

The ‘Unfathomable’ Pursuit of Personal Tunneling - rshrsh
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-unfathomable-pursuit-of-personal-tunneling

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shalmanese
I think the real question should be: Why don't more people dig personal
tunnels? It's pretty obvious that digging is an intrinsically satisfying
activity. Kids are naturally drawn to digging and we see unmotivated digging
behaviour in the animal s all the time.

Most of us lose the digging instinct as we graduate into adulthood the same
way we lose the drawing instinct or the the sculpting instinct. But, as
adults, we do plenty of menial, repetitive tasks as hobbies. Knitting,
chopping wood, doodling, spinning pens etc.

I think just not enough people have been exposed to the joys of digging as an
adult and thus, have not been converted to digging as a hobby. I'm sure, if it
reached some kind of critical tipping point, personal digging would become a
mainstream hobby in the same way knitting & crochet did for young women in the
00s.

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jkot
You are kidding, right? It is backbreaking dirty work.

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shalmanese
We perform a lot of backbreaking, dirty work voluntarily as hobbies.

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jkot
Seriously? How many cubic meters did you actually dug out?

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mbrameld
Why do you begin your replies with feigned surprise?

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ChuckMcM
Fascinating stuff, I've always been interested in tunnels and tunnel boring
machines. As a teen I built an underground fortress of solitude in the
unimproved desert near my house using cinder blocks for support that folks had
dumped in the desert after finishing a block wall job. There was mortar mix as
well so nearly two thirds of the interior walls were both brick and mortar. It
was great fun to go into it during a hot day and cool off. It quickly became
rather over run with snakes and scorpions who also appreciated its cool
interior[1].

But my strongest memories of the place are about how good it felt to be
carving a "space" out of nothing but dirt. It was almost magical in its
ability to feel like creating something from nothing, even though it was just
digging. Had the dot com crash not happened it was on my schedule to build a
basement for my house. I got to see a two story basement (two levels down) in
Palo Alto and it was really amazing to me. Almost like having an additional
house to do with what you want.

[1] Always made the first visit after an extended absence pretty interesting.

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dunham
Take this a little further, and you have "iceburg homes":

[http://curbed.com/archives/2014/12/11/this-is-what-people-
me...](http://curbed.com/archives/2014/12/11/this-is-what-people-mean-by-
iceberg-home.php)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Wow. Just Wow. I was clearly setting my sights way to low here.

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m-i-l
If anyone is interested in the "mole man" from London that the article
references:

 _Since the early 1960s, the man who owns and lives inside the £1m Victorian
property has been digging. No one knows how far the the network of burrows
underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle 's house stretch. But according to the
council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the
problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade
pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep,
spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house. Their surveyors
estimate that the resident known locally as the Mole Man has scooped 100 cubic
metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room
property._

Source:
[http://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/aug/08/communities.u...](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/aug/08/communities.uknews)

~~~
frandroid
How is a London 20-room Victorian property only worth a million pounds?

~~~
DanBC
It has a fucking massive network of unsafe tunnels under it. It's been lived
in for many years by someone who has taken no care with maintainance.

It's possibly listed, which means anyone buying it has an extensive and
complex repair bill.

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sp332
The first person who came to mind when I read the headline was Seymour Cray,
who made the fastest computers in the world for quite a while. He used to dig
while puzzling over circuit designs.

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gshubert17
John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French
scientist who visited Cray's home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the
secrets of his success, Cray said "Well, we have elves here, and they help
me". Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his
house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he
would retire to the tunnel to dig. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves
will often come to me with solutions to my problem", he said. [1]

[1]
[http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/writing/PCW/cray.htm](http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/writing/PCW/cray.htm)

~~~
defen
Is it possible there was some naturally-occurring source of DMT down there?
This is almost too crazy to be believed.

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
Is it possible subterranean elves are more common in the UK?

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defen
Possible, but his home was in Wisconsin :)

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lmm
It's worth saying that this is dangerous; people do die when these tunnels
collapse. If you're thinking of digging, be careful; make sure you know what
you're doing.

~~~
johnsberd
Also make sure you call or visit the diggers hotline before you start to make
sure you don't hit any buried cables. Not sure about outside the U.S. folks.

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schoen
When I was a kid, the kid down the street and I started digging a hole in his
backyard. We wanted it to become a tunnel network.

The hole got deep enough for both of us to fit inside, but somehow it became
much more difficult to continue digging at that point. Maybe, as the article
suggests, we hit a rock, or maybe it was the exertion of lifting shovels full
of dirt above our heads.

~~~
sliverstorm
To me digging always gets less fun as soon as moving material out of the hole
becomes the primary obstacle, rather than breaking new soil.

Same reason why pickaxes are more fun than shovels. All breaking soil, no
earthmoving.

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falcolas
I can't even dig 6 inches without hitting the rocky mess which makes the
foundation of my little down. It used to be a river bed, which makes for great
gravel pits and terrible gardens. Nothing will destroy a lawn faster than a
utility company coming along and burying a cable. All of your nice topsoil
banished beneath a rocky substrate.

So, no tunnels for me. :)

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wiradikusuma
Isn't it dangerous due to some (methane?) gas leakage, and it collapsing,
without proper calculation?

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jt2190
"Excavation cave-ins cause serious and often fatal injuries to workers in the
United States. An analysis by the National Institute for Occupational Safety
and Health (NIOSH) of workers' compensation claims for 1976 to 1981 in the
Supplementary Data System of the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that
excavation cave-ins caused about 1,000 work-related injuries each year. Of
these, about 140 result in permanent disability and 75 in death. Thus, this
type of incident is a major cause of deaths associated with work in
excavations and accounts for nearly 1% of all annual work-related deaths in
the nation."

[http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/85-110/](http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/85-110/)

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kenko
How does that article not mention Gass's The Tunnel?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_\(novel\))

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michaelwww
I grew up next the beach. Every once in awhile a tourist will dig a tunnel in
the sand and it collapses and kills them. Don't do this.

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emmelaich
Yep, as an eight year old I dug a hole in the side of a fairly solid sand
dune. _Just_ before I went in for about the tenth time, the roof collapsed and
I escaped with my life.

Terrifying.

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agentgt
Digging in the backyard like that makes me think of septic tank repair....

Hopefully she doesn't hit the drain field.

