Dan McNichol is a best selling author and an award-winning journalist. In 2008, McNichol won the Robert F. Boger Award for outstanding construction writing while chronicling Minnesota’s disastrous I-35W bridge collapse. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) named McNichol as one of nation’s outstanding writers. He was honored with a PhD in Engineering and Technology for his publications and his contributions to the fields of engineering and construction. His articles and work have appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and numerous other periodicals. McNichol is an editorial board member and columnist for CENews and its Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure.
McNichol’s film credits include numerous appearances on: The BBC, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel, ABC World News Tonight, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The News Hour and National Public Radio and many more news organizations. He has consulted for National Geographic. McNichol has also worked with CCTV, the Chinese television network, on a business program produced in Washington, D.C. to better foster economic relations between the two nations. Dan is now appearing on the History Channel’s new series titled, “The History of Mankind.”
Today, McNichol is on a national tour called Dire States. He’s advocating we build smarter, faster, and better. He’s seeking answers to why ASCE’s Report Card gives the nation’s infrastructure a grade of D+. He’s driving the message around the USA – literally. McNichol’s research vehicle is a 1949 Hudson, an original Detroit lead sled that’s as old, rusty and energy defunct as America’s infrastructure.
Join his drive around on DireStates.com.
The tour has been completed. Where should this work take us? Now, Dire States 2.o.
Information is powerful. How we use it defines us.
http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_page_where_s_google_going_next
17:00: Bikes in the future. Working with Google campuses and cities to put them on wires above the street.Separating bikes from cars with a minimal cost.
9:30: Access to the internet: 2 out of 3 people don’t have access to the internet. Hot air balloons – floating the grid above the earth and creating internet access in mountainous regions. Access points up high – cheaply.
“Go low and slow,” said Mark Lewis as casually as is Californian. The night before I had parked the Hudson outside my cabin’s door while staying the night at Deejen’s Big Sur Inn on the Pacific Coast Highway. As I approached Mark he was smiling and gazing at Mrs. Martin. We struck an early morning conversation over her. The “dude” from England stays connected to California by driving up and down the Pacific Coast Highway with his wife Claire every year. “I always stay here at Deejen’s along the way. I’ve been coming here for 30 years. It’s one of my favorite places anywhere.”
The sun was barely up when we met. The Pacific air was scented from smoke from a morning fire in my fireplace and a still smoldering forest fire that laid waste to thousands of acres in the forest weeks earlier. Mark got the messaging of Mrs. Martin as rolling metaphor. He was nodding his head in agreement as I delivered the sound byte about America’s infrastructure being as old, rusty and energy defunct as this original Detroit lead sled. “Totally. Right on dude. It is.” agreed Lewis, whose first was a 1966 Mustang, 289 V-8. “The bridges, the roads, they are rotting away. We haven’t invested in our infrastructure since the 1950s.”
This tourist in his town gets infrastructure – both civil and technical. Mark sees a direct parallel between investment and return on investment when it come to building systems. “In IT, you invest constantly or you die. Firms believe that they can coast after a big investment in their systems. Individuals do the same thing he says when the buy a laptop, “Oh, I am good for a while now. But everyday systems gets slower becoming obsolete quickly.”
The man, or should I say the dude, keeps it real. A kid from Santa Barbara, a town he calls, “God’s waiting room” where dwellers there are either, “Newly wed to nearly dead.” Mark grew up in LA and later San Francisco where he was a free lance photo journalist who logged time with Associated Press as a freelancer. “I studied film photography and now my entire education is for not. The practice is lost – completely antiquated.” He left photo journalism moments before the big disrupter known as the internet blew it up. One of his claims is he was one of the last shooters working using film. Mark says he would have had to made the switch to digital but there’s nothing better than film, a medium he uses for her personal photographic pursuits. Before another bomb called dot.com imploded 14 years ago, Mark got into the information technology world which took him to London.
The man has survived by seeing into big oncoming trends and major disruptions in technology. This is why I asked if we could stay connected. I hope to draw deeper connections between IT infrastructure and real infrastructure with his intuitiveness.
“It’s all downhill form here,” said the knowledgeable native as I described my route to LA. “You’ll be in Santa Barbara is 5 hours, and LA in another 2.” Claire chimed in adding, “But in this old car you’re going to need days not hours.” She gets it.
1:2:14: Snow fences in Wyoming are remarkable structures if not mysterious. The state puts forward significant outlays of lumber, cash and property in order to keep I-80 open to traffic during the winter. Snow fences in Laramie, Wyoming are legendary. This is where I-80 was built against the ancients, Native Americans who knew the Big Road should not never have been built in the area. Old locals knew better as well as a serious snow channel in the form of a natural snow and wind tunnel punishes the area so much that the rail road companies were prevented from laying down tracks there decades before. But tragically the builders of the Interstate System ignored the counsel of sages. Many deaths over the past half century along the route are due to fierce storms and snow. The section of highway is notoriously called Snow Chi Minh Trail. Talk came to relocating I-80. Then came the storm fences and now the green fences. The mater mind behind the structures is a little known about engineer.
