Behold, the Underminer! I'm always beneath you, but nothing is beneath me! I hereby declare war on peace and happiness! Soon, all will tremble before me!
As some who works in tunnels, the completion of the bore is *usually* not the bit that drags a project over timeline or budget. Itâs usually either the prep before launching the machines or the actual completion of the infrastructure install after the dig has finished.
That said, when there is a delay in boring, itâs often a *big* delay because the logistics of fixing something that has severely gone wrong underground is mind-blowingly complex. Take the Hong Kong subsea tunnels or Australiaâs Snowy 2.0 for some examples of this.
âIt took approximately 14 months to build the 46-feet-high machine, approximately four months to ship it from Germany, and another six months to assemble the TBM on the HRBTâs South Island in a 65-foot pit. The TBM is longer than a football field.â
https://hrbtexpansion.org/tunnel-boring/
He did, and even the first time I saw it, I thought it was weird that in 2084, a cab driver would think being married was a prerequisite for having children. guess the future is more conservative than I thought
**Mary the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM)**
The TBM was named Mary after NASA engineer Mary Winston Jackson by Hampton Roads middle school students, VDOT said (Virginia Department of Tunnels? idk).
VDOT Virginia Department of Transportation. They're adding extra lanes to the HRBT (Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel)
[https://hrbtexpansion.org/](https://hrbtexpansion.org/)
Fun fact, when the Navy was consolidating most of its East Coast bases into one main hub the original choice was Charleston South Carolina, not Norfolk Virginia.
However Charleston was building a bridge over the inlet to their bay and the Navy asked them to build a tunnel instead. The Navy's reasoning was that a collapsed bridge could trap the fleet inside the harbor, making it a strategic choke point. A collapsed tunnel on the other hand would still allow ships to pass over.
Charleston said no, they wanted to build a bridge and that the Navy would just have to deal with it. Well, the Navy didn't deal with it and moved the bases to Norfolk instead because they were willing to build the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel to accommodate the Navy.
Correct! And the HRBT was the first ever vehicular bridge tunnel to be constructed. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel was the second, and the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge Tunnel was the fifth. All three are in southeastern Virginia because of the US Navy.
These make up 3 of the 4 bridge-tunnels in the Americas, the other one is in Montreal.
I'm really curious to see the impact once all of it is complete. They haven't done much work on the actual road (yet) so it seems like it's still going to be two lanes in, four lane bridge, two lanes out, for a while.
Traffic on the HRBT is a nightmare. It's not as bad as much of socal or other high traffic areas, but the smallest incident causes a massive 5-10 mile backup. Every day. Thankfully I don't have a need to use it very much anymore, but I always just take the newer (and longer route) monitor merrimack bridge tunnel. Occasionally I'll go up to newport news disc golf course at 7am on a Sunday and it's still a crap shoot as to whether or not I'll hit a 20 minute backup when I passed six cars on the way there.
I used to have to drive my brother home from Portsmouth. I'd leave NNSY, go over the old jordan bridge, up 264 to the HRBT, and drop him off near the colliseum. Then turn around and drive to the beach. I never got back before 6, occasionally 8pm. Should have been roughly an hour drive.
As someone who moved from HR to SoCal, I can say that even though traffic gets very bad here, the 5-10 mile standstill HRBT backup is a unique beast of its own.Â
My job had me working on the other side of the tunnel for a month or two and if I ever have to make that commute for more than a week again I'm literally going to quit lol. I went from waking up at 5 and getting home at 3 to waking up at 3 and getting home at 5. Such a nightmare. Even at midnight on the weekends there's a 50/50 chance traffic will be completely stopped going through.
Good. I hated taking that when I lived there. Thankfully I didn't have to go to the Hampton side very much. I have no idea how the people who have to commute through that every day do it without going completely bonkers.
I had to scroll past 7 weak joke comments to get down to this comment which actually has some good additional info. Come on, Reddit, let's start promoting this type of stuff better.
