Down under

MORE THAN 40M underneath Auckland, Peter Lilley is in a control cab, manning the tunnel boring machine nicknamed ‘Alice‘. He's working on New Zealand’s largest roading project, the Waterview Connection. Peter's one of four drivers of the 2400 ton and 12m machine which pushes about 5cm of dirt a minute and reports continuously on speed, earth pressure and the amount of dirt extracted. While it’s all highly automated, being in charge of a huge machine is serious work.

“I’ve been doing it for so many years it’s like second nature now, but when I first started out it was overwhelming. I was terrifi ed.”

Peter’s fi rst underground job was on the South Island’s Manapouri tunnel in 1998. He moved into operating the machines two years later and has since worked in Brisbane, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Tunnelling’s a potentially dangerous job and Peter had a close call in Brisbane.

“A ten ton concrete ring segment fell from the roof of the tunnel right next to a ring builder,” he says. “It was human error. It shut the job down for three days and the worker at fault lost his job. Out of the near misses you learn from your mistakes and you have to remind the guys that these things can happen.”

But safety practice on the Waterview tunnel is a priority and the team has it down-pat, he says, with good communication and safety buttons to stop the machine at any time.

Peter is contracted by McConnell Dowell, one of seven organisations in the Well Connected alliance formed to construct the New Zealand Transport Agency project. The development involves construction of a six lane motorway stretching 5km between Owairaka and Waterview, connecting the Southwestern and Northwestern motorways and completing Auckland’s 47km Western Ring Route.