The first case, which will come to trial in King County in October, is between STP, which sued its insurers for $80 million it believed it was due on an insurance policy for which it paid a $25 million premium, and the insurers, who countersued STP and Hitachi, claiming the two had conspired to blame the steel well casing for the damage to Bertha even though they knew that wasn’t true. Jim figures that hitting the casing and then boulders likely damaged the cutters and they needed to be replaced. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. The SR 99 tunneling machine, nicknamed Bertha, has completed her work. On Saturday, a tunnel boring machine (TBM) so large that it looks like something out of Thunderbirds was dedicated in the city of Seattle. In an odd turn of events, WSDOT is making a dangerous bet by siding with the insurers against STP and Hitachi, thereby potentially forgoing the $80 million that would otherwise help pay for the delays. Even while Bertha was still tunneling, crews were building the roadway inside the tunnel and working on electrical and other systems. Video Ep: 395 - Dr. Alan Hocknell Takes Your Questions on the New Big Bertha B21 Family . It seemed inconceivable to them that a steel casing 8 inches in diameter could stop a machine weighing 7,000 tons, measuring 58 feet in diameter and pushing with 31 million pounds of thrust. This morning they admitted that the water main replacement is tied to damage from the tunnel project. © 2020 Condé Nast. We had hit steel, we had hit boulders. Maybe pieces of pipe were caught in the teeth and in the chamber. After nearly four years underground, Seattle’s beleaguered boring behemoth clawed its way into daylight yesterday, leaving a 1.7-mile tunnel behind it. “It was crazy,” an American mechanic told Jim later. Sometime during the midnight shift on Wednesday, December 3, 2013, just about 1,000 feet into a planned 9,270-foot journey, Bertha, the tunnel-boring machine (TBM) made by Japan’s Hitachi Zosen, smashed through a 120-foot-long steel well casing, pushing it high above the ground. Officially designated as the 42-cm kurze Marinekanone 14 L/12 in Räderlafette (“42-cm short naval canon 14 L/12 on wheeled carriage”), the gun was If the STP operators insisted on pushing the machine beyond what its specs called for, and against the advice of the Japanese engineer, the engineer felt he was in no position to stop them. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Without any view of where the machine was headed, the operators regarded these gauges as their eyes and ears. 1Story updated at 3.15p EST 04/07/17 with details on the damage and repair. What's happening on Big Bertha! This was variously called the Paris Gun, the Kaiser's gun, Big Bertha, etc. Some argued that Bertha, at the time the largest boring machine ever made, had been badly designed and was too unwieldy to control. This is big news if you've been following Bertha's problems the last few years. I’ve worked with Germans and French. It arrived in Seattle earlier this year with much fanfare and high hopes. Bertha’s in heavy rotation (above): A giant red crane slowly rotates the SR 99 tunneling machine’s front end from a horizontal to a vertical position as it is lowered into the access pit on Aug. 24, 2015, two years after the incident occurred. Why she so scary of what?! The 42 cm kurze Marinekanone 14 L/12 (short naval cannon), or Minenwerfer-Gerät (M-Gerät), popularly known by the nickname Big Bertha, was a German siege howitzer built by Krupp AG in Essen, Germany and fielded by the Imperial German Army from 1914 to 1918. WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. Now construction crews have to finish a double deck highway inside the 60-foot diameter tube, complete with lighting, ventilation, and fire detection systems. , December 3, 2013, just about 1,000 feet into a planned 9,270-foot journey, Bertha, the tunnel-boring machine (TBM) made by Japan’s Hitachi Zosen, smashed through a 120-foot-long steel well casing, pushing it high above the ground. Welcome to Primitive Monkey! Bertha has made it to the finish line. , WSDOT is making a dangerous bet by siding with the insurers against STP and Hitachi, thereby potentially forgoing the $80 million that would otherwise help pay for the delays. "Big Bertha" is the name of a marine arachnid-type Hyperspecies Abnormal. An American operator was at the controls running the machine at the full thrust of 100,000 kilonewtons, when Juan Luis Magro, the STP executive from Dragados, removed the computer controls on the machine and ordered the American operator to increase the thrust as far as it would go. And the … There were three men in the control room operating a machine roughly the size of a basketball court. Of course they say it has absolutely nothing to do with the digging of the tunnel. Another huge gun, 42-cm Gamma-Device howitzer, was the forerunner of the Bertha. The $80 million machine, nicknamed Big Bertha, stands five stories tall. The TBM began to overheat and the system automatically shut down to protect its critical seals and bearings. “When you hit something hard, usually there is a spike in the readings,” says Paul. Tagged: ‘Bertha’, the world’s largest tunneling machine to date, arrived in Seattle’s Elliott Bay yesterday, April 2, following a 5,000 mile journey from Hitachi Zosen’s Sakai Works factory, in Osaka, Japan. Ad Choices, After 4 Years, Seattle's Giant Tunneling Machine Finally Breaks Through. Watch Now Explore Callaway Talks: The New Big Bertha B21 Irons and Hybrids. The two workers, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, ridiculed Governor Inslee’s contention that Bertha was like an underpowered Datsun. The operators stopped Bertha so a hole could be drilled into the large rock and a screw attached so that a big ratchet arm with a lever hoist could be hooked to the screw to lift the boulder off the conveyor belt. Big Bertha, a type of 420-mm (16.5-inch) howitzer that was first used by the German army to bombard Belgian and French forts during World War I. “We thought the machine might be bound up. … On the shift that began at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, December 3, Bertha was moving at a fast clip. Name. “The Spanish bosses were arrogant,” says Jim. He figures that was from going through landfill, which “hadn’t been touched since 1887” and had trapped all manner of gases. The project is being delayed quite a long time and is going over budget. By December 2013, Bertha had left those issues behind it. You can follow the work on a new progress tracker page. Wired may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Investigation later revealed that its seals and bearings had been damaged from overheating. It had power out the yin-yang.”