Check out this story in Slate that talks about Dr. Ron Tabler, a snow wind engineer that innovated by chasing snow storms and collected data in order to save lives not to mention tons of money from not having to plow as many tons of snow and ice. Airports use structures like these to keep runways open. There are even tumbleweed fences to keep the drifter off the roadways.
Months ago, as I drove through the are I noticed evergreen trees replacing some of the built structures/fences.
Stuck in Seattle
“STUCK,” read the headline of the Seattle Times on December 10, 2013. The world’s largest tunnel boring machine came to a standstill about 50 feet beneath Seattle’s downtown. The giant rig, known as Big Bertha, ground to a halt 1,019 feet into her chartered course of 10,289 feet. What is stopping her remains a mystery.
Big Bertha came to a standstill while digging a nearly 2 mile long, 4 lane, highway tunnel costing $3.1 billion. The mega machine, whose namesake is Mayor Bertha Knight Landes, the first woman elected to mayorship of a major US city, is being challenged to dig a large tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a dangerously old elevated highway along Seattle’s waterfront.
The project, launched in January of 2011, is officially known as the SR 99 Bored Tunnel Alternative Design-Build Project. The mega work is likened to The Big Dig, another underground urban highway endeavor which replaced another waterfront elevated highway – that one along Boston, Massachusetts. That project, offically known as the Central Artery Tunnel Project, was completed without a Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM). Work on it wrapped up in 2008 at a cost of approximately $15 billion.
Complicating construction logistics at the site of the Seattle project are the embarkations and debarkations of commuters tourists as well as the movements of cargo. Washington State Ferries and ocean going ships along Seattle’s busy working waterfront take place in the shadow of the Alaskan Viaduct. Also in the immediate area are tens of thousands of Seattle Sea Hawk and Mariner fans jamming area roadways while attending games at adjacent stadiums.
Experts fear the early 1950s elevated highway, a heavily congested commuter route, will collapse should another powerful earthquake strike the Pacific Rim city as one did in 2001. Over ten years ago that earthquake severely damaged but did not destroy The Alaskan Way Viaduct. Highway structures built before 1990 were not designed with features used today to keep them standing after intense seismic activity.
Inside Seattle’s new tunnel. The tail end of Big Bertha is in the distance. A surveyor is at work while standing on the concrete liner of the new 2 story tall highway tunnel.
Big Bertha got stuck inside of Zone 1 which sits in the middle of the busy port area. Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), the owner of the old viaduct and new tunnel mapped 10 eventual work zones that Big Bertha is set to pass though. Prophetically posted on agency’s website is a bit that portends the current situation: “Think of it this way: if Bertha were learning to ride a bike, Zone 1 would be her training wheels.” Put another way: Big Bertha ran into problems during her trial-and-error phase.
Mysterious is whether the object blocking progress belong’s to mother nature’s or mankind. The area of Zone 1 was created by Seattle’s early settlers who cut down the hilly terrain they inhabited and used the excavate to create real estate along the commercial waterfront. Today, geologists, archeologists and lay folk are engaged in an unofficial contest of predicating what has stopped Bertha. Predictions range from a glacial boulder, a sunken sailing ship and even abandoned public toilet facility – a world class one in its day.
Project managers predicted that Big Bertha’s early work would progress at a crawl: 6 feet per day. Later she is supposed to cruise at 36 feet per day. Those who know tunneling say Tunnel Boring Machines like Bertha are designed to free themselves form expected hangups by reversing a bit so obstacles in the way can be cleared.
“We’re going to get her going again,” assures Daren Konopaski, the head of the International Union of Operating Engineers, known in Seattle as Local 302, the arm of organized labor representing unionized heavy equipment operators in Washington state. “We sent several of our members to Japan to learn how to operate [Bertha] before work on her fabrication was finished. “This is the type of challenge our brother’s and sisters in the trades live for. We’re eager to free Big Bertha and get on with delivering the job.”
Compounding the danger to public safety, the viaduct is a product of urban renewal gone wrong – a hulking double deck superstructure that connects the city as much as it divides it. Traffic runs constantly along the elevated road that connect Seattle’s Western neighborhoods to Interstate 5. Simultaneously, the giant roadway has separated Seattle from the its busy waterfront for over half a century.
“When I was a kid my father took me downtown while the Alaskan Way was under construction. I remember my dad saying he’d never seen anything like it,” recalls Ray Speck, a master wooden boatbuilder and longtime resident of Port Townsend, a seaport about 40 miles north of Seattle. “It was out of the future – a highway way up in the sky with these wild ramps emanating out of it”
Supersized in Seattle
Bertha was greeted with fascination when she arrived into the Port of Seattle/Tacoma from her birthplace 5,000 miles away in Osaka, Japan. A specialty ship carried her 41 pieces across the Pacific Ocean to waiting customized trucks on the docks of the Port of Seattle. Specialized rigs towed her parts to a heavy lifting crane capable of hoisting her largest section of 900 tons. From street level Bertha was lowered into a 6 story deep launching pit, still in parts and pieces, that had taken 300 workers a year to dig.