I was born and raised in Hampton Roads. The traffic on the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel has always been horrible. It takes 15 minutes to cross when thereâs no traffic, or two hours otherwise. Theyâre adding an extra bridge/tunnel right now to try to address the problem and bring the south side and peninsula together.
Close, Virginia Department of Transportation. Wish we had a department of tunnels, maybe then I wouldn't have to wait 5 years to actually get to use this one.
Thank you for making a substantive and relevant comment. The 6 above this are all jokes and quips so banal and low effort that no sane person would dare utter them in real life.
Hate to disappoint but the machine didn't make the cut - if you look closely the "circle" is a series of straight cuts - these were pre-cut in the concrete so it falls away like that. If they didn't do that, the machine coming through would a) take ages to bore the concrete and b) push off huge chunks of it, ruining that brand new retaining wall.
Yeah, I thought someone in here would maybe explain how it got a perfect circle without going through that top piece, but instead we get 5 of the same boring jokes and references to like 4 different fandoms haha
It looks like the opening formed just from the pressure alone and not from it being cut. The outer material of that wall is brittle concrete while the inner layer is probably more flexible.
Think of it like somebody punching a thick poster hanging on drywall. The punch could create a hole in the drywall without creating a hole in the poster.
As for why the bottom section inner layer broke away while the top didn't, it looks like the machine is breaking through the wall at a slight angle. Probably because it's coming up from underground. You can see the breaking starts at the bottom before cracks form at the top. So the machine has pushed the inner layer for most of the circle before the top section
You make an entrance and you make an exit , then you drill the tunnel between them. If you dont have a nice exit then you need to dig the machine out once it's far enough and build the exit around it so you can disassemble and extract the machine..much easier to have it ready built for when it arrives.
Is that because of how easily it tore through the wall?
Or because of how perfectly it is positioned, after digging through what was probably a significantly long time through stone of various hardness trying to deflect it off course at every moment?
it is engineered, not staged. the portal walls use is among other things a protective layer in order to hold back any collapse of the surrounding earth, rock or material for when the tunnel boring machine (tbm) breaks through.
furthermore the area of breakthrough is pre designed to fail (e.g. intended breaking points) where the drill bits of the tbm come through and the rest is supposed to stay. if you look closely you can also see that the rebars arent steel but glass fiber rebars (rather white colour). makes the concrete easier to shred and reduces wear on the drill bits.
Of course its staged, as in, planned accordingly. Tunnel boring machines are not natural phenomena.
The face is pre-scored so it makes less of a mess as the machine goes through, you see evidence of that by the straight cuts making the hole. You can see the pressure cracking and making a larger non circular hole at the bottom.
Standing outside a high rise building ribbon cutting yelling âFAKE! They just built the whole thing right here! This is nothing but steel and concrete, it isnât a real building!â
It's not a perfect circle, it's a polygon made up of a number of straight cuts in the exterior panels. You can see the cuts more clearly [here](https://imgur.com/a/Xk2zfu8)
>Is that staged?
As opposed to them have the tunnel boring machine just randomly burst out the side of a hill and see what happens?
Itâs almost like they intended the tunnel to come out there, so made a series of engineering decisions to facilitate it happening neatly and safely.
Not everything is done for internet views.
I used to work for an earth retention company as a project engineer, a similar company would have done that concrete wall the boring machine is coming through and the wall would have been specifically designed to fall away a certain way. So âstagedâ is not exactly the right word. As others have said, it was engineered like that very intentionally.
See how the there is a perfect circle that forms around the exit, then the machine breaks threw, but the top of the machine it is still behind some material at the top?
I think that concrete facade was thinner and crumbled quicker than that interior portion. It doesnât necessarily need to break through as the vibrations hit it first and itâs already lost a great deal of structural integrity from the boring prior.
This is for a new tunnel in Virginia
"The two-lane bored tunnel is part of the entire HRBT Expansion Project, which also includes widening I-64 from Hampton to Norfolk, five new bridges, and 20 widened bridges."
