Hundreds of feet beneath the Santa Monica Mountains, far below a residential driveway, Los Angeles will mark a milestone today, when a massive tunneling machine punches through a wall of rock and soil and opens a path for the subway between the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood.
But unlike similar occasions--the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct or construction of the Pasadena Freeway, the city's first--it will be a celebration marked not by a sense of promise, but by a realization of limitations.
When the mechanical mole claws through the final feet of its almost 2.4-mile subterranean journey, a city famous for its love affair with the car will have a 17.4-mile subway tunnel from downtown Los Angeles to North Hollywood. That task probably was the system's greatest engineering challenge. But the achievement is overshadowed by growing apprehension that it marks not the end of the beginning for Metro Rail, but the beginning of the end.
By the time the subway line from Union Station to North Hollywood actually opens in the first spring of the next century, local, state and federal taxpayers will have spent at least $4.5 billion on the mass transit system, more than $250 million a mile. And chances are none of the planned extensions will be built in the foreseeable future.
To historian Kevin Starr, that is an anxious prospect. "Having invested in a public works of this sort, there has to be a lot of thought about walking away from the project," he said.
Something like such a retreat, however, appears increasingly likely.
With an absence of political consensus and a hard reality that the money may not be available, visions of a vast subway network--to the Eastside, Mid-City and across the Valley are fading fast.
And in a quirk of timing, this subway tunnel to the San Fernando Valley comes as the Valley talks of secession from Los Angeles.
"There is a delicious irony that just as we build transportation linkages to the Valley, the Valley wants to say goodbye to the city," observed UC San Diego political scientist Steven Erie.
Like the active earthquake fault that the tunnel crosses, the fracturing of the subway's political support will be lurking beneath the surface, as politicians and construction workers gather this morning to celebrate the completion of the first of the twin tunnels through the mountains.
"It's a triumph of man over geology," said an engineer involved in carving the tunnels between the Valley and Hollywood.
Charles Stark, construction chief for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, called the cross-mountain project "the toughest and most challenging" phase of the decade-old subway project.
The geological conditions encountered by miners working the tunnel boring machine ranged from "very hard granite-like rock to hard basalt and less hard shales and sandstones," said Harvey W. Parker, a Seattle-based geotechnical and tunnel engineering consultant. "It's a very difficult challenge in engineering terms and construction terms."
Parker, a member of the MTA's tunnel advisory panel, said a significant achievement was using mining techniques to carve out a wider tunnel through the active Hollywood Fault zone, where the rock is even more fractured than along the rest of the route. The extra width is intended to provide the ability for the tunnel to flex in an earthquake.
But for the workers involved, the tunnel breakthrough is bittersweet not only because of the recent death of a construction colleague in Universal City, but also because the injury rate on the project was significantly higher than the national average.
And the MTA's cross-mountain tunnel contract with Traylor Brothers/Frontier-Kemper is behind schedule and running $41 million over the original $124-million budget.
The digging--which began in May 1996 and involved 150 workers--was painfully slow at times and stopped altogether for six weeks last year when one of the two digging machines--nicknamed Thelma and Louise by workers--got stuck. The machines began their journey in Universal City, in a deep shaft across from Universal Studios. Hanging over the entrance to the twin tunnels is a sign reading: "Hollywood 2 1/2 miles"
Except for workers unloading the "muck boxes" filled with dirt and rock, there was little activity Tuesday around that pit, since the miners were deep in the tunnel, approaching the La Brea Avenue shaft near Hollywood Boulevard.
Inside the dimly lit tunnels, the ground is muddy from water seeping in--some of it dripping from above. An odor permeates the tunnel--from the use of 550,000 pounds of chemical and concrete grouting to reduce water intrusion, said a subway construction supervisor.
Workers must wear high boots, orange vests, goggles, hard hats and carry an emergency breathing apparatus and a flashlight.
At the tunnel face, the huge digging machine--as long as a football field--is operated by a crew of about half a dozen workers.
