Boring Progress

The tunnel boring machines each had cute names like Mary, Chris, and Yardbird with social media handles meant to connect the public to their unseen mission under Washington D.C. The contracts for the tunnels were awarded as part of an overdue environmental debt that the swampy city incurred by having a combined storm and sewage water system. The system was never designed for the amount of water the now mostly-paved watershed threw at it after even modest rains and so these events sent untreated sewage into the rivers.

At 18 feet wide, the significantly oversized tunnels that would cross the city were meant to serve as both conduit and storage for water on the way to the treatment plant at Blue Plains on the southern part of the city. These large primary tunnels followed the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers while secondary bores would follow the city’s old creeks and canals that had long been covered. It was inevitable that the paths of these tunnels would go under many government campus and buildings that were concentrated in downtown core of the city.

The work began in 2013. Attentive commuters would have seen the boring machines being assembled and staged near the various vertical shafts that would transport them down. Working through mostly clay and other soft soils, the machines would often go faster than the concrete culvert crews that followed behind them. By 2019 the primary storage-sized tunnels were complete. The remaining work using the smaller diameter boring machines would take five more years as they interconnected with and navigated through a maze of utilities

Larger boring machines are often diverted off to one side after finishing a tunnel. They dig their own tomb because it is cheaper to abandon them than recover them. This fact was met with modest social media grief as each machine’s end of life was announced but the collective consciousness moved on quickly as it always does. As it happened, the machines also moved on. Never intended for their tombs, each continued digging for years.

Mary, which completed the Anacostia River tunnel, diverted east at the confluence and eventually connected with the deep network of facilities under Joint Base Andrews, home of Air Force One. The Yardbird which started at the Navy Yard and moved south to Blue Plains circled back north to build tunnels connecting the Naval Research Lab, Defense Intelligence Agency, Homeland Security Headquarters, the Navy Yard and the Capitol Complex before circling back west to the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon.

Chris, the third machine which started with the shortest actual water tunnel from Georgetown to the confluence, tackled the longest secret one afterwards. After cutting under the Potomac River, Chris went north roughly along the C&O Canal. The progress must have been slow given the rocky soil, but conspiracy theorist and amateur seismographers piecing the information together track the trail all the way to Point of Rocks. There Chris either turned north to Camp David and Blue Ridge Summit or south to Raven Rock and Mount Weather.

This is how federal spending in the name of the environment was taken advantage of and how national security spending was obfuscated resulting in network of secret tunnels under the capitol city. Or rather, it was how Joe’s imagination would do it. ~