Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports)
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Subject: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports) Fri Dec 13, 2013 11:57 am
Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports)
Friday, December 13, 2013 6:39 (Before It's News) By Susan Duclos
Sky Valley Chronicle is asking if the mystery “thing” blocking “Bertha” (the giant boring machine that’s drilling the new Highway 999 tunnel under Seattle) is a buried UFO or evidence of an long lost civilization. Videos found about this mysterious blockage are asking if it is alien intervention, but no answers are forthcoming as of yet.
Whatever this object is, it is capable of stopping Bertha which is a “humongous (five story tall) tunnel boring machine they’re using to carve out the tunnel,” sixty feet under?
“We don’t know what it is,” Chris Dixon with Seattle Tunnel Partners said during a news conference Wednesday. “Right now, we’re developing plans to access that area underground to see exactly what it is that’s limiting the progress of the (tunnel boring machine). And it’s going to a while to implement these plans and see what exactly the situation is.”
“There’s thousands of guesses what’s going on, but until we get down there and see what the actual situation is, it’s just speculation and guesses,” said Dixon. Exactly what type of object is capable of stopping such a gigantic tunnel boring machine which was created to be capable of boring through just about anything?
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GROUNDZERO
Posts : 461 Reputation : 24 Join date : 2013-03-01
Subject: Re: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports) Fri Dec 13, 2013 12:29 pm
Aliens already??
researcher Admin
Posts : 14659 Reputation : 962 Join date : 2011-08-13 Age : 72 Location : San Diego
Subject: Re: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports) Fri Dec 13, 2013 1:18 pm
Highway 999 ? ? ?
They changed highway 666 to 491 a few years ago after enough people protested about it. Seems to me that 999 is just 666 inverted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_491
researcher Admin
Posts : 14659 Reputation : 962 Join date : 2011-08-13 Age : 72 Location : San Diego
Subject: Re: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports) Fri Dec 13, 2013 1:22 pm
OK, correction. Found out it is really highway 99 NOT 999. This is one of many reasons I so hate before it's news!!!
!! FOXTROT JULIETBRAVO !!
quietobserver Super Elite
Posts : 2707 Reputation : 131 Join date : 2013-02-06
Subject: Re: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports) Fri Dec 13, 2013 9:17 pm
They've struck Jimmy Hoffa's concrete scuba suit
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Subject: Re: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports) Sat Dec 14, 2013 6:18 pm
HERE is the answer!! http://www.stevequayle.com/index.php?s=33&d=708
CONCERNING 'BERTHA,THE SEATTLE TUNNELING MACHINE' THATS BEEN FORCED TO STOP UNDER SEATTLE
Bertha - or Perchta, the "guardian of the beasts" - appears during the 12 days of Christmas. Article mentions the feast of Epiphany - let's see if anything with that digging machine happens on Jan 6.
A bit odd, I felt like researching "Seattle beast" - that's what I heard. You can imagine my surprise when I found this.
We'll find out soon of there is anything to it. I had looked up the name "Bertha" before - but never found this. SQ NOTE THIS IS THE SAME INTERCESSOR WHO SAW TWO GIANT GATES BENEATH THE GROUND IN A VISION AND WAS TOLD THAT IT WAS NOT TIME FOR THEM TO OPEN MONTHS AGO-MY QUESTION IS WHATLIES BEHIND THE GATES? NOTICE WE ARE OBVIOUSLY IN THE 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS --THE NAME, THE TIME AND THE UNUSUAL EVENTS CONCERNING THIS WHOLE SITUATION ARE WORTH KEEPING A CLOSE EYE ON!
Dec 14, 2013
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Subject: Re: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports) Sat Dec 14, 2013 7:21 pm
Tweets
Bertha [ltr]@BerthaDigsSR99[/ltr]
12 Dec Still weighing options. In the meantime, surface crews are drilling wells to lower groundwater near my face.
Bertha [ltr]@BerthaDigsSR99[/ltr]
11 Dec Update: It's not @RSherman_25. http://bit.ly/18mK1DB Seriously, though, we're working hard to determine what's blocking my path.
Bertha [ltr]@BerthaDigsSR99[/ltr]
9 Dec Seeing some reports that I’m stuck. I’m working fine, but have encountered an obstruction. I’ll keep you posted.
Bertha [ltr]@BerthaDigsSR99[/ltr]
6 Dec @ChadleyLukk I’m roughly 450 feet from entering zone 2. http://1.usa.gov/10tAe4r
Bertha [ltr]@BerthaDigsSR99[/ltr]
6 Dec @neiltimes I’m just north of South Jackson Street, about 60 feet below the surface.
Bertha [ltr]@BerthaDigsSR99[/ltr]
6 Dec The beauty of barging … http://1.usa.gov/1gcTFvd pic.twitter.com/HXqsIQmeLz
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Subject: Re: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports) Fri Dec 20, 2013 7:49 am
Under Seattle, a Big Object Blocks Bertha. What Is It?
