Tunnels and Sewers

Yesterday was family day (or something similar) at NSP, the Northern Sewerage Project, and Shannon got us on the list to go down in the hole. There was no designated tour guide to take us down, so one of the younger employees offered to lead us around. Between that, and the small group size (7) we got a pretty good view of what was going on.

There are a handful of shafts but the one that we went down was about 65 meters deep. It was a long lift ride down. This is the view looking up from the bottom of the shaft. It looks deceptively small.


The shaft has two tunnel segments on each end of inner diameters 2.4 and 3.4 meters. The top picture is the smaller of the two.


At the end of the tracks in each direction is a tunnel boring machine (TBM). They were nearly 400 meters in on the bigger tunnel. I'm not sure how far they had made it on the smaller one because we didn't walk down. Too short to comfortably do it, and the people movers weren't in operation. Actually, most things were shut down for safety reasons (obviously).

This is the space between the two bores. Possibly the thing that amazed me the most was the amount of infrastructure that has been laid for construction. Obviously, the farther they go, the more infrastructure that must be created. Rail is laid continuously and power must be supplied farther and farther down the hole. Then at the end it's all got to come out. Wild.


So much effort to haul the city's ever expanding crap!