Tunneling Beneath Sydney - Mega Metro - S01 EP1 - Engineering Documentary
foreign has ever embarked on the scale of what we're doing here in Australia Engineers are taking on an extreme Challenge there's constant problem solving every day there's new problems there's new issues trying to clear suffocating traffic congestion by building an immense state-of-the-art Metro through the heart of Sydney we have to get there there's no other way stinks hi they're going to take every bit of luck you can get don't you this is not Far and Away the biggest public transport project in Australia's history if I'm honest I probably didn't quite know what I was getting myself into that problem Sydney one of the most recognizable cities in the world it's got the Opera House the Harbor Bridge Bondi Beach and traffic endless traffic but that's about to change now a crack team from around the world is tackling the problem head on battling to build a world-class Metro without bringing the city to a standstill they've come from the UK Mega projects gets thrown around like confetti what makes us different is just layers and layers and layers of Mega fit together like a really nice McConnor project from the US I'm here to dig tunnels I'm here to do stations excavations you name it I love it France it's a design for Sydney Metro is unique it's a very Creative Design only for Sydney Germany when we are tunneling under Sydney Harbor there are no Second Chances and from Italy is the future is the future of Mobility for this city 40 000 people will build this Metro most of them Australian it's definitely the biggest role and responsibility I've had I'm loving it I've personally developed and grown working on this project and I think the whole team has it is interesting not very often you get to dig a big hole right in the middle of Sydney the whole James Pierce needs to dig is in the toughest location imaginable right in the middle of Central Station the busiest rail Hub in the entire country 99.5 of Sydney trains travel through this station every single day so it's a huge undertaking we've got four pedestrian tunnels through the middle of the station box and three of them we need to keep open at all times 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year station doesn't shut down at all James has to remove more than half a million tons of Earth 6 000 tons a week without disturbing Central's almost 2 million weekly passengers it's a highly complex task but James is up for the challenge so here we are right in the middle these platforms all need to go to let us dig 30 meters down into the ground and Connect into the new tunnels which will be the Metro trackway so all these platforms time to go pigeons out we're coming in Lucian is simple Bridge there's no access the whole way around Central Station 230 000 cubic meters of material to come out every single truck movement for the project will be in and out over that bridge one way in one way out the largest beam is 55 meters long James is only allowed to disrupt train services for 12 hours so they're bringing in a pre-fabricated bridge 400 tons of it and that's fully sealed so then you can drop the concrete in it will be a Race Against Time to Crane in the gigantic steel spans right next door lines will remain active with 1500 deadly vaults that must be avoided abutment B is extremely close to the live rail James backs himself and his team to get the job done before the Monday Peak arrives it's going to be a totally different scene on Monday morning there's going to be a whole heap of Steel across here and the trains will travel under the bridge for the first time digging up the middle of Central Station is just one of the many enormous challenges that confronts the team from here one line needs to run North through a Minefield of subterranean obstacles deep under the city under the harbor and 50 kilometers out to the northwest running south from Central Station another line will swing 20 kilometers out to the Southwest next another line will leave the city and travel 25 kilometers Due West to Parramatta yet another metro line will then connect a new international airport with the rest of the city and further still more lines will create a virtual Metro loop around Sydney more than 50 new or renovated stations need to be built linked by the longest railway tunnels ever dug in Australia this project is exceptionally ambitious and it all needs to be constructed in just a few short years at every turn new complex dilemmas await [Music] such dilemma Looms looms at a new station site right in the city called Pitt Street Bobby saying is in charge of Excavating this station he has to carve out two giant holes between the skyscrapers no easy feat considering the cramped in a city location Bobby's mission is to demolish then dig there's a total of 12 buildings we're demolishing there's a 14-story building here there's a pub in the corner a number of one to three story buildings around the rest of the site there's also another four buildings of Pitt Street South the access on the street surrounding site are very limited the Harper is actually getting that first bit of access so you can drive trucks in load them and then they go out that's correct yeah 12 buildings bite the dust but one must stay it's 41 stories high and Towers over one of the massive holes Bobby needs to dig 76 000 tons of Earth must be extracted right next to the building's foundations if anything goes wrong it could be a disaster we're about to dig