In October, workers walked through the first rings of the highway tunnel being built under Seattle’s waterfront toward the boring machine called Bertha. WASHINGTON STATE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION
By KIRK JOHNSON
December 19, 2013
SEATTLE — A secret subterranean heart, tinged with mystery and myth, beats beneath the streets in many of the world’s great cities. Tourists seek out the catacombs of Rome, the sewers of Paris and the subway tunnels of New York. Some people believe a den of interstellar aliens lurks beneath Denver International Airport. Now Seattle, at least for now, has joined that exclusive club.
Something unknown, engineers say — and all the more intriguing to many residents for being unknown — has blocked the progress of the biggest-diameter tunnel-boring machine in use on the planet, a high-tech, largely automated wonder called Bertha. At five stories high with a crew of 20, the cigar-shaped behemoth was grinding away underground on a two-mile-long, $3.1 billion highway tunnel under the city’s waterfront on Dec. 6 when it encountered something in its path that managers still simply refer to as “the object.”
The object’s composition and provenance remain unknown almost two weeks after first contact because in a state-of-the-art tunneling machine, as it turns out, you can’t exactly poke your head out the window and look.
“What we’re focusing on now is creating conditions that will allow us to enter the chamber behind the cutter head and see what the situation is,” Chris Dixon, the project manager at Seattle Tunnel Partners, the construction contractor, said in an interview this week. Mr. Dixon said he felt pretty confident that the blockage will turn out to be nothing more or less romantic than a giant boulder, perhaps left over from the Ice Age glaciers that scoured and crushed this corner of the continent 17,000 years ago.
But the unknown is a tantalizing subject. Some residents said they believe, or want to believe, that a piece of old Seattle, buried in the pell-mell rush of city-building in the 1800s, when a mucky waterfront wetland was filled in to make room for commerce, could be Bertha’s big trouble. That theory is bolstered by the fact that the blocked tunnel section is also in the shallowest portion of the route, with the top of the machine only around 45 feet below street grade.
“I’m going to believe it’s a piece of Seattle history until proven otherwise,” said Ann Ferguson, the curator of the Seattle Collection at the Seattle Public Library, who said she held out hope for something of 1890s Klondike Gold Rush vintage, when Seattle became the crazed and booming gateway city to the gold fields of Alaska and Canada.
At the downtown storefront museum for the tunnel project, called Milepost 31, visitors are cracking Jimmy Hoffa jokes or spouting theories about buried train engines. Gabe Martin, a sales clerk at a curio shop near the dig site, said he was intrigued by the Prohibition era, when Seattle rode a tide of illegal alcohol smuggled from Canada, and people had reason to bury things, not wanting them found. “Bootlegger stuff,” he said.
Chris Dixon, a manager with the Seattle tunnel project, briefed reporters last week on the stalled Bertha. TED S. WARREN / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Dixon said that efforts to drain water and reduce pressure at the drill head, with a series of bore holes pushed down in recent days, could allow workers to get safe access to the blocked site as early as Friday. But working at atmospheric pressures similar to what a diver would experience, the team could stay down only for short periods, he said, and each visitor would then need time in a decompression chamber.
And there is something of a John Henry’s hammer theme to the tale of Seattle’s object. Bertha is blind as a mole in front, with no forward-facing windows or cameras, so a kind of spacewalk through air-locked doors is required to get to the front of the machine for inspection. And the removal or breaking up of the object is likely to be done with jackhammers or other old-fashioned tools that a tunnel-digging sandhog worker of generations past would recognize.
If the object can’t be broken up below ground, there would need to be excavation down from the street. In any event, Mr. Dixon and other state managers said, the machine’s forward progress could be halted for weeks — though they stressed that work is continuing on the ends of the tunnel, and that it is too early to talk about cost overruns or delays. The tunnel is scheduled to be open to traffic by late 2015. The tunnel is to run north and south along Elliott Bay from Century Link Field, home of football’s Seahawks, to a point near the Space Needle on the north, allowing demolition of an elevated roadway and improved crosstown foot and bicycle access.
Bertha in May, before it was lowered underground to start digging. WASHINGTON STATE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION
Economics and geology — two key threads of Seattle’s creation — underpin the tunnel’s impetus. Planning for the project began after an earthquake in 2001 revealed seismic vulnerability in the elevated viaduct roadway, which was built in the 1950s. Businesses and real estate interests were then sold on the idea that a tunnel, replacing the viaduct, would open access between downtown and the waterfront.
