Word: tunnelled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Chicago's sanitation engineers have dug themselves into a hole so deep that they are having trouble getting out. In 1976 giant mechanical moles began work on the largest public works project in the nation: 131 miles of tunnel shafts, reservoirs and pumping stations. The network was designed to drain off rainwater and thus combat sewer backup and subsequent flooding of basements and overflow into the area's reservoirs...
...Deep Tunnel, as it is known, has turned into a bottomless pit. The deeper it goes, the more money it costs, and the sharper the questions about the wisdom of the venture. The excavation, which is about 10% dug, is useless unless it is finished. But it will take the next 20 years to complete and cost $11 billion. What's more, it cannot operate without an additional $1.6 billion in hook-up costs for the 150 communities involved, and they do not have the money...
...studies pile up (154 to date), and federal money pours in, Deep Tunnel just keeps tunneling deeper. Meanwhile, housewives in one Chicago suburb resorted to their own program to keep the sewers from flooding: they covered the inlets with worn-out throw rugs during a downpour. Worked fine...
...burlesqued the experience in a column: "Just one more script and that island in the Aegean would be mine. I wrote another script... No longer were we doing a musical about a paraplegic cabdriver who falls in love with a tollbooth collector at the Lincoln Tunnel. Somehow, inexorably, because there's no business like show business, the musical had turned into the story of a fast-food-chain heiress who falls in love with a Marine corporal during the Boxer Rebellion...
...delay. The frustrating case, Yale Professor Robert Bork told TIME'S conference, is the antitrust division's "Viet Nam." Thomas Barr, the Cravath, Swaine & Moore attorney who is leading the IBM defense, explained at the meeting why he sees no light at the end of the tunnel...