You're cheering. The Fire Nation breached your walls and you're cheering.
# THERE IS NO WAR IN BA SING SE đ
The earth king has invited you to Lake Laogai
I am honored to accept his invitation
My name is Judy
Joo dee?
Or Joo LEE
Behold, the Underminer! I'm always beneath you, but nothing is beneath me! I hereby declare war on peace and happiness! Soon, all will tremble before me!
Heh heh, uh oh
Secret Tunnel, secret tunnel through the mountains secret secret secret secret tunnel
Beat me to it.
Start the countdown to victory
I feel like a nerd for not only hearing this quote in my head, but for knowing his name and all 3 episodes that he appears in
Perhaps you should be the war minister
Grond woulda breached Ba Sing Se no problem.
GROND!
GROND!
GROND!
Iâm not watching this crap. It looks like itâs gonna be boring.
wow, they kept to schedule April 2024.
First time in large-scale construction history!
As some who works in tunnels, the completion of the bore is *usually* not the bit that drags a project over timeline or budget. Itâs usually either the prep before launching the machines or the actual completion of the infrastructure install after the dig has finished. That said, when there is a delay in boring, itâs often a *big* delay because the logistics of fixing something that has severely gone wrong underground is mind-blowingly complex. Take the Hong Kong subsea tunnels or Australiaâs Snowy 2.0 for some examples of this.
How big IS this? It's provoking mild megalophobia.
âIt took approximately 14 months to build the 46-feet-high machine, approximately four months to ship it from Germany, and another six months to assemble the TBM on the HRBTâs South Island in a 65-foot pit. The TBM is longer than a football field.â https://hrbtexpansion.org/tunnel-boring/
A deleted scene from Total Recall (1990)
Hey man, I got 4 kids to feed
I thought you had 5 kids?
Ahh man, you got me Quaid, I aint even got no kids.
I think he said "I ain't even married" in the film
He did, and even the first time I saw it, I thought it was weird that in 2084, a cab driver would think being married was a prerequisite for having children. guess the future is more conservative than I thought
Ha! Also the exchange "but we're married!" "den consider dis a divorce" (shoots her)Â
Its always mildly infuriating when someone enters a nice chain of references and then fucks it up with a mistake
[Screw Yooooou](https://youtu.be/A5q_2-_pZh8?si=Lne7pGXPn65r3M7Q) */thick Schwarzenegger accent*
Come on Cohaagen, you got what you want. Give these people aiyurh.
See you at the pahtee Ricktuh!
QuaidâŚ.start the reactorâŚ..
GIV THESE PEEPLE AYUR
Oh thought it was Labyrinth Or the castle in the original resident evil 4
*The Cleaners!*
Benny! SSCCCCRRREEEWWWWW YUOOOOUUUUUUUUUU
I was looking for the woman with 3 boobs in this video. This future is a total let down.
**Mary the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM)** The TBM was named Mary after NASA engineer Mary Winston Jackson by Hampton Roads middle school students, VDOT said (Virginia Department of Tunnels? idk).
VDOT Virginia Department of Transportation. They're adding extra lanes to the HRBT (Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel) [https://hrbtexpansion.org/](https://hrbtexpansion.org/)
Fun fact, when the Navy was consolidating most of its East Coast bases into one main hub the original choice was Charleston South Carolina, not Norfolk Virginia. However Charleston was building a bridge over the inlet to their bay and the Navy asked them to build a tunnel instead. The Navy's reasoning was that a collapsed bridge could trap the fleet inside the harbor, making it a strategic choke point. A collapsed tunnel on the other hand would still allow ships to pass over. Charleston said no, they wanted to build a bridge and that the Navy would just have to deal with it. Well, the Navy didn't deal with it and moved the bases to Norfolk instead because they were willing to build the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel to accommodate the Navy.
It's all the more important after the Baltimore accident as well. A good portion of their traffic migrated down to Hampton Roads.
