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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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Doesn't sound like anything a bit of dynamite couldn't handle.
How's that paradigm working out for you Mr. Coyote?
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.
hull of a schooner
IT'S A SAILBOAT!
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