But unlike, say, Boston or New York, where tunnels are common and bedrock is close to the surface, getting to that end point is messy. Seattle’s underbelly is more like pudding than soil — a slurry of sand, gravel and clay, all jumbled and compressed by the pressures from a 3,000-foot-thick ice sheet that extended as far as Olympia, 50 miles south. A city famous for being wet also has a high water table, only about four to five feet down.
And because Seattle, as first encountered by European-American settlers, was hardly conducive to being a city at all, with steep, glacier-carved hills rolling right down to the water, the landscape was reshaped from the beginning, with projects to grind down the hills. That in turn created lots of landfill, which went into the waterfront to level it and create land on which the city’s commercial center rose. “It’s mind-boggling how much we have altered the landscape of Seattle,” said David B. Williams, a geologist and author of a coming book about the making of Seattle’s landscape, called “Too High and Too Steep, Reshaping Seattle’s Topography.” “The tunnel is just a continuation of that story,” he said as he walked north of downtown, where a cliff face showed the layered strata of the geologic past. Mr. Williams, who blogs about local geology, speculated in a recent post that the remains of a famous shipwreck, the Windward — which foundered in 1875 and was buried near the waterfront — might be the kind of object that Bertha encountered, though he conceded that the machine could probably grind through a wood vessel as though it were paper.
In the end, he said, state engineers are probably right. A rock, huge in size or in a configuration that the machine cannot quite get purchase on to grind, is the most likely culprit. “I do hope it is not,” he said. “It would be great to find some new mystery.”
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Subject: Re: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports) Sun Dec 29, 2013 6:06 pm
DATE: 29 DECEMBER 2013 POSTED BY : BY C.T. COMMENT : 0
December 2013 marked a very unforgettable day for the people of Seattle. As reported by UFO Sightings Daily on December 24, 2013, Bertha, a huge tunnel boring machine was already digging down in the native glacial soil when it suddenly stopped in its tracks.
Project manager Chris Dixon, did not expect that this colossal machine would hit anything with the depth of the digging they were already at.
"Well theoretically, we're down in the native soils, we're below the zones that they fill. We're not expecting to find artifacts or railroad locomotives or ships or something like that down there".
Many speculated that Big Bertha could have hit the side walls of one of the many alien bases on Earth.
Feliks Banel, Seattle's historian elaborated on the history of the place 100 years ago. As a working waterfront, the object could be a part of a locomotive or a part of an old ship. However, he also did not discount the possibility of the presence of UFOs and extra-terrestrial activities.
"Maybe it's some ancient artifact, maybe there is an ancient civilization here that goes way back that nobody's even considered."
Feliks Banel is hoping that whatever it is that is stopping Bertha, it would be something cool. UFO Sightings Daily is coordinated by Scott C. Waring who had been affiliated with the United States Air Force at SAC base and is currently an ESL teacher and UFOlogist who lives in Taiwan.
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Subject: Bertha’s nemesis: 119-foot steel pipe Sat Jan 04, 2014 8:51 am
Bertha’s nemesis: 119-foot steel pipe
Highway 99 contractors revealed Friday what’s been blocking Bertha, the giant tunnel machine: The obstruction is steel pipe, left buried by a state groundwater study in 2002.
By [url=http://search.nwsource.com/search?searchtype=cq&sort=date&from=ST&byline=Mike Lindblom]Mike Lindblom[/url] Seattle Times transportation reporter
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SEATTLE TUNNEL PARTNERS
A fragment of steel pipe pokes between spokes of Bertha's cutting face, in this photo from Thursday's inspection. It's part of a 119-foot deep well, left in the soil after a 2002 groundwater test.
"They avoided mentioning the steel as a possible culprit for four weeks, (FOUR... (January 3, 2014, by themostinterestingman) MORE
I'm not sure if people are really coming "clean" on this Bertha issue. Too... (January 3, 2014, by martolo)MORE
So, moronic agency A fails to follow the rules of moronic agency B, so that when... (January 3, 2014, by ugottabkidding) MORE
State officials revealed Friday that the mystery object blocking tunnel machine Bertha is a long steel pipe, left buried in 2002 by one of the Highway 99 project’s own research crews.
The tunnel drill has been stranded for a month near Pioneer Square, with no clear strategy yet to extract the pipe.
The Department of Transportation (DOT) could not estimate how much time and money it will take to get the world’s largest drill moving again.
Bertha’s cutting teeth struck the pipe Dec. 3, yet the DOT and its contractors avoided mentioning the steel as a possible culprit for four weeks, despite an incident in which the machine knocked a 55-foot pipe fragment to the surface.