. level 2 Washington State's Department of Transportation says inspectors will test more than 8,500 components over the next two years, before signing off and letting traffic through. She is one of the most powerful beings on the planet, and a member seen in the Avatar Chamber. Now the Seattle tunnel boring machine is finally back on track. After four years underground, Bertha reaches daylight. May also be a Bulgarian shot putter. “It was clear there were problems. Bertha's job was supposed to take two and a half years, but in December 2013, disaster struck: After just 1,000 feet of work, temperature spikes inside the machine set alarm bells ringing, and Bertha had to stop. That took technicians two years, but they finally sent Bertha on its way again in December 2015. Sometime that day, Jim and Paul aren’t sure exactly when, water started to collect in front of Bertha. AP Photo/ The Seattle Times, Mike Siegel . The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Big Bertha is the name of a type of super-heavy howitzer made by the famous armaments manufacturer Krupp in Germany on the eve of World War I. The cutter head had been designed to be thicker than past cutter heads to make it possible to replace cutters more easily during the dig, a specification STP had requested. That worker also added the conditioner that had to be added to the soil to create the toothpaste-like consistency required for it to be pulled out of the ground and transported by conveyor belt to trucks waiting at the back of the 326-foot machine. The tunneling machine, named for former Seattle mayor Bertha Knight Landes, boasts a 57-foot diameter and measures 325 feet long. After dropping into a pit in July 2013, it started digging the tunnel that will hold the replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct, an elevated highway that was partly demolished after being damaged by a 2001 earthquake. Washington Gov. He is digging a test trench outside the HQ of his company SpaceX in Los Angeles, and while he admits "We have no idea what we're doing," he says he hopes to increase the speed of tunneling by 500 to 1,000 percent. Paul figures Bertha put up five or six concrete rings that evening, extending the tunnel by another about 30 to 36 feet. Since only 144 rings had been completed, the company wasn’t worried about breaking it, figuring Hitachi Zosen would be required to fix the machine. “Isn’t that power or what?” Magro wrote, punctuating his email with a smiley-face. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives—from culture to business, science to design. Bertha has broken through. The workers weren’t particularly concerned. Since Bertha was the largest TBM ever built, says Jim, “it’s not surprising that we had to deal with some bugs, some electrical issues that had to be worked out.” Another issue was that everybody working on Bertha developed “a sniffly nose” and a lot of people were getting sick, said Paul. All Rights Reserved. He pulled out his iPhone and calculated that thrust was about 24 times greater than the thrust required to launch the space shuttle. For that story, we spoke with executives and workers at Hitachi Zosen in Seattle and Japan to provide a perspective that challenged the prevailing view that Hitachi had somehow failed by building, in the words of Washington Governor Jay Inslee, a “Datsun” when something far more powerful and reliable was required. VIADUCT CRACKS SIGNAL STATE RACE AGAINST TIME. Bertha was a 57.5-foot-diameter (17.5 m) tunnel boring machine built specifically for the Washington State Department of Transportation's (WSDOT) Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel project in Seattle, Washington, United States. Eventually he’d like to see a network of tunnels up to 30 layers deep under cities, with traffic whizzing in three dimensions, instead of just two on the surface. "Big Bertha", a 19th-century criminal; Big Bertha (cow), a cow that broke two Guinness World Records, for being both the oldest and having the most offspring Big Bertha (golf club), a line of golf clubs from Callaway Golf In a calmer spring—when facts weren't so slippery, social media so noxious, the country so ready to combust—what happened in Forks, Washington, on June 3 might have been a perfect plot for a farce. WDOT apparently fears that a successful claim by STP against its insurers would strengthen STP’s position in a second case to be argued in Thurston County, likely sometime next year, which will determine who should cover additional costs of a half-billion dollars related in large part to Bertha’s breakdown and resulting delays. I had no idea it was even close to being done, let alone being done! VIDEO: Big Bertha breaks through: tunnel-boring machine enters repair pit, ready for disassembly. Two workers, who request anonymity, suggest the tunnel-boring machine was pushed beyond its limit by a foolhardy contractor. The fattest female teacher in every school who makes class entertaining by her comedic weight, but whom is completely unaware of the numerous jokes which occur reguarding her gargantuan size each lesson. STP knew Bertha was still under warranty until it completed 200 rings. Paul agrees that things should have been checked but says the problem wasn’t that the cutters were damaged, but that they were clogged. But just getting to Bertha, which sat more than 60 feet below downtown Seattle near the stadium district and the waterfront, posed a serious problem. The M-Gerät had a 42-centimetre (17 in) calibre barrel, making it one of the largest artillery pieces ever fielded. The thickness of the cutter heads meant that the spaces through which the newly scraped soil was supposed to pass, were more easily clogged by pieces of steel mixed with polymer-filled soil. But Dragados [the Spanish company that was the STP partner in charge of the dig] was making all the calls.” Stopping the machine and checking the cutter head might have taken a week or two, precious time that could reduce the chance STP would earn the incentives built into the contract with WSDOT for completing the project early. 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