Marty's Travels

My house has wheels

Big Bertha

Bertha is a tunnel-boring machine used to drill a replacement for an overhead viaduct along the waterfront. I’ve got a good punchline, but first, the set-up.

An earthquake in 2000 severely damaged the 2-level viaduct, enough so that I don’t drive on it. Patched up with braces and clamps, another quake (now overdue) will pancake it at a high loss of life. The fix, after arguing about it for ten years, was to bore a tunnel under it to provide for traffic, then take it down, creating a huge potential for a glamorous waterfront.

Enter Bertha, “The Biggest Tunnel-Boring Machine in the World”. It does it’s thing for about a half mile and the main bearings get fried. Hate it when that happens. It’s 200 feet below ground, can’t back up, buried in rock.

Punchline here: The repair bill is 125 million dollars, plus cost overruns. That’s three times what the machine cost.

The repair involves building a caisson down in front of it so the head can be removed. This work is identical to that used to build the Roebling bridge in Cincinnati, the Brooklyn bridge, and the Golden Gate bridge. Risky, treacherous work, horribly time-consuming and expensive.

Once fixed by Hitachi, it’s manufacturer, the question remains whether it will happen again, this time under a few high-rises in downtown Seattle. Even if Hitachi offers full money back (“Would you like a voucher for a future machine?”) a huge amount of money must come from somewhere. While that fight goes on, the viaduct is falling down.

It will be one year before Bertha is working again. There won’t be an earthquake, right?