On April 4, the world's largest tunnel boring machine broke through to the open air after almost four years underground. Called Bertha, the giant digger was tasked with the challenge of building a tunnel large enough to carry four lanes of motor traffic under the heart of Seattle. The story of how it made the 1.7 mi (2.7 km) journey under the skyscrapers of the port city is not only a tale of a remarkable machine, but also of civil engineering, geology, politics, luck, and proving the old adage that anything that can go wrong, will.
It's an interesting story in its own right, made more timely by announcements that Elon Musk has formed a tunneling company to alleviate traffic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @02:23PM
Sure, it was a technological tour de force (except for the part where foreseeable problems trashed any hope of the schedule or budget surviving), achieving incredible engineering feats (except for the bit where they were entirely credible, and as others have pointed out, not even all that new), resulting in massively improved efficiency (if you don't count the fact that they're reducing the lane count on a major arterial route) and increased safety (replacing a rickety old viaduct with a below-grade tunnel at sea level, where large parts of the surrounding land is really fill, full of voids and unstable, next to a seawall that is one earthquake away from total collapse, in a seismically active zone, with a long history of tsunamis) at very reasonable cost (compared to bulldozing half of downtown).
If you aren't holding your sides for laughter now, perhaps it's because you hadn't heard that the city's plan to recoup the cost was increased tax revenue from waterfront properties more valuable because there would no longer be an ugly viaduct hanging around - oh, and lots of other taxes and levies, just because .... because it's Seattle. Hey, have you yet heard the one about their increased vehicle tag fees? It's a hoot.