down a really big hole right next to a 41-story building there's a risk that because that building relies on this ground for support as we excavate it will cause movement it's no ordinary dig as Bobby's team descends in the skyscraper's shadow they must Shore It Up From Below with reinforced concrete walls up to half a meter thick they'll work slowly but surely inch by inch to build a concrete Rampart we can't take away the entire shaft material and then install the wall we have to progressively do it as we come down otherwise there is a risk of movement of the 41 story building to make matters worse Bobby's work sites are surrounded by bustling things and businesses they all need to keep functioning while he demolishes other buildings and then digs his super-sized holes right next door this is fire station number one in Sydney CBD our site is located on the back face of this building the busiest fire brigade in the southern hemisphere we need to ensure that we don't block their driveways that we're clean and clear around their site they operate 24 hours a day and therefore they have sleeping quarters there as well so we need to make sure that during the sleeping times we're not creating a lot of noise on the other side there's a pub it's also Heritage listed so a good reason not to demolish it but it is a beautiful building and I'm told it has a great beard there are places people want to enjoy a quiet drink and places where people need to sleep this is a hotel and so you have guests and you need to keep them happy and also so in our interests to keep our neighbors happy because we have to work with them for years on end Gloria Fernandez shares responsibility with Bobby for trying to get this station done keeping the neighbors happy is one of their top priorities noise has been one of the bigger complaints as well as dust and so really when we put this acoustic shed up that actually had decreased the amount of complaints in that space you know it's not we're just doing the work and carrying on it's about working with the community and our surrounding Neighbors up here this job is hard but Gloria has the right Spirit to overcome all setbacks as a project engineer you look after everything and that's what I love about you know being in construction I love project management being across safety engineering design quality delivery what have you and that's that's why I'm here and this in this amazing project and in this amazing industry with a sight feared it's time to start digging it's been going great we're about um four four meters deep at the moment and it's a total of 20 meters deep once we're done his main concern Remains the 41-story building towering right over the hole as we excavate the Sharks and we expose what is left there adjacent to the building it's something that we have to look assess get a designers involved to ensure that what is there it matches what their assumptions were and so far so good so can Bobby be sure the skyscraper next door won't begin to lean in over his hole I'm very confident and I'm very hopeful but I'm very confident that everything will be under control and we won't end up with a tower of Pisa the vision for Sydney's new Metro is breathtakingly bold and far-reaching this is the man responsible for it engineer and transport Chief Ron Staples he is both proud and often over awed by what he has set in motion no one has ever embarked on the scale of what we're doing here this is by far Far and Away the biggest public transport project in Australia's history if a monaster probably didn't quite know what I was getting myself into at the start when it goes wrong where do I go to blame someone I can unlock myself in a room and have a good hard chat to myself Rod is actually not the first person to have championed a Sydney Metro remarkably the idea was originally suggested more than a hundred years ago the brainchild of this man engineer John Bradfield in 1915 Bradfield submitted a grand plan to government to revolutionize Sydney's transport infrastructure Bradfield wanted to build a bridge across the harbor Electrify the trains and create an integrated efficient Railway system much of it underground Justice was being done in London New York and Paris the first World War intervened and bradfield's plan was shelved after the war Parliament approved the plans for the Sydney Harbor Bridge and the building of that John Bradfield icon began by 1926 work had started on bradfield's other vision for a Sydney Metro some new underground city stations were built but then work stalled beneath Sydney are almost one and a half kilometers of Unfinished platforms and train tunnels remnants of bradfields Metro during the second world war the tunnels did prove useful as bomb shelters because these walls weren't here originally they were put in for the air ride shoulder not for the railway the original vision for these tunnels however almost did become a reality so this platform depleted nearly a hundred years ago even to the point where the tilings in and some of the signage is up but never ever seen a train run through [Music] if you took yourself back to the 1920s in Sydney it was an unprecedented amount of construction going on people believed in bradfield's vision and they were getting on with it we get to the end of that decade the bridge is finished a bit of the plan for the railways finished and then the depression hits the money's not there and then before we know it World War II and that's it game over the focus really