-Everything has to work in sequence.
There's three trains running down the tunnel.
(honking horn)
They are working about 24 hours
a day, six days a week.
(honking horn)
This is not a high speed rail line.
Yes, it is bumpy. It's really loud.
And I think it's important to note
that this is the commute
and there's about 15 people up in the machine,
and this is how they commute to work every day.
They commute there and they commute out.
This is a 2.7-mile-long storage tunnel.
Basically, the sewer system and the drainage system
were plumbed together over 100 years ago.
There were no treatment plants,
they just charge the sewage
and everything right into the water bodies.
(talking)
-You will follow me,
so now we can go straight.
-I'm operating a tunnel- boring machine.
As you can see, the muck is coming out real quick.
We're mining almost at three inches a minute.
You know, you've gotta counteract,
you've got to put positive pressure,
but at the same time, not too much.
-He's mining
the soils coming up over the top
on a conveyor belt
and then just dropping in
where you saw that guy back there.
What we're mining through
is essentially a soil that was deposited and then
run over by the last glacier about 15,000 years ago.
And so we're running through very hard, compressed soil.
When he stops mining, he's done for 30 minutes.
Then we're going to see very quickly these guys
or gals trying to set those liners in to build a tunnel.
To build about five feet of tunnel generally
takes about 30 minutes if all goes well.
(whirling noise)
Parts of the tunnel are underneath the roadways.
Parts of our underground structures
will be under the Burke Gilman Trail.
People will have no idea what's underneath there.
And that's part of the whole realm of utilities.
If you look at utilities, you don't see them.