Bertha has broken through. After nearly four years underground, Seattle’s beleaguered boring behemoth clawed its way into daylight yesterday, leaving a 1.7-mile tunnel behind it. And now that its job is done, workers can at last move an aging, potentially dangerous stretch of elevated highway below the surface, and build a new public space on Seattle’s waterfront in its place.

The tunneling machine, named for former Seattle mayor Bertha Knight Landes, boasts a 57-foot diameter and measures 325 feet long. After dropping into a pit in July 2013, it started digging the tunnel that will hold the replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct, an elevated highway that was partly demolished after being damaged by a 2001 earthquake.

Bertha's job was supposed to take two and a half years, but in December 2013, disaster struck: After just 1,000 feet of work, temperature spikes inside the machine set alarm bells ringing, and Bertha had to stop. The contractor says an 8-inch steel well casing, a bit of pipe, basically, fouled the cutting tools and damaged the blades at the front. (Washington State disagrees on the cause; lawyers are fighting it out.)

Bertha the tunneling machine broke through a new concrete wall into a disassembly pit. At first it was hard to see the machine's arrival through clouds of dust. Workers clamoured to get a shot of the exact moment Bertha emerged. Now crews will remove the metal support braces so that Bertha can move all the way into the pit. Engineers will cut the 6,100 ton machine into pieces no more than 20 tonnes in weight, so that they can be removed on trucks. A worker looking out through Bertha's blades gives an idea of the scale of the earth chewing machine.

Eventually engineers determined that seals on the main bearing needed replacing1, and the most efficient thing to do was to dig down 120 feet to where Bertha was stuck, pull the cutting head up to the surface, and do repairs on site. That took technicians two years, but they finally sent Bertha on its way again in December 2015. And on Tuesday, it finally gnawed through the concrete wall of a newly constructed, 90 feet deep, ‘disassembly pit’.

Now, workers will cut 7,982-ton Bertha into about hundreds of 20-ton pieces, so they can crane them out and truck them away. They’ll decide if parts can be salvaged for use on other projects, or if they should be recycled. No surprise, that'll take several months. (Dismemberment beats being buried alive: After a 200-ton tunneling machine finished its work under New York City, workers abandoned it instead of hauling it back up.)

This breakthrough is just the start. Now construction crews have to finish a double deck highway inside the 60-foot diameter tube, complete with lighting, ventilation, and fire detection systems. Washington State's Department of Transportation says inspectors will test more than 8,500 components over the next two years, before signing off and letting traffic through.

Bertha's journey has been a slow one, even when compared to other boring projects. London carved 23 miles of tunnels under the city for a new Crossrail train in just three years, using eight machines. And serial entrepreneur and traffic hater, Elon Musk says he can find a better way to build tunnels, which he sees as a way to increase road capacity. He is digging a test trench outside the HQ of his company SpaceX in Los Angeles, and while he admits "We have no idea what we're doing," he says he hopes to increase the speed of tunneling by 500 to 1,000 percent. Eventually he’d like to see a network of tunnels up to 30 layers deep under cities, with traffic whizzing in three dimensions, instead of just two on the surface.

Musk may want to look at Seattle for a reality check on the difficulties of working underground. The $2 billion Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement in Seattle is now slated to open in early 2019, fully three years behind schedule. But hey, at least there’s now light at the end of the tunnel.

1Story updated at 3.15p EST 04/07/17 with details on the damage and repair.</s>It's official - Bertha has broken through!

Seattle's tunnel boring machine that's been digging beneath the city for the State Route 99 tunnel reached the end of its 1.75-mile journey Tuesday, nearly four years after it embarked on the job.

Just before 10 a.m., Bertha pierced the cement wall of the tunnel, sending water, dirt and a plume of dust into the disassembly pit. About an hour and a half later, Bertha's cutterhead emerged from the earth.

