"Workers have poked the soil in six locations in front of the stranded tunneling machine Bertha, but their probes haven’t bumped into any huge obstructions yet, a senior engineer said Monday.
Those results increase the mystery over what might be blocking the world’s biggest tunnel machine. Project leaders initially speculated that an unusually wide boulder, deposited by ancient glaciers, might be in the way.
Progress on the Highway 99 tube has stalled since Dec. 6, when the rotary cutting blades of the 54.3-foot-diameter drill spun without scouring much sediment between Pioneer Square and Elliott Bay.
The probe holes are being drilled 110 feet deep and spaced five feet apart, from east to west. A hole-digging rig was out Monday morning to take another poke, and more test holes will be drilled Tuesday.
“We’re not hitting anything unexpected,” said Dave Sowers, tunnel-engineering manager for the state Department of Transportation. If a school-bus-size boulder were there, he said, the probes should strike it.
Meanwhile, contractor team Seattle Tunnel Partners intends to send workers into Bertha’s flooded front end Thursday to inspect for the blockage through gaps in the cutting head, Sowers said. Many crew members were gone on holiday, so contractors chose to wait for their return before starting the inspection, he said.
The tunnel team hopes to remove enough groundwater so the inspection can be done at normal air pressure. Ten wells have been installed around the buried machine to extract the silty water that permeates this stretch of the route."
Hat tip to Freeper 21twelve.
Dull blades.
I got 99 drills but this tunnel ain’t one of them.
An extraterrestrial monolith.
A huge chunk of frozen global warming?
Pre-historic civilization’s buildings?
Have they struck unobtainium?
A new labor contract at double the current hourly rate and the “problem” goes away. Nobody gets hurt.
Unions.
Maybe the tunneling machine just broke down.
Lots of Poking and Still NO Answers....Great Title of a Marriage Fable
Big Dig II...
This has “huge Disaster Waiting To Happen” written all over it.
It’s where ALL of the bodies are buried.
Or it’s the underground prison where the 12 Mahdi was being held.
It is obvious that it must be a carbonite monolith
To partially quote Churchill “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”
This should serve as a reminder to you all that if you’re over 50, you need to have a colonoscopy.
The mole people have their shields up.
They must have found Gandalf. And he’s not gonna let’em pass :-)
Check out what they’ve been digging underground...
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5KcMrIAFbmE
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AzvobMUgeds