What's Been Going On Under the San Bernardino Mountains?
August 20, 2008
According to articles in the Riverside Press Enterprise yesterday and the Los Angeles Times today, a giant rock-chewing machine is breaking through the San Bernardino mountains. It has been chewing rock creating a four mile long tunnel, 19 feet wide that is a major segment of the Inland Feeder water project. The boring machine will punch trough at Devil Canyon near Cal State San Bernardino.
Locally there was a lot of publicity about this project back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when they were tunnelling under south Redlands to Moreno Valley. That segment of the project was completed in 2003.
The entire project is designed to bring water from Northern California though an already built canal to the Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet. It is a project of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The scheduled completion date for the entire project is 2010.
As I remember, the plan was to build a reservoir to hold water that would be available to Metropolitan District communities if a rupture of the San Andreas fault caused a blockage in the flow of water. The plan to use Northern California Water to supply the lake necessitated the construction of this 44 mile long series of tunnels and pipelines that weave their way through San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
Clearly this project is a great engineering feat and officials are celebrating this emergence of the huge boring machine that occurred this week.
According to articles in the Riverside Press Enterprise yesterday and the Los Angeles Times today, a giant rock-chewing machine is breaking through the San Bernardino mountains. It has been chewing rock creating a four mile long tunnel, 19 feet wide that is a major segment of the Inland Feeder water project. The boring machine will punch trough at Devil Canyon near Cal State San Bernardino.
Locally there was a lot of publicity about this project back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when they were tunnelling under south Redlands to Moreno Valley. That segment of the project was completed in 2003.
The entire project is designed to bring water from Northern California though an already built canal to the Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet. It is a project of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The scheduled completion date for the entire project is 2010.
As I remember, the plan was to build a reservoir to hold water that would be available to Metropolitan District communities if a rupture of the San Andreas fault caused a blockage in the flow of water. The plan to use Northern California Water to supply the lake necessitated the construction of this 44 mile long series of tunnels and pipelines that weave their way through San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
Clearly this project is a great engineering feat and officials are celebrating this emergence of the huge boring machine that occurred this week.
posted by shirley harry at 8:18 AM
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