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Enormous Tunneling Machine 'Bertha' Blocked By 'The Object'
An anonymous reader sends word that 'Bertha,' the world's largest tunneling machine, which is currently boring a passage beneath Seattle's waterfront, has been forced stop. The 57.5ft diameter machine has encountered an unknown obstruction known as "the object."
"The object’s composition and provenance remain unknown almost two weeks after first contact because in a state-of-the-art tunneling machine, as it turns out, you can’t exactly poke your head out the window and look. 'What we’re focusing on now is creating conditions that will allow us to enter the chamber behind the cutter head and see what the situation is,' [said project manager Chris Dixon]. Mr. Dixon said he felt pretty confident that the blockage will turn out to be nothing more or less romantic than a giant boulder, perhaps left over from the Ice Age glaciers that scoured and crushed this corner of the continent 17,000 years ago. But the unknown is a tantalizing subject. Some residents said they believe, or want to believe, that a piece of old Seattle, buried in the pell-mell rush of city-building in the 1800s, when a mucky waterfront wetland was filled in to make room for commerce, could be Bertha’s big trouble. That theory is bolstered by the fact that the blocked tunnel section is also in the shallowest portion of the route, with the top of the machine only around 45 feet below street grade."
...The SCP Foundation.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I bet it's a rectangular solids whose dimensions are in the precise ratio of 1 : 4 : 9....
Zoid.com
... a create of unsold Windows phones?
I'm sure I saw an old documentary about this kind of thing happening in the London Underground. Watch out for giant ants...
Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I'm betting on a lost anchor or random pieces of cast iron from an old ship.
I'm betting it's a fragment of the House. As we have seen, it can obstruct almost anything it puts its mind to.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...and eight tanker trucks of coffee. That ought to do it.
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.
This tunnel was locally controversial, with opponents arguing that
- it was expensive
- it wouldn't help with Seattle's traffic problems, AND
- these monster boring machines have a track record of getting stuck underground, and then what are you going to do? Call Roto-Rooter?
Sounds like it's starting to come true...
Civil Engineers, geologists, and mining specialists encounter the BFR phenomenon on a regular basis.
It's a Big Fucking Rock.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Not plausible. More likely a large nugget of Adamantium.
An anchor that can block a five-story-high tunneling machine? I've seen some massive anchors from old battleships, but to block this it would have to be an order of magnitude larger.
Best bet is either on a giant boulder of some hard rock, or maybe a buried building of some sort. It's not ship debris - this thing is the *size* of some large ships.
"'Bertha,' the world's largest tunneling machine, which is currently boring..."
It's not THAT boring.
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
The machine puts up tunnel walls as it goes.
http://gizmodo.com/big-bertha-is-digging-seattles-massive-underground-fre-662469199
Concrete panels go in right behind the bore head. Infront of the maw is ground below the water table. The bore head forms a seal and the tunnel behind the bore head is pumped dry of water that leaks through.
Clearly it is the Arkenstone. They digged too greedily and too deep.
They should totally get you in on this project. I imagine they have no idea they're doing it all wrong.
They couldn't build an Earth tunneling machine that cant deal with a giant boulder ?
The cutter heads break apart stationary rock and other objects. The theory in the local press here in Seattle is that the bolder is being spun with the cutter head, thus the cutter teeth canâ(TM)t grip it, and itâ(TM)s too big to fall through the openings in the cutter head that channel debris to the exit conveyor.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
So we really have moved past "Too big to fail" then. Good to know.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Holly crap, it's almost like someone THOUGHT about this. Like maybe an engineer that gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to think about this shit every day!
AMAZING!
Dr. Who's phone booth.
Dr. Who has no phone booth. Everyone knows the TARDIS is a police box.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
No can do. As the machine moves forward the tunnel walls are built behind it. TBM's have no reverse.
Actually the machine isn't stuck, yet. They stopped the machine because it encountered resistance. If it actually does get stuck the machine can't be dismantled underground and removed. They would have to dig it out from above, remove the TBM and install a new one. If it does get stuck let's just hope it's not under a skyscraper.
