Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. On a Sunday in September 2019, NSW Transport chief Rodd Staples was sitting at a dining table in his Sutherland home when he got a phone call that instantly caused him alarm. “It was very stark, and I remember being really concerned about it because we obviously thought about all the possible things that could go wrong,” he recalls.
Sydney Metro executive Tim Parker was on the other end of the phone. “He said, ‘Rodd, I just want to let you know we’ve got a problem. It’s not really a problem, but we’ve got these bubbles in the harbour above where the tunnelling is going on’,” Staples explains.
“I said to him, ‘wow Tim, that really sounds like a problem’.” Giant bubbles rise to the water’s surface directly above a giant machine tunnelling under Sydney Harbour in September 2019. The bubbles were rising to the water’s surface directly above a giant tunnelling machine which was carving through rock and sediment beneath Sydney Harbour in an around-the-clock operation.
With a small crew on board, the 170-metre-long machine was in the midst of one of the riskiest parts of the $21 billion Metro City and Southwest project, digging twin 800-metre-long rail tunnels under the harbour between Blues Point and Barangaroo. The bubbles immediately raised fears that one of the tunnels had been damaged, and possibly breached. “The first reaction in my mind when I heard that there are bubbles was, ‘w.