The event marks the end of Bertha's 9,270 foot journey that she began July 2013. But the tunnel still has awhile to go before it will open to the public. Crews need to finish the double-decker lanes and other infrastructure.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray says completing a tunnel that will serve as an underground highway was "a major construction milestone in our plan to reclaim Seattle's waterfront." He added the city is one step closer to taking down the viaduct for "our vision of a well-connected 21st century city" serving "pedestrians, transit and sensible car trips."

Washington Governor Jay Inslee says the breakthrough is "a historic moment in our state's transportation history." But critics call it an expensive vanity project, and environmentalists have objected to building another highway in Seattle.

The tunnel project was not always a smooth journey. From a sinkhole that shut down operations for months to cost overruns that climbed to nearly $500 million, the project caused some headaches.

Related: Bertha: How we got here and beyond

However, Bertha finished the journey without any major hiccups since digging resumed in December 2015.

As for tolls for the new tunnel, the state transportation commission says it's too soon to know the price.

Former Washington Governor Christine Gregoire, who was a driving force to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel, said she always believed it was the right decision.

"Even during the worst of times, I never lost faith," Gregoire told KING 5. "That doesn't say I wasn't praying it would happen, but I've always been optimistic it was going to get done."

Gregoire believes the tunnel had to be built and points to studies that the viaduct likely wouldn't survive another earthquake.

Meanwhile, some lawmakers are working in Olympia on a bill to make Seattle pay for the cost overruns on the tunnel instead of the state of Washington.

Republican Representative Ed Orcutt says back when Seattle Mayor Ed Murray was in the legislature, he included language in the project, promising that Seattle property owners would pay for any overruns, either through a property or sales tax.

KING 5's Liza Javier, Allison Sundell and the Associated Press contributed to this report.</s>It's official - Bertha has broken through!

Seattle's tunnel boring machine that's been digging beneath the city for the State Route 99 tunnel reached the end of its 1.75-mile journey Tuesday, nearly four years after it embarked on the job.

Just before 10 a.m., water, dirt and a plume of dust or smoke came from the wall inside the State Route 99 tunnel pit, indicating Bertha was a foot within the wall. About an hour and a half later, Bertha emerged from the earth.

Bertha, the machine digging the State Route 99 tunnel, completed the 9,270 foot journey that she began July 2013.

The machine’s cutter head stopped just short of the disassembly pit Monday, drilling the final 30 feet Tuesday morning.

The tunnel still has awhile to go before it will open to the public. Crews need to finish the double-decker lanes and other infrastructure.

The tunnel project was not always a smooth journey. From a sinkhole that shut down operations for months to cost overruns that climbed to nearly $500 million, the project caused some headaches.

Related: Bertha: How we got here and beyond

However, Bertha finished the journey without any major hiccups since digging resumed in December 2015.</s>Water, dirt, and a plume of smoke can be seen coming from the exit point for Bertha, the Seattle tunnel boring machine that has been digging beneath the city for nearly four years.

It's not clear how long we'll have to wait before the cutter head emerges.

Just before 10 a.m., the water and smoke could be seen from the State Route 99 tunnel pit.

Bertha, the machine digging the State Route 99 tunnel, completed the 9,270 foot journey that she began July 2013.

The machine’s cutter head stopped just short of the disassembly pit Monday, drilling the final 30 feet Tuesday morning.

The tunnel still has awhile to go before it will open to the public. Crews need to finish the double-decker lanes and other infrastructure.

The tunnel project was not always a smooth journey. From a sinkhole that shut down operations for months to cost overruns that climbed to nearly $500 million, the project caused some headaches.

Related: Bertha: How we got here and beyond

However, Bertha finished the journey without any major hiccups since digging resumed in December 2015.</s>SEATTLE -- With a cloud of dust, Bertha -- Seattle's tunnel boring machine -- reached the end of her journey Tuesday morning.

Bertha, the machine digging a 1.75 mile tunnel under Seattle to replace a waterfront bridge with an underground roadway, had just 30 feet of mining left at the beginning of the day Tuesday.

Mining started around 8 a.m. Three hours later, Seattle Tunnel Partners said there was less than a foot of mining left. At that point, Bertha was moving at a rate of 5 mm per minute.

