There will be no tunneling in 2014 of the new state Route 99 under downtown Seattle. The latest repair schedule, released on April 21, for North America’s largest tunnel-boring machine, dubbed Bertha, wasn’t what Washington State Dept. of Transportation officials hoped for. Sitting idle since December 2013, Bertha won’t dig again until late March 2015.
“Resuming tunneling will take longer than any of us would have liked, but making these repairs is a significant engineering challenge that must be done safely,” says Chris Dixon, project manager at Seattle Tunnel Partners, a joint venture of Dragados USA and Tutor Perini Corp.