Inside the launching pit the 325 foot long TBM was assembled into one machine. The digging began on July 30, 2013. When the highway tunnel is substantially complete in 2016, the launching pit will have become the new tunnel’s Southern portal, the eventual entrance and exit to the underground highway now being built.
When inside of the 7,000 ton cylindrical behemoth, you feel as if you are in a subterranean ship or earthen submarine. Adding to the feel of a vessel on a mission are the grave faces of Big Bertha’s 20 plus crew. Crewmemebers are currently taking advantage of Big Bertha’s downtime by performing needed maintenance. The underground vessel is also being readied with supplies for its earthen journey – a voyage expected to take over a year.
Greg Hauser is the Deputy Project Manager for The Seattle Tunnel Partnership, a construction joint venture between Dragados of Spain and Tutor Perini Corporation of Sylmar, California. Hauser speaks with the certainty of an expert and the passion of an intense practitioner. “This tunnel is going to be completed on time and on budget – this is no Big Dig project. That project regretfully gave tunneling a bad name. Adding, “Every city should have a big tunnel underneath it, “This is a work of art. And when its finished, it’s going to be beautiful.”
Washington State Department of Transportation simply says that the public will have to wait until the new year to learn what’s blocking Big Bertha’s path.
Leaving Seattle I headed south in the fog and rain. I spent the late afternoon driving while contemplating a manageable morning in Portland, Oregon. I’d have a cup of the town’s famous coffee in hand. But driving into a dark December rush hour I was tired. Portland looked too big to be fun, cheap or easy. Crossing the Columbia River in the dark I was awed by the 405 as it shot off in pure science fiction over the Willamette River over an old steel truss bridge. I thought Portlandia a smaller town. Judging through the right side windows I ruled the mysterious metropolis steely. I opted to keep on along the 5.
The following day I climbed, dove and finally landed the terra-plane in Crescent City, California. It was a wild ride.There were tough looking people along Oregon’s parts of the Interstate. Making the breakdown lane their hiking trail these grunged folk were overburden with their belongings. They blended into the dark earthy mountains. The evergreens, piles of snow and blue sky made the drive pleasant. At Grants Pass I peeled off the Big Road and headed towards State Road 99 that eventually took me to US 199. Ray Speck, my boat’s master builder back in Port Townsend had suggested this route in case of snow. “You enjoy the ride – rolling along the road,” he promised.
Ray’s recall of the road was right on. US 199 was a thriller. I was chasing the sun as it was dropping behind the mountain peaks. Mimicking the Smith River’s curves and rapid decants, US 199 was either rising, falling or curving. It was getting dark when the moon was clearly in the Eastern sky. Heading towards sea level, Mrs. Martin and I made our way to towards the coast dropping into pitch darkness. It seemed like the trip was not going to end or end well. But, I popped out into the town where I met a man who had returned from oil work in Alaska. The pay here is next to nothing. But, you got to love the weather said the stout one with a red goatee. “That the worst road in America,” he said at the gas pump. “It’s like a goat trail.”
The hotel clerk, a man from Hawaii who just moved to California a year or so ago, suggested I drive into the Redwoods in the morning. “Go to Stout Grove and get out and walk around. Everyone thinks that the National Parks aren’t any good. I’m telling you this state park is the best place to see the Redwoods. It’s an old logging road” Turning off local roads until there were no more I took a road that looked at first too narrow for the old girl. Once in the Redwoods I was driving on dirt. I was in awe among the giants.
A nation’s successful coordination of investments in infrastructure produce powerful results. In the early 1980s China and India were on equal economic footing notes the World Bank. Deng Xiao Ping, the leader of Communist China at the time, launched a peaceful revolution towards prosperity. His efforts mirrored those of Dwight Eisenhower, a contemporary of Ping’s, a few decades earlier in the United States.
The former peasant, Red Army General and world leader systematically began investing heavily in his country’s infrastructure. Ping launched what became the modernization of The Peoples Republic of China. First he concentrated efforts on building a modern superhighway system similar to the ones in Europe and the United States. Then Ping directed improvements to the nation’s ports, railways and airports. As a result nearly half a billion Chinese were lifted above the poverty line inside of 20 years. China’s economy reached annual double digit growth into the 2000s.
India, by comparison, underinvested in its infrastructure. As a result, its economy saw little significant growth during the same period. Today, China’s economy is many times larger than that of neighboring India. India and many other nations are struggling. They are unable to make needed infrastructure improvements.
President Eisenhower, early in his presidency preached, “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.”
Headline news here in Seattle this morning.
Dire States tour arrived in Seattle to news that the dream machine called Big Bertha is stuck 60 feet below Seattle’s downtown. Tunneling is mysterious. Geotechnical challenges lurk in the unseen. Drilling boring samples is expensive. On The Big Dig in Boston (Seattle citizens are calling the Alaskan Way Viaduct Project The Big Dig also) the project claimed to have launched the largest ever geotechnical exploration ever – and more was unknown than known afterwards. Good luck Big Bertha, keep on tunneling…
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