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Tunnel
Vision:
Blasting
through Rock, Burrowing under the Bay
There’s
a reason John Henry became a legend. When the
steel-driving man engaged in his famous contest with
a steam-powered drill, he was working on a tunnel.
Specifically, the Big Bend Tunnel in Talcott, W.Va.
The project was part of a 19th-century effort to
expand the railroad west across Virginia from the
Atlantic. In one tall tale, the six-foot former
slave (who may never have existed), won the contest
against the drill, but keeled over dead from
exhaustion.
In
the mid-19th-century, before the steam shovel, jack
hammers and other modern construction machines, it
took hundreds of men with picks, shovels, mules and
wagons to dig a railroad tunnel. Tunnels were
necessary in the mountains of western Virginia
because of physics. The steeper an incline, the
harder it was for an engine to pull a load of cars.
It had to overcome more friction. Without tunnels,
railroads had to buy more powerful engines, use
shorter trains or put extra engines on through
mountainous terrain. It wasn’t cost efficient in
the long run.
Before
the Civil War, the Virginia Central Railroad was the
first to use railroad tunnels, built at state
expense, to cross the Blue Ridge at Rockfish Gap.
The company later became part of the more well-known
Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.
The
most infamous railroad tunnel in Virginia was the
Church Hill Tunnel in Richmond, built in the 1870s
when coal trains needed access to the James River. A
viaduct replaced the tunnel in 1901, but it was
reopened in 1925. In October of the same year, the
tunnel collapsed on a work train, killing an
engineer and at least two additional employees.
According to a Richmond Times-Dispatch news
story at the time, during the attempted rescue
“more than 75,000 persons visited the scene during
the day, many of them remaining from early morning
until late last night.” The tunnel was sealed in
1926 and never used again. (See Richmond
Then and Now.)
While
railroad tunnels were the Old Dominion’s first
civil engineering feats, it is their vehicular
cousins that now bring accolades to the
Commonwealth. When the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
opened in 1964, it was declared “one of the seven
man-made wonders of the world” in a global
competition. The combination bridge-tunnel project
connects the Norfolk and Virginia Beach area with
Virginia’s Eastern Shore. It has since been bumped
off the list by the Channel Tunnel, nicknamed the
Chunnel, which is the 31-mile tunnel between Great
Britain and France. (See Chesapeake
Bay Bridge-Tunnel History.)
But
of the 50 longest road tunnels in the U.S., Virginia
has eight, topped only by Pennsylvania. The longest
Virginia tunnel is the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel
at 7,479 feet, followed by the Thimble Shoal Tunnel,
a part of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel project.
(One mile = 5,280 feet.) It measures 5,734 feet. The
next longest is the Chesapeake Channel Tunnel at
5,423 feet, also a part of the tunnel-bridge
project, but completed in 1999. (Road
Tunnels in the U.S.)
Perhaps
the most unusual tunnel project was the East River
Mountain Tunnel, completed in 1973. It straddles the
Virginia-West Virginia state lines, with the
boundary actually within the tunnel. The tunnel
carries I-77 between Rocky Gap, Va., and Bluefield,
W.Va., through East River Mountain. Prior to its
construction, the trip over the mountain was arduous
and sometimes dangerous on a twisting highway with
no guardrails. At 5,412 feet, it is the third
longest tunnel in the state and the seventh longest
twin highway tunnel in the U.S.
Groundbreaking
took place on August 12, 1969. At the ceremony, the
governors of both states pushed a plunger that
created an explosion with red, white and blue smoke.
For the next five years, crews from each state bored
four tunnels from opposite sides of the mountain,
finally meeting each other in the middle. As with
many such projects, there were unforeseen obstacles.
Sinkholes appeared because of caves under the
mountain, and once the tunnel dropped two feet. Deer
continued to disturb stakes on the top of the
mountain that marked where digging was taking place.
Finally, the workers imported lion manure to stop
the foraging creatures from interrupting
construction. The tunnel finally opened in 1974.
Forty-nine percent of it sits in the Commonwealth
and the other 51 percent belongs to West Virginia.
(See Bland
County History Archives.)
Virginia’s
other tunnels have idiosyncrasies as well. According
to a trucking journal, "Land Line Magazine,"
when the westbound tunnel facility of the Hampton
Roads Bridge-Tunnel was built in 1957, it
accommodated the height of trucks of that era. It is
just not tall enough for some modern truck designs.
The eastbound tunnel was built 15 years later and
has no such problem. Thus, taller trucks can travel
eastbound to Virginia Beach, but have to return by
an alternate route. Some trucks try to sneak through
by lowering their suspension (called air dumps) and
cause traffic jams when sensors detect them. They
have to be turned around before entering the tunnel.
The General Assembly, in an effort to stop the
practice, just raised the fine from $85 to $500 and
adds three points to a truck driver’s record if
they try to sneak through.
Most
of the Commonwealth’s other major tunnels are
located in the Newport News-Norfolk-Portsmouth area
because the U.S. Navy, which has a large presence
there, prefers tunnels to bridges over the wide
waterways. They are considered less vulnerable to
enemy or terrorist attacks. These include the
Monitor Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel, which
connects Newport News with Suffolk, opened in 1992,
and the Downtown Tunnel and the Midtown Tunnel that
connect Norfolk and Portsmouth under the Elizabeth
River. The Downtown Tunnel opened in 1952 and the
Midtown Tunnel 10 years later.
The
final major Virginia tunnel is the exception. It is
the 4,229-foot Big Walker Mountain Tunnel, located
20 miles south of its larger East Mountain Tunnel
cousin near Bland, Va. John Henry may have lost his
life hammering out a tunnel, but that didn’t deter
those who followed. Virginia stretched much farther
west in Henry’s day.
As
the lyrics to the famous folk song go, “Some say
he's from Georgia/Some say he’s from Alabam/ But
it’s wrote on the rock at the Big Ben Tunnel/ That
he’s an East Virginia Man/ That he’s an East
Virginia Man.”
Next:
Down the Drain or Waste Not, Want Not: Wastewater
Treatment in Virginia
--
August 23, 2005
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