Light of Acclaim Shines on Tunnelers

In a damp subterranean passage momentarily illuminated by high-intensity television lights, the final few feet of earth yielded Wednesday to the steel teeth of a massive boring machine, and suddenly Los Angeles had a continuous subway tunnel joining downtown and the San Fernando Valley.

As their rugged year-and-a-half journey through the 2.4 miles of hard rock and soft shale beneath the Santa Monica Mountains ended, construction workers, their contractor bosses and Metropolitan Transportation Authority staff members burst into cheers, shouts and applause.

To the city known for its freeways and suburban sprawl, the opening of one of the deepest and longest transit tunnels in the United States was a cause for celebration. And nowhere was the pride more evident than on the faces of the miners and crew of the 350-ton boring machine that battled its way through rock hundreds of feet below the Hollywood Hills.

“They had to fight for every foot of tunnel,” said Cal Negley, construction supervisor for the tunnel contractor, Traylor Bros., as the last barrier was breached.

Negley described the dark, damp, hot, humid world inside the tunnel as the boring machine took aim at the folded and faulted geology of the Santa Monicas. “This mountain has been twisted and shook,” he said. “It didn’t give up easy.”

As they worked their way foot-by-foot as deep as 900 feet below ground, the miners bored through rock so hard that it regularly destroyed the $3,000 steel cutters on the front of the drilling machine.

But such difficulties were a fading memory as the boring machine reached its goal, opening a 17.4-mile subway tunnel from Union Station to North Hollywood.

MTA project manager John Adams hailed completion of the tunneling as a promise kept to the people of Los Angeles.

On the surface, before the machine made its final push through the last eight feet of earth, James Cragin, an MTA board member who once worked for the Pacific Electric Railway, recalled that its old Red Car streetcars used to run along Hollywood Boulevard.

“We’re working on rebuilding the system that was thrown away,” Cragin said. “Common sense tells you this is a breakthrough for the future.”

If it was, it went unwitnessed by both the chairman of the MTA’s board, Mayor Richard Riordan, and the agency’s new CEO, Julian Burke--neither of whom attended the ceremony.

Their absence and Cragin’s sentiments foreshadowed a coming political battle on the MTA board over increasingly problematic plans to extend the subway system to the Eastside and Mid-City areas.

“People are saying this is going to be the last tunnel,” Cragin said. But he vowed that “there will be more subways and more tunnels.”

While joining in the day’s celebration, MTA board member and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky added his voice to those insisting that the $4.5-billion subway may have reached the end of the line at North Hollywood. “I’m sorry to say for a while it may be the last connection because of our financial constraints,” he said. “Let’s finish what we’ve started, then let’s stop and rethink where we’re going with our transit system.”

Yaroslavsky also took the occasion to remember three construction workers who were killed this year while working on the subway project.

Both Yaroslavsky and Los Angeles Councilman Hal Bernson saw the subway link between Hollywood and the Valley as a historic achievement at a time when some Valley activists are pushing for secession from the city.

But one of the most ardent subway critics, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), offered a sharp counterpoint to the celebratory mood.

“This triumph must be put in context,” Hayden said in a statement. “The price tag has been enormous. Lives have been lost, the environment of the Santa Monica Mountains is at great risk and the MTA is on the tracks to fiscal insolvency. And for what? A subway system that will carry a statistically insignificant amount of riders compared to the total number of commuter trips in the MTA service region.”

After congratulatory speeches Wednesday, an entourage of reporters, camera crews, MTA officials and others descended into the tunnel and began walking toward a point 250 feet beneath the Hollywood Hills where the tunnel from Union Station would meet the tunnel being dug from North Hollywood.

On the other side of a huge rock wall, the massive tunnel boring machine launched its final assault. Its approach was signaled by a low whirring sound that grew ever louder as the huge steel blades on the face of the machine tore at the earth.

But its progress was temporarily interrupted when a conveyor belt carrying the rock debris from the blades filled the last of a five-car train of huge “muck boxes” used to haul mined material out of the tunnel. A new train was brought in.

Then there were delays caused by the standard procedure of installing steel ribbing to shore up the last 4 feet of the tunnel. And a new hurdle: technical difficulties with MTA’s closed-circuit feed to television crews on the surface.

Once the picture was restored, work resumed. As sound emanating from behind the wall intensified, cracks began to appear, and a small hole opened.

The machine was stopped to allow crew superintendent Tony Traylor to peer through.

More than an hour later, after the polished face of the boring machine had sliced a passageway through half the tunnel diameter, Traylor and his crew walked across to shake hands with their colleagues.

“I’m glad we’re done. It’s been a long year and a half,” said Heath Mortensen, the operator on the tunnel boring machine. “We’ve worked our guts out.”

“It’s an awesome feeling. One of the biggest rushes I’ve felt,” said tunnel miner Ted Serna of Maywood. “It’s been well worth it.”