turned to other things fast forward to the 1950s car becomes a thing that everyone wants and so the desire the appetite to finish that plan disappeared I just think to myself wow what a lost opportunity for Sydney that really just drives me to say well let's go back and finish the job that he started Rod is on a mission he is determined to realize what Bradfield could not Ron's biggest problem was convincing his boss that a driverless Metro was the best way forward for Sydney's future after she had promised the community a more traditional Railway that kind of shook me little and some bits of it were confronting like driverless trains was this the right way to go is it the way of the future Rod was convinced Metro was the way of the future convincing others was harder transport officials including Rod said to me we don't think it's sensible building the same old kind of rail line you've got to go for a metro the challenge for Rod and the team was set but what confronts them is a city that has changed radically in the last 100 years in bradfield's time the population was eight hundred thousand it's now more than 5 million the digging of Sydney's first train tunnels was a painstakingly slow and laborious task some were dug in the more traditional way using drills Dynamite picks and shovels polls were done walls built and the whole thing covered over today train tunneling is a very different Affair meet an extraordinary invention the tunnel Boring Machine a TBM Sydney has ordered nine of these [Music] a factory in Guangzhou has just about completed the first ones for Central Sydney these mechanical beasts were designed in France and Germany tvms are gargantuan intricate machines each one will take six weeks to build when assembled they weigh more than 900 tons a single TBM can cost more than 15 million dollars and can cost a million dollars a day to run one stretches more than 150 meters end to end this is the very front of it the cutter head this wheel of Steel more than three stories hides slowly rotating pushed by powerful Hydraulics will crush and grind The Rock ahead of it openings in the cut ahead led the crushed rock enter the machine conveyor belts then transport the spoil back all along the machine out through the tunnel coming up the tunnel concrete segments a robotic arm Picks Them Up and places them against The Rock Wall six at a time it creates a ring of concrete then does it all again and again as it inches forward like a giant mechanical worm it leaves behind it a fully formed completed tunnel it's time to test that this one works the machine is fired up and turned up to high overseeing four weeks of tests is Martin Bell this is just really proving that the machine's finished the machine will do what we've asked that's really designed to simulate Excavating the machine without actually Excavating if you like so we're doing a trial run of all the functionality it's basically a mobile Factory at the end of the day once the machine is built and running then it everything's like the Sausage Factory is the way to describe like a performance car this TBM has been modified to help it go faster we've introduced TCI Cutters to The Cutting head so they're a button cutter those Cutters allow us to cut a lot further they're better suited to the Sandstone conditions and minimize the amount of color changes we need to do high quality piece of equipment I'm excited I can't wait to put it together and put it in the ground that's that's really what it's all about and now it's the nervousness of putting it on the water and hoping that it gets off the water and gets to site but yeah it's a pretty proud moment it's like being a father I suppose that's one down and on its way foreign the clock is ticking James Pierce and his team are in a Race Against Time to Crane in the giant steel girders of the truck Bridge he needs to get them in and balanced above the tracks before train Services resume beneath all around him other trains keep running so the Suburban lines are continuing to operate this weekend the Intercity lines are shut down for The Possession to lift in the major steel trusses over the live rail that has been shut we've got 48 hours between Saturday morning and late Sunday night to do all of our work and hand back the rail for Monday morning to open for the customers there are eight human ists of Steel that need to be craned into place and maneuvering them is very dangerous 1500 deadly vaults of electricity is running through the nearby wires this steel girder weighs 55 tons we're very limited to what we can do we've had to install the biggest tower crane in the world to come in and lift over live rail so we can lift them in in the modules there are massive pieces of Steel this girder is more than 50 meters long but needs to be placed with millimeter accuracy they're landed on all of the works which have been constructed previously so the bridge piers and footings we drop the steel girders on and bolted immediately one by one and carefully the giant crane lifts the giant girders into position there's no room for error the space is as tight as it's been on any job slowly the truck Bridge begins to take shape they're doing a great job here there's one already in another one to go so pretty good night shift at this point and then we come back later and do the decks on top trucks are the backbone of any major excavation deep station boxes are being dug all around Sydney so an extra thousand trucks a day have joined the city's traffic snarl