What the ongoing delay means for taxpayers is unclear, but it’s certainly not good.
The costs will be determined later through negotiations between the state and Seattle Tunnel Partners (STP), maybe even a legal dispute.
The $2 billion tunnel budget includes a $40 million risk allowance for repairs and inspections near the front of the rotary cutting face — plus a $105 million general contingency fund to deal with crises. Matt Preedy, deputy Highway 99 administrator for the state Department of Transportation, said some of that money will be consumed.
The culprit is an 8-inch diameter, 119-foot-long well casing, used to measure groundwater for the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project, officials said. Back then, a shallow cut-and-cover tunnel was a leading option.
A jagged piece of the pipe appeared Thursday night, after enough groundwater was pumped out of the machine and soil to allow STP crews a view through the cutting face.
The 2002 well site was listed in reference materials provided to construction bidders, as part of the contract specifications.
“I don’t want people to say WSDOT didn’t know where its own pipe was, because it did,” said state spokesman Lars Erickson.
However, Chris Dixon, STP’s project director, said the builders presumed it had been removed.
“If we had known the pipe was there, we would have removed it,” he said.
Dixon mentioned that Ecology Department rules require well casings to be removed after use. Ecology spokesman Dan Partridge said his department didn’t perform the viaduct studies, and as a general rule, “you do not necessarily have to remove a casing when you remove a well.”
Bertha first encountered the pipe Dec. 3, Dixon said. The clockwise cutting motion pushed part of it above the surface, and fragments showed up in a conveyor system within the machine, he said.
“We saw a pipe come up, out of the ground 6 or 7 feet,” he said. “We continued mining, successfully.”
Workers removed a 55-foot-long piece, he said. For two days, the drill moved along fine, creating what Dixon called “a false sense of security.”
The blockage, which Bertha hit 60 feet below surface, is beneath the area where Seattle settlers dumped fill soil and debris, based on local histories. No metal should be there.
So why didn’t that bizarre pipe hit scare Dixon into halting immediately Dec. 3? He replied Friday the team didn’t realize the pipe extended so deep, and thought workers had removed it all.
On Dec. 6, the cutter turned without grabbing soil. So the operators quit running it the next morning, to avoid harming the $80 million machine.
A modern tunnel machine can chew through dirt, rocks and concrete, but not steel, which can become tangled in the cutting head, or caught in a conveyor screw.
Dixon said Friday that “we don’t know” yet whether any moving parts are jammed.
However, the team has found unusual wear on block-shaped cutting tools, and STP is replacing those with new tools on the cutting head.
For the last four weeks, DOT didn’t mention steel pipe as a suspect, and even talked about the cutting-tool swap on Monday as routine. In a Dec. 20 blog post, removed Friday, the DOT said, “We simply don’t know yet” the cause.
Asked about this, Preedy said Friday that initially, the team gave DOT and outside tunnel experts information about the pipe strike.
“In that same two days, there were pieces of boulder that had come out on the [conveyor] belt,” he said. The experts thought the chance of further problems with pipe were low, he said. “At that point in time, we were pretty well convinced it was something else,” Preedy said. For instance, a giant rock deposited by glaciers.
The theory changed this week when vertical-test probes hit small objects, then Thursday’s inspection located buried pipe, he said.
Construction of the four-lane tunnel is three months behind its schedule to be open at the end of 2015.
However, the machine in November was advancing as fast as 50 feet a day, prompting Preedy to say it’s possible to regain time after the steel is removed.
This incident follows other woes at DOT, including an expensive crack repair and delay for Highway 520 bridge pontoons; staff shortages that canceled late-summer ferry runs; and the loss of $175 million in planning costs for the Interstate 5 Columbia River Crossing, before work was halted by a legislative impasse.
On the positive side, work is proceeding smoothly on rebuilding Interstate 90 east of Snoqualmie Pass, and the DOT quickly replaced a downed Skagit River Bridge span. Quite a bit of work remains to clear the pipe away from Bertha.
Thursday’s inspection included only the top 15 feet of the machine because the rest is flooded with mud and groundwater. STP must somehow check the lower 42 feet of the 57-foot diameter face, perhaps with tunnel-trained divers.
Then the steel must be extracted from above, going through unstable soil, or from within the cutter face.
Dixon said contractors are trying to figure out what methods are possible, while protecting worker safety.
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Subject: Re: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports)
Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports)
Subject: Mystery ‘Thing’ In Seattle Tunnel – Long Lost Civilization? (Video Reports) 
Fri Dec 13, 2013 11:57 am
Bertha 