Dust obscured the view of Bertha's final stretch, but you could hear pieces of concrete falling as the machine broke through a five-foot concrete wall.

At 11:30 a.m., Bertha tweeted that the cutterhead had broken through and was visible.

Crews will break down the boring machine as others prepare the inside of the tunnel to handle double-decker lanes of highway that will replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was damaged in a 2001 earthquake.

The $3.1 billion tunnel project is scheduled to open in 2019, four years behind schedule. The original completion date was the fall of 2015.

Opponents of the project continue to be skeptics about whether it will serve its purpose.</s>It was Seattle in 2010 — when first-term President Barack Obama was still glowing from the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Edward Snowden was an unknown contractor for the National Security Agency and Russell Wilson was still playing in college at North Carolina State — and three contractors were competing to build the largest tunnel in the world.

A tunnel six stories in diameter, stretching more than 9,000 feet from SoDo to South Lake Union. The tunnel would pass through sand, gravel, silt and clay and not a small amount of trash buried underneath Seattle. It would travel beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct, one of the world’s most precarious highways.

Construction of the tunnel would leave a trail of dirt that would measure roughly the height of the Columbia tower, dirt to be carried across Puget Sound and dumped at Port Ludlow’s Mats Mats quarry.

The price tag for all of this: more than $3 billion.

One of the finalists to do this mammoth construction project was Seattle Tunnel Partners, an umbrella company made up of two larger construction firms. STP was the Spirit Airlines of tunneling, known internationally for bidding low and then making up the lost profits elsewhere, frequently in court. This was no secret.

“One of the questions that came up was they had a reputation of suing people frequently,” says former-Seattle City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen, a key proponent of the tunnel. “When we asked them, ‘What about this?’ the response that I recall was that this was a whole different leadership.”

Not to take them at face value, but Rasmussen says he felt reassured by city and state attorneys that the contract would place the burden of risk on the companies, not the taxpayers — called a design-build contract.

Seattle Tunnel Partners won the job. The tunnel was expected to be completed in December 2015 if not sooner, officials announced at the time.

But when the tunnel boring machine Bertha, named for Seattle’s respectfully remembered and only female mayor, Bertha Knight Landes, busts through a 5-foot thick wall on Tuesday as it’s expected to do, it will set off a party to which Bertha is more than three years late. And the tunnel project’s final cost will run, at the very least, $200 million more than expected.

At times, the tunneling left legitimate fear in its wake that it could cause the viaduct to crumble or Pioneer Square to sink. That “whole different leadership” of the Seattle Tunnel Partners has filed nearly half a billion dollars in claims and will put to test the design-build contract. The legal fight will unfold over many years: More than 350 subcontractors have touched Seattle’s Big Dig, providing anything from photography to transportation to geotechnical engineering. That’s a lot of potential liability, claims and counter-claims to work through.

Nevertheless, with the crash of concrete Tuesday, the Washington Department of Transportation and STP — client and contractor — will share a moment of good feeling and accomplishment.

“Today we’re here to celebrate the success of the tunnel,” WSDOT’s tunnel project manager Joe Hedges said Monday. “The litigation’s going to be ongoing. We’ve both got great teams of lawyers who will get us through this process.”

Although Christine Gregoire was no longer Washington’s governor when Bertha began digging, she was there for its christening, helping to smash a bottle of champagne on its hulking ribs. She’d fought for the tunnel, and her successor, Gov. Jay Inslee, invited her to come.

Most everyone today agrees with Gregoire’s decision that the viaduct is an earth-shudder away from collapsing and cannot continue to exist indefinitely. The options to replace it were either to build a new viaduct, create some combination of surface streets and transit to make up for its loss, or build the tunnel.

The fight over the best way to move forward was brutal, defining in some ways political parties in non-partisan Seattle. In 2009, when Gregoire announced her support for a tunnel to be bored underneath downtown, the plan was one of two things, depending on where you stand: The best possible option to save the waterfront, even despite it troubles; or a risky investment into the wrong priorities. The Seattle Times was in favor; The Stranger, staunchly opposed. Mike McGinn, on his way to election as mayor later that year, was opposed; his 2013 opponent for mayor, then state Sen. Ed Murray, for.