a thousand trucks in and out of the city normally with trailers causing congestion blocking intersections to traffic lights it's just not a fun city to drive around anymore like it used to be making sure traffic doesn't grind to a standstill rests on the shoulders of this man Steve Jones even for this ex-british Commando it's a daunting task it's going to be really really hard this is going to be a massive challenge this is going to be collaboration on a mega scale so whether it's the transport Management Center that you see behind me whether it's Sydney trains whether it's the ferries everyone is actually going to have to come together make sure there's minimum disruption across Sydney while we do it Steve is fighting a constant battle to keep to keep traffic moving in this room our 18 Specialists monitoring roads traffic lights buses trains and ferries each scrutinizes their piece of the transport maze they try to unravel problems that pop up minute by minute with military precision in their Arsenal they have access to more than 10 000 CCTV cameras this state-of-the-art nerve center is the largest in the southern hemisphere this is our Apollo 11 Mission Control Center this is where everything occurs this is the integration and I I say to everyone for me it's like the swan so it looks elegant and everything looks calm around us but you know underneath there's lots of people working really really hard to make sure everyone gets to their destination as smoothly as possible so can you tell us literally what's happening now today so we just have to peek this morning on Thursday morning which is one of the busier mornings somewhere else from this Command Center Steve can track the movements of hundreds of trucks every minute of the day Trucking and the logistics is absolutely massive we're looking at around 1 000 trucks a day in that CBD we do all of the planning upfront to make sure that disruption is kept to a minimum so whether you're delivering infrastructure on the battlefield you know it's about continuously improving continuously testing yourself there's a new challenge every day and it's testimony every day Steve has to be very careful of the powder keg of frustration already out there there's trucks both side of the road you know they close the roads for some time so it caused a lot of problems I understand they've got a job to do and they have to do it for the Metro which will make things so much better for people in the long run we hope it seems everyone agrees the Metro could be a game changer I think it's the only solution we don't have the space anymore to build roads I'm hoping in the long run the short-term Agni will be well worth it in the long run [Music] back at Central Station James Pierce is in a battle of his own again racing the clock until his truck bridge is up and running he can't Bridges finished it'll be full steam ahead fully laden trucks passing right over the heads of train passengers passing through Australia's busiest station so the guys have done a great effort getting the steel in next step concrete so there's a thick deck to go in here which will enable the truck bridge to carry fully loaded trucks both in with materials and out with spoil for the main Central Station works for James there's one Ultimate Nightmare scenario a truck crashing over the bridge and ending up on the live rail probably not what we want for this job in the middle of Central Station a truck plummeting over the side would Spell catastrophe so the bridge has to be reinforced to withstand immense impacts big thick concrete barriers up the side providing protection for all vehicles both in and out with the barriers completed James's battle with the truck Bridge has nearly been won around 35 kilometers from the city of Sydney is an area known as The Hills district to build the Metro out here Engineers face an entirely different set of challenges than in the city center here the issue isn't how to connect into an existing station but where to put the new Metro stations beneath these Hills Rod's team will dig the two longest rail tunnels ever dug in Australia the length isn't the problem the hills of the problem clawing up and then being able to stay far enough more to get to Castle Hill was you know a big key part of the alignment planning whenever you're locating a station it's a real sort of fine Balancing Act between the absolute best customer outcome and then what the engineers feel that they can deliver in terms of the depth of the station the terrain and also the sort of ground conditions and geology that's underneath the steepest gradient these trains can climb is about a 4.5 percent incline up or down so the problem is in hilly country a station cannot just be positioned anywhere if a station was to be placed near the top of a hill for the train to get there the platforms would need to be very deep underground that's not a good result for customers you just want to be on the train you don't want to be spending five minutes getting from the surface down to the train so the shallower we can make the stations the more attractive it would be deepest station in Sydney is about 35 meters and customers find it frustrating so for Rod and his designers finding the right route and placement of stations is a careful Balancing Act they have to ensure the depth of each station and the maximum incline trains will travel to reach them is achievable where to put the route and where to put the stations was a massive challenge not just from an