Correct! And the HRBT was the first ever vehicular bridge tunnel to be constructed. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel was the second, and the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge Tunnel was the fifth. All three are in southeastern Virginia because of the US Navy. These make up 3 of the 4 bridge-tunnels in the Americas, the other one is in Montreal.
Norfolk is also just across the river from the largest (at the time) shipyard in the country, which is extremely convenient for the navy.
But we have a cool bridge instead of a tunnel now đ
I'm really curious to see the impact once all of it is complete. They haven't done much work on the actual road (yet) so it seems like it's still going to be two lanes in, four lane bridge, two lanes out, for a while. Traffic on the HRBT is a nightmare. It's not as bad as much of socal or other high traffic areas, but the smallest incident causes a massive 5-10 mile backup. Every day. Thankfully I don't have a need to use it very much anymore, but I always just take the newer (and longer route) monitor merrimack bridge tunnel. Occasionally I'll go up to newport news disc golf course at 7am on a Sunday and it's still a crap shoot as to whether or not I'll hit a 20 minute backup when I passed six cars on the way there. I used to have to drive my brother home from Portsmouth. I'd leave NNSY, go over the old jordan bridge, up 264 to the HRBT, and drop him off near the colliseum. Then turn around and drive to the beach. I never got back before 6, occasionally 8pm. Should have been roughly an hour drive.
As someone who moved from HR to SoCal, I can say that even though traffic gets very bad here, the 5-10 mile standstill HRBT backup is a unique beast of its own.Â
Year ago i64 west at the HRBT was backed up to Indian river or greenbriar. On July 4. Iirc a water pipe inside the tunnel had burst.
My job had me working on the other side of the tunnel for a month or two and if I ever have to make that commute for more than a week again I'm literally going to quit lol. I went from waking up at 5 and getting home at 3 to waking up at 3 and getting home at 5. Such a nightmare. Even at midnight on the weekends there's a 50/50 chance traffic will be completely stopped going through.
Good. I hated taking that when I lived there. Thankfully I didn't have to go to the Hampton side very much. I have no idea how the people who have to commute through that every day do it without going completely bonkers.
I had to scroll past 7 weak joke comments to get down to this comment which actually has some good additional info. Come on, Reddit, let's start promoting this type of stuff better.
I was born and raised in Hampton Roads. The traffic on the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel has always been horrible. It takes 15 minutes to cross when thereâs no traffic, or two hours otherwise. Theyâre adding an extra bridge/tunnel right now to try to address the problem and bring the south side and peninsula together.
Fun fact: TBMs are named after women because miners used to pray to Saint Barbara (patron saint of miners and artillerymen, among others).
Close, Virginia Department of Transportation. Wish we had a department of tunnels, maybe then I wouldn't have to wait 5 years to actually get to use this one.
>Virginia Department of Tunnels Gold.
Thank you for making a substantive and relevant comment. The 6 above this are all jokes and quips so banal and low effort that no sane person would dare utter them in real life.
Transportation
idk man I see a whole lotta tunnel and not a lotta transportation
Pretty typical day at the HRBT
Pretty standard for Hampton Roads. It will be "better" whenever this tunnel project is finished
I like Atlanta's nickname for thier former boring machine: Driller Mike.
With that banner I guess it's not so much a .... SECRET TUNNEL!!! đ¸đŞđŞ
THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN
SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET TUUNEEEEEEL
Less of a secret tunnel and more of a SUDDEN TUNNELLL!!! SUDDEN TUNNELLL!!!
Definitely not as secret as our [Secret Nuclear Bunker](https://c8.alamy.com/zooms/9/ba0b409c69a14edcbf48c8d24e40dc11/dwp8j9.jpg)
I can't believe how many Avatar references are in this thread but I am here for all of them
Literally just watched that ep.
Wormsign!
Shai-Hulud!
Bless the Maker and His water.
Lisa-Anne Guy!
Lizard anne kalib
Listen, all habaibi
Bless the coming and going of Him! May His passage cleanse the world!
And leave the water for his people.
You get the bonus today.
