Enormous Tunneling Machine 'Bertha' Blocked By 'The Object' 339
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."
Alien Origin (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Paging Dr Quatermass... (Score:2, Insightful)
Grasshoppers...large, telekinetic grasshoppers...
Hmmmm.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Jimmy Hoffa, encased in concrete? ;-)
Oh, and my car keys, hundreds of missing socks and the TV remote control. That's my theory.
Re:Doesn't sound very stable... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:It is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dr. Who's phone booth.
Dr. Who has no phone booth. Everyone knows the TARDIS is a police box.
Re:And so it begins (Score:4, Insightful)
The same type of tunneling machines managed to dig Seattle's University District light rail tunnel extension without getting stuck - and even ahead of schedule.
I don't think one incident (related to that sewer tunnel boondoggle) constitutes a "track record of getting stuck".
Re:Cannot back up (Score:4, Insightful)
All the way.