The Metropolitan District celebrated a milestone in the construction of the Clean Water Project: it has recently begun lowering a tunnel boring machine (TBM) into a special starter tunnel, where the machine will be assembled before beginning its mission of chewing through rock. The assembly is expected to take a month.
The massive TBM will be lowered in sections, and assembled 200 feet underground in a 460-foot-long tunnel built for the purpose. The machine itself is 400 feet in length. Once it's put together, the TBM will dig a tunnel four miles long between Brainard Road, which is in Hartford, to West Hartford's Talcott Road. The excavation is expected to take about eighteen months.
The TBM will be boring out a tunnel eighteen feet in diameter, known as the South Hartford Conveyance and Storage Tunnel. The conduit will be used to store sewer overflow before it's pumped to the Hartford Water Pollution Control Facility for treatment. According to Susan Negrelli, the director of engineering for the Metropolitan District, the tunnel has a capacity of approximately 42 million gallons of water.
The target date for switching on the TBM, which was manufactured in Germany, is late September. The work is so deep underground experts believe no one on the surface will hear or feel it.
Managers of projects like this can use brochure printing to provide information to interested parties.
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