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