Giant boring machine?
I would imagine that this kind of work is anything but dull!
;^)
I could see how you could get bored.
From Menlo Park to Newark NJ. is a long way,
and all underground, better bring a book.
They should probably put in a rest stop under
kansas somewhere.
Giant boring machine?
I grew up in a suburban neighborhood here in MA that had a major public works project going on beneath our feet in the 80’s.
A huge tunnel was being bored under many towns to update our antiquated sewer sewage system.
Right underneath my next-door neighbors yard the boring machine got stuck.
It stayed stuck for a good time. They couldn’t figure out how to un-stuck it.
They finally blocked the road for a few months and dug a HUGE hole to get it out.
It was pretty interesting times in the neighboorhood.
I came across the entrance to this tunnel unexpectedly as a teen drinking and hiking at night throuth some woods i hadn’t been to in a while.
We came across flood lights, a HUGE hole in the ground and a well lit, perfectly bored tunnel about 20 feet high going staight as far as my eyes could see.
We got chased out be a guard but it was pretty creepy.
Now that tunnel pushes millions of gallons of waste a day to Deer Island treatment plant in Boston Harbor.
What's a sandhog?
Sandhog is the slang term given to urban miners, construction workers who work underground on a variety of excavation projects.[1] Generally these projects involve tunneling, caisson excavation, road building, or some other type of underground construction or mining projects. The miners work with a variety of equipment from TBM (tunnel boring machines) to blasting a path for the project they are building. The term is a US-American colloquialism.
Starting with their first job in 1872, the Brooklyn Bridge, the "hogs" have built a large part of the City of New York -- the subways and sewers, Water Tunnels #1 & #2 as well as the currently under construction Water Tunnel #3, the Lincoln, Holland, Queens-Midtown, and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels to name a few, as well as the foundations for most of the bridges and many of the skyscrapers in the city. Since their work is mostly done below street level, in an unseen world of rock, sand, and earth, recognition of their achievements has been limited. Many of these workers are Irish or Irish American and West Indian.
Sandhogs are diverse in backgrounds, interests, and personalities, but are generally united in their work. Sandhogging is somewhat of a tradition and is passed down through generations of families; since mining projects span decades, it is not uncommon to find multi-generations of families working together on the same job.[2]
In the October 1997 issue of Esquire magazine, a series of photographs by David Allee, with a text accompanyment by Thomas Kelly, documents the life and work of the Sandhog. In 2006 at Grand Central Terminal in New York City there was a large-scale photo and video installation about the sandhogs, The Sandhog Project, created by artist Gina LeVay.
Thomas Kelly's 1997 novel about Sandhogs,"Payback", was reissued in 2008 as "Sandhogs" by Soft Skull Press.[3]
On September 7, 2008, The History Channel began a series on the Sandhogs.[4]