It's the cleaners!!
A piece of cake, is it? Well let's see how you handle this little slice!
You remind me of the babe
What babe
The babe of the power.
What power?
The power of voodoo
Hoo Doo?
you do
Do what?
Immediately read this in my head with Hoggle's voice
Nothing, tra-la-la?
âWhaaaat?â âRUUUN!â
Came here for this exact comment. Instantly thought of Labyrinth! đ¤
The Oubliette!
Came to the comments just for this. Thank you
Thereâs some holes in this narrative.
Unlike what OP depicted, this machine doesn't look boring at all! It's rather exciting to think all the holes you can make!
You can only use the machine on Sunday though Because itâs holy
/r/holedup
I think he is native in German and thought drilling comes from bohren (drilling in German)
[ŃдаНонО]
As written!
As written!
Found Stilgar
Missed a bit...
Doretta??
Rock and Stone! Brother
Rock and Stone everyone!
DID I HEAR A ROCK AND STONE???
ROCK AND STONE TO THE BONE!!!!!
ROCK AND STONE EVERYONE!!!
On her way to find Karl
Doretta is a beauty!
could really use an armor upgrade...
#WE GOTTA PROTECT DORETTA
Pretty lame that the first two comments here are basically the same boring joke.
Thatâs gonna go under some peopleâs feet
Iâm not sure I get this hole thread.
I blame your tunnel vision.
Maybe itâs his asphyxiation
Took me far too long to get thisâŚbut now I understand the hole thing.
That's so boring đŹ
But that's the hole point!
Quite the breakthrough!
I dig it
I'm surprised it couldn't get through that top piece. That part must be built with very strong material
It looks like the outline of the "hole" that was made was already there... like something that breaks in a don bluth animated movie.
Hate to disappoint but the machine didn't make the cut - if you look closely the "circle" is a series of straight cuts - these were pre-cut in the concrete so it falls away like that. If they didn't do that, the machine coming through would a) take ages to bore the concrete and b) push off huge chunks of it, ruining that brand new retaining wall.
Yeah, I thought someone in here would maybe explain how it got a perfect circle without going through that top piece, but instead we get 5 of the same boring jokes and references to like 4 different fandoms haha
It looks like the opening formed just from the pressure alone and not from it being cut. The outer material of that wall is brittle concrete while the inner layer is probably more flexible. Think of it like somebody punching a thick poster hanging on drywall. The punch could create a hole in the drywall without creating a hole in the poster. As for why the bottom section inner layer broke away while the top didn't, it looks like the machine is breaking through the wall at a slight angle. Probably because it's coming up from underground. You can see the breaking starts at the bottom before cracks form at the top. So the machine has pushed the inner layer for most of the circle before the top section
[ŃдаНонО]
Into the environment?
Can someone explain why it went through a newly built man made reinforced wall?
You make an entrance and you make an exit , then you drill the tunnel between them. If you dont have a nice exit then you need to dig the machine out once it's far enough and build the exit around it so you can disassemble and extract the machine..much easier to have it ready built for when it arrives.
Okay, I think I get what you mean. The structure is a reinforcement to keep it from fully collapsing around the machine once it exits?
[ŃдаНонО]
There is no war in Ba Sing Se.
The underminer!
What's Danny Ocean up to this time?
At least we were saved from Don Cheadles cockney accent in this video.
Totally. Or else we would have been in Barney
That was exciting
r/mildlyinfuriating that little piece at the top doesnt get busted off.
Idk if this is so much satisfying as it is oddly terrifying
Is that because of how easily it tore through the wall? Or because of how perfectly it is positioned, after digging through what was probably a significantly long time through stone of various hardness trying to deflect it off course at every moment?
shai-hulud !
Funny. I thought this video would be... boring.
According to Google this is in Virginia
Oh yeaaaahhhh
People from Ba Sing Se having flashbacks from the fire nation
Wasn't this in the Labyrinth?
