The Big Dig

3 Pages 736 Words

The Central Artery/Tunnel Project also known as “The Big Dig” is the largest, most complex, and technologically challenging highway project ever undertaken in the U.S. It represents a unique challenge in that it is being built in the heart of Boston, almost completely underground. The Big Dig includes examples of project planning, creative problem solving and innovative use of technology. This highway system is no doubt one of the greatest of its kind and will soon be the standard of highway design for other states and countries.

The Central Artery/Tunnel project utilized project planning to make the final product, the highway and tunnel system, the safest and most efficient highway possible. The West Virginia fire tests helped scientists and engineers create a procedure in case fire broke out in one of the tunnels. Because of this project planning, if a fire in a tunnel occurs, air flow, among other things will change thus dowsing the fire as quickly as possible.

Many examples of creative problem solving can be seen in the construction of the central Artery/Tunnel. When engineers had to dig a tunnel underneath train tracks with running trains, they came up with a solution witch involved a construction method called tunnel jacking. The fist step was to freeze the soil underneath the train and above the excavation site. This would harden the loose soil making cave-ins less likely to happen. Secondly, instead of digging caverns and placing supporting beans like tunneling into caves, a hydraulic pushing device would slowly push already assembled sections of tunnel into the unexcavated soil underneath the train. Thus, moving at a rate of 1 meter a day, the tunnel will slowly enter deeper and deeper into the soil.

Innovative use of technology could be seen in the control and regulation of the highways. An example of this technology is the traffic detection system. Its purpose is to detect traffic problems and dispatch the a...