Bertha the Giant Drill Is Ready to Rumble in Seattle
After an expensive rescue, it’s time to get back to digging.
About 750 days after she first broke down, Bertha, the massive drill long stuck under Seattle’s waterfront, is back to work. Five stories tall and the biggest of her kind, Bertha overheated in December 2013, about a ninth of the way into digging a tunnel for an underground expressway. The contractor on the dig staged a painstaking rescue, and Bertha’s slowly drilling again.
As Bloomberg Businessweek reported last March, Bertha’s troubles are yet another twist in Washington’s effort to replace an elevated highway that was damaged in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. Five years ago, the state awarded a $1.35 billion contract to a joint venture named Seattle Tunnel Partners. After the drill overheated, STP decided it couldn’t repair Bertha underground, so it dug a rescue pit 120 feet deep. Over several days last March, workers used a 240-foot crane to haul out Bertha’s cutter face and drive mechanisms, which weigh 2,000 tons.