Public Project
Big Dig
Three stories down, it took a week for a boring machine — a laser-guided, mechanical mole — to cut a seven-foot tunnel under six lanes of Queens Boulevard.
It's the same technology that built the Chunnel from London to Paris under the English Channel, but it is rarely been used on a small scale like this. It's expensive, but it promises to get infrastructure work done without tearing up streets and disrupting neighborhoods for months at a time. The construction workers on projects like this are called sand hogs, but they are, in fact, skilled tunnel builders whose job is to play handmaiden to a million-dollar machine the size of a house trailer..
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