Good news, everyone! Bertha is about to begin moving again. Kinda. After sitting still for eight weeks while workers figured out why, after, 1,019 feet of drilling, the boring machine stopped grabbing soil, the machine is going to move forward two feet so that they can attach a concrete ring that will help move it along further.
In case you're wondering, they still have no answer as to why the drill stopped. Considering how much it cost every day that Bertha stood still, that's not exciting news.
The big question now, is, can Bertha get back on schedule? And the answer appears to be…no way.
Crosscut has obtained daily tunneling data from WSDOT and performed basic analyses that show that finishing tunnel boring within the original 14 month schedule, which called for digging to be done around September of 2014, is now nearly impossible. Only one-tenth of the way to its destination and almost half-way through the considered timeframe, Bertha's got a lot of ground to make up. And not many Seattleites are expecting it to happen.
· Tunnel-drilling Bertha to start moving again this week [Seattle Times]
· State Will Resume Tunneling Under Downtown (for Reasons as Mysterious as Why They Stopped) [SLOG]
· Seattle's tunnel: No boring way it'll be done on time [Crosscut]
· All Bertha coverage [Curbed Seattle]
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