TPT March 2014

Global Marketplace

In brief . . . ‘Prosaic Pipe Stymied Seattle’s Big Bertha’

Officials have not said how much the delay will cost, or how it will affect the long-term schedule of the 1.7-mile tunnel project. There also was no early word on possible assignment of blame.

The headline, from the New York Times , announced the solution to a mystery impediment that had stopped the world’s largest-diameter tunnel-boring machine in its tracks and put a $3.1 billion project on hold for most of the last month of last year. A 119-foot length of steel pipe – neither very old nor very big: about eight inches in diameter – had stopped a machine equipped to chew its way through rock and timber. “Bertha”, the $80 million, five-storey-tall machine, was digging a new path for Route 99 in the state of Washington, one of the primary north-south arteries in the Pacific Northwest, when on 6 December it became stuck 60 feet below the streets of Seattle. Tunnel crews worked extensively over the holidays – probing, sifting and speculating – until, on 2 January, the pipe was discovered protruding through one of several exploratory openings that had been drilled in Bertha’s cutter-head. According to the Seattle news site crosscut.com , in 2002 a Washington State Department of Transportation contractor installed the pipe to conduct a test on the Alaskan Way Viaduct, following an earthquake. The location of the site was included in planning documents for the tunnel. A project manager for the tunnelling contractor, Seattle Tunnel Partners, said it would have been assumed that related apparatus had been removed when the testing site was decommissioned.

Automotive › For the first time in nine years, Volkswagen in 2013 sold more vehicles in China than General Motors, recapturing its place as the biggest foreign carmaker in the world’s largest auto market. According to company data obtained by Bloomberg News from such researchers as IHS Automotive and LMC

Credit: Ton Koldewijn

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M arch 2014