The tunnelling crane at London Road car park

For the last year the Stroud Five Valleys have been subject to a range of large scale engineering works involving digging holes, trenches and tunnels under the ground mostly at the bottom of the valleys. One of the projects is the big main sewer replacement to overcome the threat of sewage overwhelming the old or even ancient current systems.  In recent years an increasing number of flooding problems caused by rainwater overflow has been highlighting the threat to the sewage system.

Many of the valleys roads have been subject to massive roadworks causing a lot of chaos and angst.  The sewer replacement works, which is only one of the projects, is estimated to last more then two years. 

I’ve been observing some of the work in the car park of our Waitrose store. There several massive holes were created in sectioned off areas of the car park and cranes could be seen doing ‘something’ underground. Once that area of the works had finished the ‘holes’ moved to the adjacent public car park where I stood today to take this picture.

I watched the crane operator dropping this section of tunnelling equipment onto the rest of the pieces. I worked out that these rusty tubes are sections of boring equipment creating the new tunnel into which the updated sewer sections can be inserted. there are piles of concrete tubes in another section of the car park which I assume will be going underground quite soon.

The hole is just to the left of the picture in front of the four storey brick building, although actually it is the rear of the building. The crane swings its arm around and drops the hanging chain =into the hole for its full length and then a man in the hole applies the lifting sling/cradle to the next piece of the boring tube and it is lifted out. That man then comes out of the hole and unfastens the sling/cradle once it is on the pile of other sections and the process repeats. This has to be continued westwards under the centre of town! Hmmmm. That will be interesting. I may find this provides further blips in due course.