Alice, the Waterview Connection's tunnel boring machine, is lined up at the mouth of her first Mt Roskill wall, ready to dig the country's biggest roading job.
John Burden, project manager for the Well-Connected Alliance, showed how the shield or cutting face of the world's 10th-largest tunnel boring machine would soon start eating into the ground to create the first 2.4km southbound tunnel.
Alice, which can create a 14.4m diameter tunnel up to 17m long a day, not only digs the tunnel with her circular cutter head full of blades and discs but also lines the hole she has dug with concrete segments, completing the process all in one go.
"The tunnel has to be that big to get three lanes of traffic in," said Burden, aged 51, a civil engineering Auckland University graduate, who heads the project. He has worked for Fletcher Construction, one of the alliance partners, for 18 years, including on the Victoria Park tunnel.
Burden was in the successful tendering team, so has been working on the $1.4 billion Waterview job since January 2011 "and we have another 3 years to go".
