Mayor Shirley Franklin will join members of the City’s German community, Department of Watershed Management officials and representatives of the business community and neighborhood organizations to welcome the City’s newest tunnel boring machines (TBMs) today from 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the West Area CSO Tunnel construction site, 1270 West Marietta Street. Leopold Moritz Haenel, Germany’s Deputy Consul General in Atlanta; Kristian Wolf, President and CEO of the German-American Chamber of Commerce; and representatives of Herrenknecht AG, the German company that manufactured the TBMs, will be present at the ceremony.
The TBMs, named Rocky and Rocksanne by the Department, will be excavating an 8.5-mile-long tunnel that will store Combined Sewer Overflows until they can be treated at the R.M. Clayton Water Reclamation Center and released into the Chattahoochee River. The tunnels will be about 300 feet belowground.
More
Rocky will be boring a 4-mile-long tunnel from the Marietta Boulevard location to the Clear Creek CSO facility on Monroe Drive near Piedmont Park. The work will take it beneath the Downtown Connector and Peachtree Street.
Rocksanne will begin boring from R.M. Clayton to the North Avenue CSO, a distance of 4.5 miles. The tunnel will be complete in December 2007.
The West Area Tunnel project is the second major tunnel project undertaken by the City in the last five years. The Nancy Creek Tunnel, an 8.2-mile-long tunnel from R.M. Clayton to Johnson Ferry Road in Dunwoody, will store sanitary sewer overflows, increasing capacity and eliminating sewer backups in North Atlanta and Buckhead. The Nancy Creek Tunnel is currently being lined and is expected to come online in January 2006.