Sewer tunnel borer Rosie completes mile-long mission
Standing at the AKRON — brink of a 45-foot-wide abyss, “Break on Through (To the Other Side)” by the Doors played in Mayor Dan Horrigan’s mind as ripples formed in a puddle of water 166 feet below.
“You could hear her coming,” Horrigan said.
At 11:44 a.m. Wednesday, 284 days after she’d taken her first bite in the side of a hill north of downtown, Rosie chomped through a perfect circle drawn on the wall of a concrete-walled drop shaft below Exchange Street.
“It was kind of surreal,” Horrigan said shortly after he and a select group from City Hall were lowered into the earth to get reacquainted with Rosie, Akron’s $12 million tunnel-boring machine. “It’s a mile-long journey that this machine just made.”
Back at Lock 3 Park, where the final 30 inches of Rosie’s 6,240-foot trek was broadcast live on big screens, a beer-sipping, peanut-munching crowd cheered as blue boulders and flakes of Cuyahoga shale crumbled to the floor of the drop shaft. Dust kicked up, obscuring the camera view as Kenny-Obayashi, the joint company behind the project, lowered a banner advertising its work.
“We hit the bull’seye,” exclaimed Heather Bolestridge, the spokeswoman for Akron Waterways Renewed! — the city’s $1.1 billion court-ordered sewer overhaul project. The $184 million tunnel is the most expensive piece of the multiyear undertaking funded mostly by low-interest loans that will take generations of sewer bills to repay.
After an hour in the sweltering summer heat, a smattering of “woos!” washed over the crowd at Lock 3, followed by a mild chant of “Rosie.” One observer jokingly yelled “Tear down that wall” as the rest of the perfect circle came tumbling down.
Back in the light
For the first time in 10 months, the sun touched Rosie’s 27-foot-tall rotating face of spinning drill bits.
Down the hole, Horrigan stepped into the cool, damp air. Soot-faced laborers, who’d been working 12-hour shifts since October to get the tunnel dug on time and within budget, crawled down off Rosie, squeezing between her teeth to emerge before the mayor.
“We just did major surgery on our infrastructure,” the mayor later reflected.
The tunnel behind Rosie will serve as a main artery keeping heavy rainfall from mixing with sewage during storm surges.
With her mission accomplished, Rosie will be unbolted. Her pieces will be hoisted and sold. The heaviest section is her 300,000pound cutter head. Guided by satellite positioning, a piston-lined bearing behind the cutters drove her 300-footlong body forward at an inch a minute through solid rock with the force of 16 Space Shuttles.
Dismantle process
Above ground, workers have erected a concert of cranes that will lift the tunnel boring machine and some of the track laid behind her out of the earth. By early next summer, Horrigan hopes to have all the new and existing networks of sewer systems and catch basins tied into the massive tunnel.
“It’s beautiful,” marveled Ralph Hughley, an electrician who retired from Bridgestone and Firestone. His daughter, an employee of the construction management team overseeing the tunnel project, has been updating the Akron Waterways Renewed! website with photos of progress.
Having worked projects as memorable as wiring the controls that raise the flag over the old Firestone headquarters, Hugley said, “It’s just amazing how you could assemble something like Rosie to tunnel underground.”