engineering point of view but from a whole Community point of view as well in this area Rod has had to carefully manage Community expectations rail has long been promised here but never delivered people were crying out for it they've been Decades of debate and argument about building this Railway and when I first stepped out there I think a lot of people intuitively believe that yes this would help but no one actually believes that it would happen Rod is making it happen for him there's no other option this area of Sydney has the highest level of car ownership in all of Australia here triple car garages are the norm a Metro here should eliminate 14 million car trips every year people just need to leave their cars in the garage and instead travel beneath the hills and far away [Music] back at Central Station at last the truck bridge is up and running but James's real work is only just beginning it's demolition time now three railway lines have to be dug up and again they've only got 48 hours to get the job done from 2 A.M Saturday to 2 A.M Monday to allow us to build the Metro box we need to remove three tracks 13 14 and 15. again James is racing the clock it's a critical point with limited time we get a 48-hour window we'll turn off the power relocate all the wires and then we put it back in turn the power on for commuters on Monday morning as Darkness descends the rail gang gets into Top Gear James first needs to remove the old tracks and then lay new ones and new overhead power lines that will divert trains away from the platforms to be demolished 48 hours that's it we don't have any more time and we need to get the tracks open for the customers on Monday morning the clock is ticking and the team are pressed for time but they can't jeopardize safety there are 200 people working here surrounded by moving double decker trains and live power lines some are just four meters away we're dealing with live rail we're dealing with buried services and Signal cables we're dealing with turning the overhead wire back on and the reinstatement of it it's a huge piece of work compressed into 48 hours as Saturday ticks over into Sunday there's still an enormous amount of work to do soon there's only 22 hours to go time is rushing by moving the overhead lines is one thing that can't be rushed all the surrounding lines are still active 1500 volts courses through each of them we actually need to relocate the track and the overhead wiring so all of the guys here are working together to do it safely but we do need to recognize live power on both sides very specific controls on both the cranes excavators and with all the people doing the work finally the old track is gone and as night descends again time is running out the pressure is building if they don't finish in time there will be nowhere for trains relying on these three lines to go Monday peak hour will be chaos then a strange looking machine is brought in to speed things up it's called The Crab Walker and it's obvious why to save time the new track is prefabricated off-site and the crab Walker lifts it carefully into place in large pieces the crab machine or the pen Lem comes in and speeds it up rather than laying every sleeper bar sleeper the new sectional track gets picked up outside the alignment the crab walk across drop it into place and then we tie it in and reinstate the ballast and tie the track in open it up and away we go we've got about two hours to go everything's on track no pun intended should be right and the trains will be in a few hours back for Monday morning peak hour they make it with two hours to spend about 160 kilometers from Sydney is the Port City of Newcastle it receives thousands of trade shipments from around the world every year and now the gigantic TBM components is starting to arrive some of the modules of these Monster Machines are extremely large the cut ahead alone weighs over 100 tons this Shield weighs over 200 tons after the eight separate Hard Rock tbms are offloaded in Newcastle these huge pieces of Machinery will be transported by road to four different launching sites around Sydney this part of the delivery has been months in the planning but will need to be executed precisely to succeed the first two tbms traveled to a site in Bella Vista the next two will be launched at Cherry Brook two more will travel to Chatswood and the other two to the inner city suburb of marrickville the best way to achieve this is with a convoy of trucks like a military operation conducted under the cover of Darkness the Convoy sets off one TBM equals 900 tons of gear which equals 23 trucks along the Route police and emergency vehicles clear the roads ahead the route has been carefully mapped out to avoid weaker bridges that could be severely damaged by such heavy machinery and those that are too low for the trucks to fit under some are cleared with little to spare the further into the Sydney suburbs they get the harder it gets again time is running out with rush hour just a few hours away the Convoy is under increasing pressure as the streets narrow every meter is hard one there's danger on all sides but safety is Paramount power lines have to be lifted by workers parked cars Dodge it's an obstacle course one wrong move and the whole Convoy could come to a grinding halt luckily these are no ordinary trucks this rig has 132 tires to navigate some of the tighter turns another prime mover needs to steer the trailer from behind the drivers behind the wheel highly skilled Specialists