WAIT! Before you enter the cage to descend, put your hard hat on and stay clear of the bottom of the shaft when you arrive. Sandhogging is highly skilled and extremely dangerous work. "A man a mile" is the daunting formula that the sandhogs have accepted and that hstory has proven to be true. Twenty-four men have died on the Water tunnel #3 job since its conception in 1969--roughly a man for each mile of tunnel constructed.
Sandhogs still use conventional way of mining--drill and blast with dynomite--to create the shaft and a starter tunnel, but the majority of mining today is done with a massive tunnel boring machine (TBM). It's essentially a big drill, 13 feet in diameter and 100 feet in length, which pushes out 1.5 million pounds of thrust on the face of the rock.
Ready to explore? Visit the mine below...