The Sewer District’s tunnel boring machine, Mackenzie, is working her way through the tunnel and is currently beneath Lake Erie. If you were to visualize the Euclid Creek Tunnel as a really long cylinder – which it essentially is – that cylinder’s volume is more than 375,000 cubic yards
(13.5’ radius squared * pi * 17,750’ long / 27).
What happens to all of the bedrock, or “spoils,” that is being excavated from the tunnel?
This rock travels via conveyor belt through the entire distance of the tunnel and is brought up to the surface at our Nine Mile Construction Site (Shaft #1).
Don’t worry… the Sewer District isn’t permanently creating a mountain next to I-90. The spoils are hauled away by one of McNally/Kiewit’s subcontractors to another community in Northeast Ohio that was in need of “fill.”
For years, the City of Garfield Heights has wanted to extend Transportation Boulevard farther south, connecting it to Rockside Road. To turn these plans into reality, Garfield Heights needed rock. And lots of it. The spoils from the Euclid Creek Tunnel comprise part of what will be needed to establish the Transportation Boulevard Extension.
There is another great photo taken by Lynn Ischay, one of The Plain Dealer’s photographers, last September.
A prior blog post incorrectly calculated the cubic yards of spoils as more than one million.
