Yay! Plague pit!
Crossrail is an astonishing engineering project; they’re boring a big-ass new subway tunnel straight across London. Like, 26 miles worth of new track, going through infrastructure, under foundations and within inches of existing tunnels and roads. It’s Europe’s largest construction projects — one of the biggest construction projects EVAH.
If you love big machines and amazing feats of construction, if you sometimes wonder whether we’ve totally lost that audacity the Victorians had so darned much of, you really should follow the link and spend some time exploring. Try their YouTube channel (at least check out the eight ginormous tunneling machines).
Digging a huge trench across London, as you might imagine, is turning up all sorts of ancient junk. They’ve just run across the Bedlam plague pit — 3,000 skellingtons worth — and they’ve got sixty archaeologists on site beavering away at it so construction can continue soonest.
Earlier Underground lines took a stomach-crunching jog to avoid digging up plague pits and taking the chance of unleashing something. But, as it turns out, it’s pretty difficult to extract y. pestis out of old bones. They’re going to do their best.
Posted: March 9th, 2015 under britain, medicine, personal.
Comments: 12
Comments
Comment from mojo
Time: March 9, 2015, 10:12 pm
Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies
Someday comes back
Put your make-up on
Make your hair look pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City
— Atlantic City
Comment from dissent555
Time: March 10, 2015, 12:26 am
Ahh, so this is where the zombie apocalypse is unleashed from. Better get back to work on my survival caches.
Comment from p2
Time: March 10, 2015, 12:48 am
bring outcher dead!!!
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: March 10, 2015, 1:19 am
This first link should really go under yesterday’s post, but I just now saw it….. Knowing how crazy my family is, I may reconsider giving access to my DNA to anybody.
http://www.theneworleansadvocate.com/news/11707192-123/new-orleans-filmmaker-cleared-in
As for today’s topic – Haven’t we seen this movie?
Comment from Anonymous
Time: March 10, 2015, 1:52 am
Hopefully your engineers will be somewhat better than those of Seattle:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a11678/bertha-seattle-tunnel-boring-machine-still-stuck-17517311/
But then that is pretty much Microsoft country, so nobody should be TOO surprised. After all, “Galloping Gertie” was a product of that same area…
Comment from mojo
Time: March 10, 2015, 3:25 am
What? Settling earth, you say? In MAJOR earthquake/Tsunami country?
How, um, unexpected.
Comment from Nina
Time: March 10, 2015, 7:20 am
It’s amazing to me that they even know what the heck is down there well enough to miss it by inches!
Comment from Wolfus Aurelius
Time: March 10, 2015, 3:27 pm
Two points about the New Orleans filmmaker story:
One, I was going to say, “Whaddaya expect, it’s Noo Awlins,” but the cops were from Idaho; and
Two, he made a horrible mistake not clamming up and calling his lawyer when the cop wanted to question him and take pics of his car. Doesn’t matter if you “have nothing to hide,” as this story put it. Lawyer up.
Comment from Anonymous
Time: March 10, 2015, 3:37 pm
What makes you so sure they are actually gonna “miss it by inches“, Nina? Smart money sez there’s plenty of “geysers” and “sinkholes” and “data outages” once they get really underway. One fervently hopes, however, that they do not find a gas main. Or do such things not exist over there in East Pondia???
Comment from Steamboat McGoo
Time: March 10, 2015, 4:36 pm
“…they’ve got sixty archaeologists on site beavering away…”
Magnificent imagery! Pith-hatted folks with spades and magnifiers in hand zipping around in a frenzy, to’ing and fro’ing frantically, and dirt and rock and assorted odd artifacts being flung far and wide… woot.
Comment from Nina
Time: March 10, 2015, 11:19 pm
I wouldn’t mnd being one of those archeologists…I’ve still got my trowel somewhere!
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