In 2011, Seattle voted in favor of the tunnel, although there was no shortage of controversy and confusion surrounding that vote.

Still, to this day, some of the wounds are raw. “When you look at the options, the one that was most sound environmentally is the one we chose,” says Gregoire forcefully, looking back. “You don’t just take down the viaduct and do nothing.”

At the same time, though, those who warned of inevitable hiccups in the tunnel’s construction, often dismissed at the time, came to look like soothsayers.

Built in Japan by Hitachi Zosen, the machine was designed to maintain constant pressure at its face. With these types of machines, digging in consistent soil is a cinch. But as it descended below Seattle’s notoriously varying and difficult layers of fill, the muck seeped into places it should not have been, grinding down seals and causing the machine to overheat.

A rogue pipe was involved, but whether that was the cause and whether its placement was the state’s fault will be a question for the courts.

As Bertha was being fixed (through a 120-foot deep pit and a specially built crane), the viaduct began to sink and tensions in City Hall continued to rise. City council members felt they were not getting the information they needed; trust that the project was being operated well continued to erode at the local and state level . “I don’t know how worried I should be,” said Councilmember Mike O’Brien at the time. “But do I know that someone’s looking out for this? My confidence has been shaken.”

And when Bertha did begin to move again, a sinkhole opened up and speculation about the project’s future continued in earnest.

But a year after the sinkhole debacle, Bertha will finally emerge from the northern portal of what will be Highway 99 in the future.

Gregoire stands by her convictions that the tunnel was the right choice. While she admits she didn’t expect such “big hurdles as we went through,” she spoke in amazement about visiting the tunnel, marveling at its size and engineering accomplishment. And she spoke of the need for government to take risks. “I think we’re going to look back, as I’ve seen the people of Boston look back … and we’re not going to remember the hurdles or the downtime,” she says, referring to a Boston tunnel project that ran eight years behind schedule. “We’re going to ask ourselves, ‘Why didn’t we do this a long time ago?’

“When that [waterfront under today’s viaduct] is opened up, I have every expectation that people will love it.”

McGinn, who warned early and often that building the largest tunnel in the world could come with significant risks and delay, also stands by his convictions. “What a missed opportunity to invest in something that really would have helped us with traffic,” he said, referring to adding light rail earlier, coupled with surface streets. “Even if it had worked out perfectly, it’s not really the priority. Building a tunnel with no downtown exits is not going to help our traffic problems.”

“In five-10 years, people are still going to be stuck in traffic while we wait for Sound Transit. They may forget the woes of the tunnel, but they won’t forget waiting in traffic,” he says.

As the machine crawls from its hole in South Lake Union, the contractors will begin to cut it into sections weighing less than 20 tons a piece. Cranes will then carry sections of Bertha to trucks headed to ships that are then headed to Japan.

Because the most precarious piece of construction, the tunneling, is finished, it feels like the project is also finished. In reality, the tunnel won’t open until 2019. As Hedges said, “This is not the fourth quarter. This is halftime.”

A new highway must now be built inside the tube. The viaduct still needs to be torn down. Building surface streets along Seattle’s waterfront will be a massive undertaking in their own right.

And then there will be the lawsuits, determining in the end how much the entire tunnel project will actually cost.

How much it will cost motorists to drive through the tunnel will depend in part on the outcome of the legal fights over the costs of the construction. Rasmussen believes the contract is well-written and should protect taxpayers. “We asked our attorneys that and they assured that this is strong enough,” he says.

McGinn’s not so sure. “I know that Tom Rasmussen and others think we have a good contract,” he says. “But they also said there wouldn’t be any cost overruns.”</s>The world's largest tunnel-boring machine which is building a multi-billion dollar underground highway beneath Seattle has finally completed its missions - three years later than planned.

Pictures show the machine, known as Bertha, breaking through a concrete wall as it reached the end of its troubled journey - a milestone in the project to replace an aging road hugging the city's waterfront.

