Dive summary:

• As a touring reporter learned, it's impressive from the outside and from the inside, too – "it" being the 7,000-ton, 57.5-foot-diameter, 326-foot-long tunnel-boring machine called Bertha that will feed on dirt and rocks as it bores below the center of Seattle for a roadway to replace the earthquake-weakened Alaskan Way Viaduct.
• Shipped in parts (how else?) from its manufacturer job in Japan, the boring machine was finally assembled last weekend to cap a job begun in April.
• The machine, which is named for the woman elected mayor of Seattle in 1926, Bertha Knight Landes, will chew ahead at a pace of 35 feet per day, leaving a walled, 1.7-mile tunnel in its wake.

From the article:

A glance at the brownish water trickling between the seams of the temporary steel and concrete retaining walls of the enormous trench showed that we were well below the local water table. ...