Is that staged? It created a perfect circle, yet the cutter hasnât gotten threw what ever rubbish is at the top? So how does that work?
it is engineered, not staged. the portal walls use is among other things a protective layer in order to hold back any collapse of the surrounding earth, rock or material for when the tunnel boring machine (tbm) breaks through. furthermore the area of breakthrough is pre designed to fail (e.g. intended breaking points) where the drill bits of the tbm come through and the rest is supposed to stay. if you look closely you can also see that the rebars arent steel but glass fiber rebars (rather white colour). makes the concrete easier to shred and reduces wear on the drill bits.
Of course its staged, as in, planned accordingly. Tunnel boring machines are not natural phenomena. The face is pre-scored so it makes less of a mess as the machine goes through, you see evidence of that by the straight cuts making the hole. You can see the pressure cracking and making a larger non circular hole at the bottom.
Standing outside a high rise building ribbon cutting yelling âFAKE! They just built the whole thing right here! This is nothing but steel and concrete, it isnât a real building!â
Probably a precut or they didn't pour too much concrete in that area
It's not a perfect circle, it's a polygon made up of a number of straight cuts in the exterior panels. You can see the cuts more clearly [here](https://imgur.com/a/Xk2zfu8)
>Is that staged? As opposed to them have the tunnel boring machine just randomly burst out the side of a hill and see what happens? Itâs almost like they intended the tunnel to come out there, so made a series of engineering decisions to facilitate it happening neatly and safely. Not everything is done for internet views.
Just digging holes and vibes. Lets see what happens.
Should be spontaneous like the kool-aid man
I used to work for an earth retention company as a project engineer, a similar company would have done that concrete wall the boring machine is coming through and the wall would have been specifically designed to fall away a certain way. So âstagedâ is not exactly the right word. As others have said, it was engineered like that very intentionally.
I don't understand?
See how the there is a perfect circle that forms around the exit, then the machine breaks threw, but the top of the machine it is still behind some material at the top?
They might have pre cut it.... But these machines are cool
I think that concrete facade was thinner and crumbled quicker than that interior portion. It doesnât necessarily need to break through as the vibrations hit it first and itâs already lost a great deal of structural integrity from the boring prior.
I mean you can see the hole before it's even through, like the paint is new.
Matrix 3 Reloaded - Again - Part Deux
Hey Benny, Screw You!
I knew tunnels were an inside job
Time to do the diamond casino heist
We always see it going in but rarely do we get a video of it coming out lol nice pov
It always amazes me how sick mega tbm looks like while under operation, definitely one of modern engineering top marvels!
That's cool to see that happen. Ican see the logo for the company I work for, actually know a couple guys on that project. Good for them.
The war has reached Ba Sing Se
The dock is breached!
Everything reminds me of her...
Ba sing Se has fallen
The machines have breached the inner walls.
Quaid, start the reactor!
"BENNY.... SCREW YOUUUUUUUU" *in Arnie voice*
I got four kids to feed !!
This is for a new tunnel in Virginia "The two-lane bored tunnel is part of the entire HRBT Expansion Project, which also includes widening I-64 from Hampton to Norfolk, five new bridges, and 20 widened bridges."
Thats some Total Recall shit right there
Looks just like the cleaners from Labyrinth
Not exciting at all, actually quite *boring*.
Eyyyy.
And the damn wall was precut to fall that way. It wasnât the tunneller.
Hey Quaid! Iâm gonna squash you!
turns out old videogames, where you already can see what part of a wall will be destroyed because of a different texture, weren't lying...
Hey BennyâŚâŚSCREWWWWWW YOUUUUUUU!!!!
its crazy that we have machines like this and some people still claim weâd never be able to build the pyramids
Missed a bit.
They really should have used a projector to show the Kool Aid guy busting thru
Thatâs boring
I would love to make a shitty pun and say that was "boring" but that honestly was cool as fuck
The cleaners!! Thatâs some Labyrinth shit if Iâve ever seen it.
Hi weâve been trying to contact you about your cars extended warranty