"That was when the machine’s bearings became clogged with grit after digging only about 10 percent of a two-mile highway tunnel beneath downtown."
Perhaps. Perhaps more significant is that (all this from memory when I did some research after learning about this Charlie Foxtrot) the machine failed 3 days after it chewed through the steel casing of well sunk and then left there by the same state government org that's running the whole project.
Almost needless to say, they didn't tell anyone about this minor detail for a month. And while no one was talking when I checked, it's obviously very questionable this will be covered under Hitachi's warranty coverage.
Another minor detail is that that state org, their transportation department or whatever, has a wonderful financial setup for this project. Well, for them, anyway. They're paying a fixed amount, and the city will have to cover any overages. Which at this point look to be substantial, I think they'll have blown through the project's ~$48 million reserve by now.
Oh, and that earthquake damaged viaduct? Estimates are that if the tunneling or other activities like this rescue cause it to drop by 2 inches (1 more than the hopefully local drop reported in this article), they'll have to close it.
Fairly so, and particularly good in introducing the "who pays for overruns?" whammy in the 4th paragraph after minimally setting the stage.
"While construction unions are backing this project, labor disputes could also get in the way."
Some union dispute indeed delayed the start of the tunnel by a month.
On the other hand many of the cited possible problems might have been amenable to fixing in place, e.g. the cutters in the front are replaceable. The terrible problem now is that its main bearing is messed up (forget if it's just one or more seals, or worse, or even if they really know yet), requiring this major excavation to get to it and then surgery. If the problem wasn't, or wasn't uniquely caused by that steel well casing, it could get broken again ... it's only done 10% or so of the length.
And, yeah, the traffic projections aren't great. As I remember, no matter how people go "wow!" about the size of the tunnel, the capacity of it will be quite a bit less than the viaduct. Then there are all the other factors that can make it less desirable.
That's not especially meaningful -- if there's a hipster-reactionary position to be taken on construction projects, the Stranger will take it.
The Stranger has a long history of fighting losing fights to keep things more-or-less the same -- unless the alternative is trendy and/or guaranteed not to impact Capitol Hill. For example, they'd prefer that the viaduct be replaced with a "surface boulevard" that has a fraction of the throughput, thus all but guaranteeing decades of gridlock in downtown Seattle (which they like because it "discourages driving", because they heard that San Francisco did it...and most importantly, because it doesn't affect their lives either way).
Meanwhile, they complain constantly about light rail on the hill, but they campaigned heavily for the monorail-to-nowhere. Why? Because it was a monorail (cool!), and the construction wouldn't affect their favorite neighborhood (even better!)
Point being, it's not difficult to pull an article from the Stranger predicting doom for a major urban planning initiative. That's practically their stock in trade.
You apparently really don't like the Stranger, but that article is incredibly well researched and reasoned. Lots of valid points that are vindicated in retrospect. The only other notable papers in Seattle (Times + Weekly) do a piss poor job of covering government accountability.
I like the Stranger fine as an alt-weekly, but I give them basically no credence on matters like this.
It isn't especially challenging to come up with ways that big projects might fail. The point is, they'll whistle past the graveyard (Monorail!) or dwell on every conceivable negative outcome (Tunnel!) depending on which approach serves their purpose.
WSDOT is so incompetent. It's absolutely infuriating, and definitely not helping the political divide between eastern and western Washington.
The very urban portions of the coastal areas pay most of the taxes, while the rest of the rural parts pay a much smaller portion. Unfortunately, the rural parts (basically anything not directly within x miles of the coast) see this as a massive waste for something that won't benefit them.
The implications of this are far-reaching and incredibly polarizing for our state. Not good.
The contractor and others assumed the casing had been removed.
We all know about assumptions, but this shouldn't be entirely blamed on the contractor, especially since WSDOT is ultimately responsible for the project.
There's clearly a serious if not fatal problem with leadership of the whole project, which as I noted has very bad incentives that are aligned with allowing problems.
In this case, there should have been someone obsessing on the path of the tunnel. And then the boring crew, its supervisors etc. should not have, after hitting the casing (which cased the top part to jump many feet into the air), blithely continued boring until the machine failed hard (that could have turned something relatively fixable into the disaster they have now).
The machine failed once with grit in the bearing before even leaving Hitachi. That it failed again for the same reason should not be surprising. A little steel well casing might break teeth, but it isn't going to fill the bearing with sand.
"Preedy said that when Bertha was being built in Japan, one of the tests performed was to turn on the motors and rotate the cutter head. That’s when testers heard a noise and took Bertha apart. They found that some parts of the machine weren’t moving properly and caused “some metal-on-metal contact and basically damaged the seal assembly for the main bearing,” Preedy said."
This was a manufacturing problem discovered when it was first spun up in a test, as far as I can tell not even involving any digging, just making sure everything functioned correctly (e.g. what NASA didn't do with the Hubble mirror).
Perhaps. Perhaps more significant is that (all this from memory when I did some research after learning about this Charlie Foxtrot) the machine failed 3 days after it chewed through the steel casing of well sunk and then left there by the same state government org that's running the whole project.
Almost needless to say, they didn't tell anyone about this minor detail for a month. And while no one was talking when I checked, it's obviously very questionable this will be covered under Hitachi's warranty coverage.
Another minor detail is that that state org, their transportation department or whatever, has a wonderful financial setup for this project. Well, for them, anyway. They're paying a fixed amount, and the city will have to cover any overages. Which at this point look to be substantial, I think they'll have blown through the project's ~$48 million reserve by now.
Oh, and that earthquake damaged viaduct? Estimates are that if the tunneling or other activities like this rescue cause it to drop by 2 inches (1 more than the hopefully local drop reported in this article), they'll have to close it.