with nerves of Steel the convoys reach their destination just before peak hour all the components are offloaded now they work around the clock to get the machines up and running so the all-important tunneling can get underway [Applause] back at Central Station all train services are back to normal Australia's busiest station is again running at Full Steam in the middle of it all James faces his next challenge removing three train platforms they're in the way of the cavernous station box he needs to dig the problem is parts of the platforms have Heritage elements he can't just bulldoze it all so the first thing to go is going to be these Timber canopies beautiful Old Timber individually bolted and fully truss frame not very often you get Timber like this anymore all of the signs all of the clocks and everything in here is Heritage and well worth preserving we'll do our best to look after it platforms 13 14 and 15 disappear platforms 13 and 14 will later be rebuilt when the new Metro has been completed below but one platform is doomed and will never be seen again platform 15 is gone it'll go 12 13 14 and over to 16 on the Suburban line with all train services at Central Station now back up to speed James and his team are again surrounded by live railway lines from here on nothing will be switched off to a system we've got the intercities live and we've got the Suburbans live so we're working with cranes excavators and pulling down pretty big buildings as well as demolishing in the middle of the live rail the railway isn't Switched Off for what we're doing and we're doing this all in a very constrained space as the Heritage structures are pulled apart problem after problem needs to be addressed there's existing lead dust train breaks over in years idea where they're running in addition to that it's a fully bolted truss frame so we're really undoing 60 to 100 Years of history in the turn of a bolt soon this part of Central Station is consigned to history currently there are ways to cross the harbor the bridge including rail a road tunnel and the Ferries the new Metro will revolutionize this situation for the first time in nearly 100 years Sydney will have another rail crossing of the harbor two new rail tunnels will be excavated deep under the harbor and join with a brand new station called barangaroo this Underground Station needs to sit on the very edge of one of the largest and deepest Harbors in the world and all of it will be below sea level one of those responsible for making this station happen and safe is engineer and design manager Ali Shard so this is our station that we're designing here it's about 240 meters long and 25 meters below ground and it's about 20 meters wide so it's a really big station it's basically an iceberg station so it's a lot bigger below ground than it is above all of this is below the water level so the harbor is just there and all this is below that being below water level right next to the harbor is a major challenge in designing this station Ali is well aware of the risks see this wall here it kind of just juts out it Kinks out there and then it kicks out again again we have some unique challenges in regards to the location that we're in but also some brilliant benefits I mean we're the only Metro station that's gonna take passengers right to the harbor front that's just incredible to his credit Ali is determined to see the positives but this station's proximity to a huge amount of water is a construction risk not just in terms of the water in the harbor but the water in the ground the water seeping in through the rock the water level is basically above whether the station's going to be the station is going to be in a big hole in the ground at the end of the day and so we've got to design for the groundwater which is trying to push to ineffect the station out of the ground not to be too dramatic it's not going to float away down the harbor but the buoyancy effect would would cause the station to rise out of the ground one solution to this buoyancy problem would be to have a sump a low point from which all the groundwater seeping in could be pumped out but Ali and his team have decided they cannot rely on this solution the problem with training the station is of course the hardware just going to be pumping and pumping and pumping for for the next hundred years and also if there's any nasties in the soil then you're gonna have to deal with them as well to make his station completely watertight Ali plans to wrap the entire immense station box in plastic without a single Gap through which the water will be able to get in it's known as tanking but it is rarely attempted this way and it will magnify another problem with nowhere else to go the pressure of the groundwater will build and build it will eventually begin to push the entire station box out of the ground tanking has its benefits but what it means is we have to lock the stitching into the ground so to do that we've got all these what you can see on the screen here all these permanent anchors these are really big anchors they're up to 20 meters long they contain 49 strands and each strand is about the size of a double A battery so in effect that each anchor is about 30 centimeters in diameter 20 meters deep and that's what helps lock the station into the ground Ali is placing his face in the power of Steel to hold back the power of water to make things even harder he's not just battling a water problem his station is very much caught between a rock and a