Dank and Dangerous: ‘Tunnel Hands’ Dig It

They call themselves “tunnel hands.” They admit, with pride, that they’re a totally different breed.

They work underground--in the case of Los Angeles’ new Metro Rail subway system, about 60 to 80 feet below the surface--down where the only light is a harsh, artificial glare filtered though a gritty fog of misting water, leaking hydraulic fluid and rock dust.

These are the workers who actually dig the tunnels. It’s noisy, smelly, punishing work--the kind that involves lifting, pulling, prying and levering hour upon hour, day upon day in spaces often so confined that only one man can change positions at a time.

Despite a safety record on this job that is enviable, there is danger everywhere--from falling rock, from flammable gasses and from shoulder-to-shoulder proximity to the immense and powerful machinery being used to gouge out the twin tunnels that will form the initial, 4.4-mile segment of the subway system between Union Station and MacArthur Park.

Last week, in fact, two tunnel hands were hurt when a cable snapped between a construction locomotive and a heavy piece of equipment being dragged down one of the tunnels.

Almost all of these men admit that they hated the work at first--vowing that they would make their money, then get out. But somehow, while watching “the ones who aren’t crazy” slip away after a few weeks, they stayed on through the years, going wherever the jobs happened to take them.

“It’s the money that draws us,” said Mel Rose, the 45-year-old tunnel superintendent on the half-mile stretch of subway that will run beneath Hill Street from the Civic Center to Pershing Square. “Then there’s the challenge. And the danger. I like the danger too.”

Rose was just 19 years old--his major league dreams shattered after his pitching arm went dead during a stint with a Triple-A baseball team in the Detroit Tigers organization--when some mining jobs opened up on the Oroville Dam project in Northern California.

“They offered $3.27 an hour,” he recalled a few days ago. “That was big money back then. So I got in the tunnel business.”

Marion Eastern, a miner in his 50s, said the pay--now $20 an hour or more--can look awfully good when, as he was, you’re fresh out of the service, short on training, short on education and short on cash.

“I went underground because that’s the job that somebody offered,” Eastern said, pausing briefly between a variety of tasks that included shoveling up muck, laying rails, loading train cars and heaving massive tunnel-shoring timbers into place.

“I started in ‘61,” he said. “I’m still at it.”

The challenge facing Rose, Eastern and the other members of the tunneling crew is to get the job done on time and to get it done right.

Dozens of things can go wrong, and over the months many of them have. But unlike some teams on some other segments of the subway, Rose’s men were virtually on schedule last week. One of their twin tunnels was done, with less than six feet to go on the other.

That means--with the exception of one of the two tunnels between the Civic Center and the subway’s eastern terminus at the railroad station--all the major digging on the initial phase of the system is done or largely completed.

Rose had chosen Tony Anderson, a lean, 30-year-old miner from Utah, to run the excavating machine that would tunnel the last five feet or so, right up to the steel and wood shoring for the Metro Rail station under construction beside the underground parking garage at Pershing Square.

A cylindrical cutting tube, slightly larger than the 22-foot diameter of the completed tunnel, had been shoved forward on its hydraulic jacks for the last time, slicing like a giant cookie cutter about four feet through the earth. The tube, in addition to cutting the tunnel, serves as a protective shield in which the miners can work.

The cutting work completed, Anderson climbed into a tiny seat alongside a hydraulically powered backhoe mounted inside the tube. Using the backhoe, which is fitted with a large, flat spade, Anderson scraped up the dirt that had been sliced free by the forward edge of the tube.

Anderson shoveled the loosened soil onto a conveyor belt on the tunnel’s floor. The belt carried the dirt back though the tunnel to a string of waiting train cars.

It was slow, painstaking work that required a deft touch to avoid the station’s shoring. Under Rose’s watchful eye, Anderson gave a perfect performance.

“He’s worked out pretty well,” Rose said with a smug grin. “You know, I gave him a break, hired him off another job and put him here. He’s a good hand.”

The crew clambered down to the tunnel face to pose for a couple of photographs. A few large clumps of dirt tumbled down, reminders of the danger that is always lurking.

Nobody seemed very worried then, and they weren’t deterred by the accident a few days later that promised to lay up two crew members for a week or more.

In fact, as Rose had suggested earlier, the element of danger seems to attract people like him. He reminisced fondly about several of his closer calls.

“I was in Colorado once, in a molybdenum mine,” he said. “The (tunnel) caved in right behind us, and we were trapped. We had water and air, but no food or light. We had to just sit there and wait for them to come and get us. . . .

“We could hear them coming, so I wasn’t scared. But it took them two days to get us out.”

There was another time, though, when he was working near the top of a vertical shaft that he was plenty scared.

“This door caught me and almost knocked me off,” he said. “I almost fell 3,700 feet, all the way to the bottom, but I caught this strap and hung on. . . .

“I was making $580 a day on that job, but that did it. I quit.”

Nonetheless, Rose admitted that it wasn’t long before he was back on the job again, drawn by the money and another kind of excitement.

“This is damned hard work and it breaks a lot of people,” he said. “But I’ve kept at it, working my way slowly up, and now I’m the tunnel superintendent with about 80 people working for me. . . .

“I’m in a position these days where I can help the young ones . . . people like Anderson . . . get a start. If a man’s willing to work, I can teach him the business. . . . I guess that’s what I really like the best.”