The city is quite busy these days digging giant holes on Kalakaua Avenue. near the Waikiki Aquarium and casting enormous concrete and steel rings inside the pits. OK, we caught them. The city is building ICBM missile silos to provide mutually assured defense against Ewa Village's intercontinental ballistic missile capability. You really think all that missing redevelopment money went for pretending to move businesses around? They were stockpiling warheads, baby. Giant holes is the question;
microtunneling is the answerActually, the city is putting in new sewer lines, primarily to service the Kapiolani park public bathrooms. Instead of digging big troughs and plunking the pipes down, though, they're trying a new system called "microtunneling."
"It's a new technology that won't disrupt the environment so much," said wastewater spokesman Doug Woo. "Because that area is special and a park and so heavily used, microtunneling is the answer."
The equipment is imported by Delta Construction, said Woo, perhaps from Japan. "It's very precise, and it's guided by a laser. It's never off by more than an inch or so."
The big silos are sort of base sites. They're so big because the boring equipment has to be brought below ground level, and the segments of sewer pipe angled into place properly.
And when we say boring equipment, we mean don't mean dull. We mean, like, digging holes. It's not like it's the Bored of Education, or something.