hard place on the one side is the iconic Harbor and on the other side is a considerable wall and a Heritage one at that this formidable rock face is part of the so-called hungry mile a name bestowed by Harborside workers during the Great Depression last century this place was crowded daily with hundreds of men walking from Wharf to wharf seeking work if they found it they put food on the table if they didn't they went hungry so this area's got heaps of cultural and historical significance for it and we've got to be really careful that we don't impact that negatively in any way so we really want to make sure this hungry male War doesn't fall in when we're doing our work the highest part of the hungry mile wall is about 10 meters the station box needs to be dug right at the foot of this wall 25 meters straight down the end result will be a sheer drop of 35 meters needless to say the team want to be sure the top of the wall is Rock Solid before they turn this into a high cliff we want to make sure that the Wall's stable and it's already about a 10 meter high wall and we're going to be Excavating another 25 meters down so it's going to be 35 meters in total we want to make sure there's a good solid sturdy wall the Geo technicians get to work drilling cores d into the rock face they discover it is definitely not as stable as it should be they insert Rock anchors which should stabilize and add strength to the wall it also needs to be covered in mesh so rocks don't fall on cars passing below we've done the analysis and we know exactly what we need to do so we're going to print some anchors some some mesh so we protect the wall and make sure that the Cliff face is nice and sturdy digging down can now begin except for one small impediment we're planning to build a station directly underneath the operational Hicks and rope we want to keep traffic running so what we decided to do was build a temporary bridge deck to move the traffic over onto a bridge and that allows us to then dig up the road and build the station excavate completely underneath it the new road takes just seven weeks to build finally the station box excavation gets underway not long after work grinds to a halt yet another predicament emerges from the mud but we found the oldest australian-made boat it's a pretty impressive find see where that hole's been dug over there next to the hull that's where we got the keel Marine archaeologist Cosmos coronius is excited by the fine this uh Rick is the wreck of the earliest known Australian built ship that we have in Australia we think it was built around about the 1820s or 30s was probably dragged up on what was once a beach sometime in the 1840s and eventually covered over over the decades and finally covered over around about the 1890s cosmos's work proves the boat was built in Australia based on what it was built from it's made out of Sydney Blue Gum springy bark and spotted gun so local Timbers and that's what helped us conclusively say that it's an australian-built vessel the floor Timber it's one of the strongest Timbers I have on the boat and what they've done is used the natural curve of branches to make that Timber so they were very skilled in what they did with the little that they had Cosmos wants to excavate the entire boat and plans to remove every last piece so he can study this ghost from Sydney's past in detail we always knew there's a high likelihood of finding something we just didn't know what so we plan to work around it just so it doesn't hinder our progress of the station field the boat is a wonderful find for archeology but risks hindering the barangaroo team every day the archaeologists work is a day lost Excavating the barangaroo station Ali puts a brave face on what is for him an unexpected situation it's a bit of a pain but it's uh it's the right thing to do the right thing to do perhaps but the schedule has just gotten a lot tighter this historic Discovery risks delaying Ali in the team's progress work might have stalled at barangaroo but tunnel boring machines wait for No One Time for Action stations time to fire up the mechanical monsters and launch the tbns all right the high risk job of digging 61 kilometers of tunnels is underway through sandstone and shale and down to 58 meters at their deepest point hundreds of tunnelers working around the clock in giant underground mechanical factories where there is danger at every turn tbms are only ever given female names a long-standing tunneler convention working in the Underworld they're a superstitious group at every dig there's a statue of Saint Barbara the patron saint of turnovers providing protection well you've got to take every bit of luck you can get don't you in this game high-risk construction we'll take every bit we can get the eight tbms that have launched will dig almost 60 kilometers of tunnels but not those under the harbor the two tunnels beneath the harbor are the shortest any of the tvms will dig it's less than a kilometer from barangaroo to the North Shore it may not be far in distance but it will be by far the most challenging and most dangerous tunneling on the entire project the team is about to discover what really lurks beneath the surface next time the tvm's fire up on all cylinders where the guinea pigs really so skyscrapers in the middle of Sydney need to go the biggest challenges for the 28th story building and a TVM weaves its way through narrow city streets you to get the TVM across the road let's go thank you [Music]
2023-07-28 12:14