Critics of the effort to build the underground roadway called it an overpriced endeavor that would collapse under the weight of its ambition and mounting costs.

For a while, they looked to be right as the machine, known as Bertha, broke down soon after it started drilling in 2013 and didn't crank up again until last year.

But the boring device has finally capped its 1.75-mile journey, which the state Transportation Department and some media live-streamed online.

Social media users posted memes about the time it took to reach this moment, when the giant machine cut through the final pieces of concrete in a 5ft wall, filling the air with dust.

'Today is a major construction milestone in our plan to reclaim Seattle's waterfront,' Mayor Ed Murray said. 'We will build a waterfront for pedestrians, transit and sensible car trips without a freeway wall casting a shadow over our vision of a well-connected 21st century city.'

Crews will break down Bertha as others prepare the inside of the tunnel to handle double-decker lanes of a $3.1 billion underground highway project that will replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was damaged in a 2001 earthquake. The tunnel is set to open in 2019, three years behind schedule.

Proponents say the viaduct will no longer wall off Puget Sound. Some conservative lawmakers slammed the project as an expensive vanity project, and environmentalists objected to building another highway in Seattle.

'This is a historic moment in our state's transportation history,' said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, adding that it was a time 'to reflect on the incredible level of innovation and skill needed to get to this point.'

Republican state Sen. Michael Baumgartner of Spokane, a member of the Transportation Committee, called the project 'a tragedy of errors.'

'Only in bonkers, leftist Seattle would an absurdly stupid project that's massively behind schedule and over cost, would finishing be considered a success,' he told The Associated Press.

Bertha had only drilled about 1,000 ft of its 9,270 ft trek when it hit a steel pipe and ground to halt in December 2013.

Crews dug a pit to reach the machine so it could be pulled out and repaired. Exactly what caused Bertha to stop drilling will be the subject of litigation between the state and the contractor.

The removal of water near the pit sparked concerns about the ground in the area settling and posing a danger to pipes, buildings and roadways. Some businesses reported cracked walls, and monitors detected ground movement near the pit.

Officials ultimately decided the movement stemmed from activity in the pit and natural causes. After being shut down for more than two years for repairs, Bertha began digging again in 2015.

Officials also expressed concern when a barge carrying excavated soil began to tip and dropped material into the water. The spill posed a hazard to tunnel workers and the public.

The courts will decide who will pay for the hundreds of millions of dollars of cost overruns and delays.

Seattle Tunnel Partners and its insurance companies sued in 2015, claiming the state was at fault for Bertha's breakdown.

The Department of Transportation responded with its own lawsuit, seeking unspecified damages because of the delays caused by the breakdown.</s>SEATTLE (AP) — The world’s largest tunnel-boring machine broke through a concrete wall beneath Seattle on Tuesday to reach the end of its long, troubled journey, a milestone in a multibillion-dollar project to replace an aging highway hugging the city’s waterfront.

Critics of the effort to build an underground roadway called it an overpriced endeavor that would collapse under the weight of its ambition and mounting costs. For a while, they looked to be right as the machine, known as Bertha, broke down soon after it started drilling in 2013 and didn’t crank up again until last year.

Bertha has finally capped its 1.75-mile (3-kilometer) journey, which the state Transportation Department and some media live-streamed online. Social media users posted memes about the time it took to reach this moment, when the giant machine cut through the final pieces of concrete in a 5-foot wall, filling the air with dust.

Crews will break down Bertha as others prepare the inside of the tunnel to handle double-decker lanes of an underground highway that will replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was damaged in a 2001 earthquake. The $3.1 billion tunnel is set to open in 2019, four years behind schedule. The original completion date was fall 2015.

Proponents say the tunnel will allow Seattle to open up its waterfront along Puget Sound, which they say has been artificially walled off by the viaduct since it was built in the 1950s. Some conservative lawmakers slammed it as an expensive vanity project, and environmentalists objected to building another highway in Seattle.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement that he was proud of the work and that this was “a moment to reflect on the incredible level of innovation and skill needed to get to this point.”

