Richmond Tunnel

New Jersey

A brand-new tunneling machine spent two years under New York Harbor and dug only about six hundred feet.

engineeringhistorical

Nine hundred feet below Upper New York Bay, a machine that had never been used before was supposed to cut a five mile water tunnel in about a year. Contractors leased the Alkirk Hardrock Tunneler and shipped it by rail from Seattle, then assembled it at the bottom of a shaft in Tompkinsville on Staten Island. It broke down, over and over. Between March and August it made no progress at all. Over the next two months it cut seventy six feet. The sandhogs union finally asked the city to stop letting the contractors use it, saying the public should not finance experimental work. They took out an advertisement in the Staten Island Advance to say so. After two years and about six hundred feet of rock, the machine was pulled out in 1965. Crews went back to drilling and blasting, and finished the tunnel in December of 1966 with a ceremonial charge of dynamite. The whole thing was dug from the Staten Island end.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
After attempting use of the TBM for a total of two years and only excavating about 600 feet (180 m) of rock, the contractors decided to remove the TBM in March 1965 and instead use conventional construction methods.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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