Saturday, November 15, 2008

November 14, 2008 - Working at Night

It was hot in the city on Friday evening, for the middle of November, so I decided to go for a walk and take a few pictures of evening work location at the NW corner of 93rd street and 2nd avenue.

The crew that was working at this hour was digging a trench for part of the slurry wall that will become the west side of The Launch Box.

Note:
All of the pictures that follow were taken using the
Sepia tone setting on my camera.



One of many pedestrians that stopped to observe the activity.



The crew here is digging a 70 foot deep trench using a piece of equipment called a Diaphragm Wall Grab.

The Grab is lifted, and lowered, into the trench using one of the big Liebherr crawler cranes - as shown in the image above.



The crane operator has just lowered the Grab deep into the trench.



And now the Grab has just been lifted out of the trench, with the bucket at the end full with a load of earth and rocks.



Another view of the same work location -
this time looking south down 2nd avenue.






The liquid that is falling off the Grab, as it is being lifted out of the trench, is a mixture of water and bentonite. The hole is full of the water & bentonite mixture to prevent the collapse of the trench.






The soil and rocks from the bottom of the trench are dumped by the Grab into a pile, and then loaded into a truck to be taken away.



I left the site at about 9 PM, as the crew kept working.


- - -


Here's a listing of the recent additions to the right-hand
column of The Launch Box:

Under News Links:

Local Business Owners Struggle Through Construction Project
The Epoch Times - 11/6/08

Upper E. Hell Zone
New York Post - 11/10/08

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can someone explain to me why constructing the launch box takes such an extraordinary amount of time?

It's going to take less time to bore the twin tunnels than it takes to build the launch box. This just seems odd to me.

ffm784 said...

Let me take a shot at trying to answer the question --

Building the actual launch box, for the Tunnel Boring Machine, is an enormously complex project.

The "box" (hole) in the ground that is being built is about 75 feet deep and 4 blocks long, which one could imagine is like building a 20 story high skyscraper on it's side and underground.

It takes time because,
(a) they have to relocate the electric, telephone, gas, sewer and water lines,
(b) they have to do their work while maintaining both vehicle and pedestrian traffic flows in, around, and over the work site,
(c) they have to build a 75 foot deep concrete wall around the perimeter, before the can dig the box out to it's full depth,
(d) they have to work between the hours of 7 AM and 10 PM M-F and 8 AM and 6 PM on Saturday.

I'm sure there are other reasons, but I can't think of them at the moment.

Ben

Anonymous said...

That seems like enough reasons.

The TBMs don't have to relocate anything, can work 24 hours a day, and don't have to maintain traffic flow around them.