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/News/2013/12/10_SR99tunnelingstatement.htm
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/what-could-possibly-go-wrong/Content?oid=4399657
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
... while the timid one is standing off to one side looking at its shoes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Unfortunately, they are going to find where we hide all of our dead Californians.
Doesn't sound like anything a bit of dynamite couldn't handle.
How's that paradigm working out for you Mr. Coyote?
They are concerned and not just about a cave-in. Vibration could cause lot's of damage. According to the WSDOT the machine is not actually stuck yet. They stopped it because they encountered resistance. The walls behind the machine are already built so there's not much risk of a cave-in. But there is a risk that nearby infrastructure could be damaged if they move forward. They can reinforce the infrastructure above but if they actually get stuck it could have enormous consequences. The machine would have to be dug out and replaced (at $80 million per borer). Add in the cost of reinforcements and digging a big hole, then consider that the $3.1 billion project is only bonded up to $500 million.
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/what-could-possibly-go-wrong/Content?oid=4399657
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/News/2013/12/10_SR99tunnelingstatement.htm
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Here is a different link with a nice picture of concrete panels, scroll down.
http://www.gizmag.com/worlds-largest-drilling-machine-bertha/28311/
They got a photo of it already.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I guess the machine isn't boring after all.
Here is a nice video from a company that makes these rather impressive machines it should answer all of your question as to how they work and why they don't have cave ins behind the machine. In softer than expected soil, like hitting a deep spot of dirt in limestone, sink holes can develop in front of the cutting head as was a frequent problem on the SMART Tunnel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
I am not a tunnel excavating expert but my 5 year old thinks these are among the coolest machines that have ever been constructed and likes educational shows that are about tunneling where they use a TBM.
Time to offend someone
Putting a camera or hatch on the front of the cutting head makes no sense. It presses hard against a rock face and would just get smashed or scuffed up. A number of these machines will have some forward looking capacity by taking a core sample ahead of the machine regularly but unless the sample managed to drill into the unknown object they wouldn't know it was there.
Time to offend someone
Will it blend?
hull of a schooner
IT'S A SAILBOAT!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Switch to creative mode temporarily to remove it.
Clearly The Object is an interstellar vehicle with a structure of super-dense composite materials built to withstand the vagaries of near-light-speed travel for thousands of years. It crashed here long before human tribes crossed the land bridge from siberia and has remained undiscovered until now. They are best off leaving it undisturbed, if they enter it, they risk releasing biomechanoid killing machines that will destroy all of humanity.
Yes, but thousands of years? Try billions. The pilot was killed on impact and eaten by their own gut microbes, which quickly escaped and went looking for more things to eat. Failing to find a single suitable eatery, the microbes went on to destroy most existing anaerobic life, become sentient, create eateries, and re-discover their long lost progenitor's ship thus activating its homing beacon through very efficient electromagnetic induction. Unfortunately, Earth's inhabitants could no longer serve the role as gut microbes due to a gross miss calculation in scale, and were instead eaten by a transdimensional dog named Jeebus after fetching them. Within said belly they reside to this day battling his mentally corrosive digestive juice which is rich in charged retardation and litigation particles known locally therein as: Religions.
This has all happened before, and will all happen again; The process has been deemed "mostly harmless".
This is an earth-pressure-balance type TBM built for soft sand and dirt, below water level. Compressed air is used to keep water out at the working face. That's what's needed for a tunnel under the Seattle waterfront. It can cope with rocks and boulders, but not a solid rock face. It's not a hard-rock TBM. Those have very different cutters, but can't handle waterlogged soil.
Tunneling is like that. Stuff like this happens. It will be handled.
Actually they did think of that. It's replacing a double-decker viaduct highway along the shoreline. One which was found to have weaknesses that make it not where you would want to be during an earthquake. You're also a lot more likely to be drowned in an open-air highway viaduct along the shore than in an underground tunnel. It's that little matter of the wave going horizontally, and not down through yards thick of earth.
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