Subway
Subway
The article Environment and Mass Transit Interlink (The
Jakarta Post, June 17, 1995) prompts me to write this. Since
Jakarta will build a subway, allow me please, to share with your
readers my experience in a large city which built a subway.
In 1972 Sao Paulo started building its subway and I watched
closely. My job was to standby every night in the
telecommunications company in which I worked. In case the subway
excavators dug up a trunk cable, I had to make the necessary re-
routing connections in order to limit the damage to the telephone
traffic. Then, we had multi-pair copper cables carrying some 200
circuits. Today in Jakarta it is probably a 24-fiber optical
cable carrying 3 or 4 x 1920 trunks.
Constructing a subway is a big thing. The constructors will
start by surrounding a place in the city with plywood and closing
the neighboring streets to traffic. Huge pile drivers (the height
of a five-story building) are assembled on the site. The machine
will knock long piles deep into the ground. Since the job has to
be finished fast, they will hammer piles round the clock under
flood lights which would make a site look like a Xmas tree.
Eventually the anchoring and the foundations are complete. But
do not breathe yet. The excavation begins and tip-trucks will
drive across the city with sludge to be dumped somewhere in the
outskirts of the city. The sludge is semi-liquid and drips from
the lorries, with the rain it clogged the storm drains and Sao
Paulo streets became like Venice.
During the excavation works here, if you are in a high rise
building and it starts to shake a bit, do not worry, they are
jacking it up with hydraulic jacks to anchor the foundations. The
foundations tend to sink while the engineers lower the water
table.
The excavation ends and the tip-trucks go away. Then it is
time for convoys of concrete trucks to fill the streets. The
civil work part of the construction ends and the mechanical
engineers come; they work more quiet and the hassle diminishes.
The big day will come for you to reap the benefits of a subway
system. I rode our subway the first day it opened. Very modern,
using the same technology of the BART of San Francisco. It was a
free of charge inauguration celebration. The one thing I have to
add from my experience -- which will also surprise you -- it was
the surprise I had when I discovered the fare.
OSVALDO COELHO
Bandung, West Java