It appears that more dump trucks have been called into service earlier this week to speed up the digging process or to catch up from three lost days last week. On Tuesday morning at about 7:30, there were 31 dump trucks queued up to haul dirt from the bus box. I could not get the line of trucks in one photo so here is a 28 second video from my friend Carol of the parade of trucks.
It doesn’t take long to fill those trucks and send them on their way. To do the job, Kiewit uses a John Deere 450C LC excavator (if you are into specs, check this out). Three scoops from its giant bucket and a truck is full.
The excavator gets help from a Caterpillar D8T bulldozer (50 second video here demonstrates its size). It pushes dirt from the floor of the bus box to within reach of the excavator. In the photo below, notice the slit of yellow above the blue pipes and below the excavator. That’s the roof of the dozer working in the bus box hole. I took the photo from the light rail platform while standing on bench across Wewatta Street.
By the way, on Monday the dozer got stuck in the bottom of the hole. Another excavator came to the rescue and dug it out. The wet ground from last week’s snow storm probably contributed to the problem.
Since some components of the dewatering system are still being installed, I believe (unconfirmed) that Kiewit is not yet digging the bus box hole to its eventual depth of 28 feet. I’d say they are currently digging to a depth of about 15 feet. The top layer of dirt is contaminated (not toxic) so they are disposing of it off site. The deeper, cleaner dirt will be recycled on site and used for backfill around the completed bus box. In the meantime, the top layer of dirt is being hauled away at an incredible pace. You can see the progress in this photo.
Great photos and information, can’t wait to watch the progress of this project.
So where does all the “bad” dirt go? Since landfills are just dug holes in the ground it’s hard to imagine that they’d just fill them back up with new dirt from somewhere else, but there’s gotta be some big pile somewhere.
Awesome photos!
So curios, what exactly is that dirt contaminated with that they can’t just back fill with it?
While I am very interested in Union Station progress and I greatly appreciate the effort, I think daily updates are a bit excessive. A weekly summary would be more than sufficient. Daily updates are going to overwhelm all the other news on here.
Just my $0.02.
Thanks for your comment Ken J. We don’t have a set schedule for updates… just as the progress seems to warrant. I’m sure over the course of the four year project there will be periods of time when the updates are less frequent.
I had a feeling my opinion on this would be in the minority here. 🙂 I’d certainly rather have too much information than too little. Keep up the great work Ken and Rick!
I say keep the updates coming. I can’t get enough of them! My 2 cents.
Agreed. I have been waiting for this project to start for a long time. I enjoy seeing the progress and reading the updates.
Ditto!!!!! I love seeing these updates. Keep ’em coming!
One of my motivations in writing this blog is to provide you with you-saw-it-here-first information so I tend to write an update while something new is happening. And it doesn’t take much for me to classify an activity as “new.”
At a meeting on Monday morning, I expect to get some additional information, including answers to questions about bad dirt. You should see another update midday Monday.
Rick: Feel free to write as much as you can. I check into this site everyday and each new piece of news is like a litle surprise. In fact; you could make a post that the dirt still looks brown and I’d probably read through it. Great job on the updates, btw..
Yes, Rick, your work is much appreciated.