Republican state Sen. Michael Baumgartner of Spokane, a member of the Transportation Committee, called the project “a tragedy of errors.”

“Only in bonkers, leftist Seattle would an absurdly stupid project that’s massively behind schedule and over cost, would finishing be considered a success,” he told The Associated Press.

Bertha had only drilled about 1,000 feet (305 meters) of its 9,270-foot (2,826-meter) trek when it hit a steel pipe and ground to halt in December 2013. Crews spent much of 2014 digging a pit to reach the machine so it could be pulled out and repaired.

The removal of water near the pit sparked concerns about the ground in the area settling and posing a danger to pipes, buildings and roadways. Some businesses reported cracked walls, and monitors detected ground movement near the pit.

Officials ultimately decided the movement stemmed from activity in the pit and natural causes. After being shut down for more than two years for repairs, Bertha began digging again in 2016.

Officials also expressed concerns when a barge carrying excavated soil began to tip and dropped material into the water. The spill posed a hazard to the tunnel workers and the public.

The courts will decide who will pay for the hundreds of millions of dollars of cost overruns and delays.

Seattle Tunnel Partners and its insurance companies sued in 2015, claiming the state was at fault for Bertha’s breakdown. The Department of Transportation responded with its own lawsuit, seeking unspecified damages because of the delays caused by the breakdown.</s>After four years of moving — and sitting broken for a while — underneath downtown Seattle, the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine on Tuesday reached the end with much fanfare.

Q13 News streamed it live online and on Facebook and 2 million people watched the cutterhead break the final wall into the disassembly pit near Seattle Center.

It’s all for a double-decker highway that will go in the tunnel. Southbound lanes will be on top and northbound lanes on the bottom. Both will carry hundreds of thousands of drivers every day when the tunnel opens in early 2019.

Crews will have a lot of plumbing, electrical and mechanical features to work out, not to mention more than 8,000 tests to make sure the tunnel is safe for drivers. As crews get ready for that endeavor, hundreds on Tuesday paused for the historic moment and watched Bertha break through to its final destination.

During the process Bertha sounded like a whale at times, then a raging river.

The gushing water was the first sign of Bertha’s birth into daylight. Chunks of concrete started to rain down, and the people who worked for years for the monumental moment tried not to blink.

“It’s a unique experience,” the Washington State Department of Transportation's Roger Millar said.

The haze of concrete dust made it hard to see. The anticipation, nevertheless, built up, then finally a tunnel the size of 6 stories opened up.

“Machine was right on alignment, broke through at the exact spot it was supposed to,” said Chris Dixon, with the contractor Seattle Tunnel Partners.

The delayed journey and cost overruns took a backseat during the celebration.

“The only stronger is King Kong; now we got ourselves a tunnel,” Gov. Jay Inslee said.

“Thank you Bertha, it’s time for the next stage,” Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said.

The next phase entails months of taking apart the largest tunnel-boring machine in the world. Some parts will be recycled and others shipped back to the machine’s creator in Japan.

“We have to clean all the debris that you see,” Dixon said.

Then the work begins on finalizing the tunnel that will replace the elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct for good.</s>SEATTLE — A tunnel-boring machine has broken through a concrete wall beneath Seattle in a troubled multibillion-dollar project to replace a waterfront highway with an underground roadway.

The machine, known as Bertha, reached the end of a 1.75-mile journey Tuesday, years behind schedule. The machine broke down soon after it started drilling in 2013 and didn't crank up again until last year.

Crews will prepare the inside of the tunnel to handle double-decker lanes of highway that will replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was damaged in a 2001 earthquake.

The $3.1 billion tunnel is scheduled to open in 2019. It was supposed to be done in 2015.

Tunnel proponents say it will allow Seattle to open up its waterfront along Puget Sound, which they say has been artificially walled off by the viaduct. Critics slammed it as an expensive vanity project.
Bertha, once the world's largest tunnel boring machine, completes its 9,270-foot-long (2,830 m) tunnel under Seattle, Washington, after four years of digging and a lengthy delay near the beginning of the project.