Flashlights and cleaning tools

Our great tunnel boring machine "Big Bertha" has been stranded for six weeks under Pioneer Square, ever since she hit her head on a mysterious obstruction. There was wild and excited speculation in the media.  A glacial  boulder?  A sunken ship?  A pile of pioneer rubbish? Nope. The object blocking the world’s largest tunnel boring machine isn’t an old steamship or locomotive or alien spaceship – it’s an 8-inch-diameter steel pipe, part of well shaft left behind in 2002 to study groundwater movement under downtown Seattle. Oops.

State Transportation Secretary Lynn Peterson says the agency “has had concerns” about how contractors have been operating tunnel-boring machine Bertha since July 30, when drilling began. In other words, this is costing a lot of taxpayer money.

Now some unlucky workers will be lowered into the shaft and use flashlights and cleaning tools to get a look around the damaged 57-foot diameter rotary cutter. Pressures around the cutter are double the surface pressure, so 10 temporary wells are being drilled to pump away groundwater first.  As I say-- expensive.

Meanwhile, above ground in Seattle, we might as well be living in a tunnel. I can't remember a winter with so little rain and so much polluted ground fog.  The warm air is just a few thousand feet above our heads.

I took my invalid hand on an excursion to North Bend yesterday-- and oh, it was nice it was to break out of the clouds and see familiar faces.

"Spanky" catching some rays above it all...