Tens of thousands of people have turned out in Auckland to see a drill named Alice that's not even working yet.
It's been assembled to drill the Waterview Connection – New Zealand's largest infrastructure project since the Harbour Bridge.
"I was in the mines originally and this is totally mind boggling to what I used to see and do in the mines," says ex-miner Bill Starrs.
Mr Starr has a pretty good reason to come along. But what about the other 24,000 that queued all morning?
"Twenty-thousand people [came] to watch a tunnel machine, and it's not even moving," says NZTA senior communications manager Gez Johns.
Even the Transport Authority communications man is trying to get his head around the turnout.
"It's by far and away bigger than anything we've seen in New Zelaand," says Mr Johns. "It's the biggest infrastructure project we've seen since the Harbour Bridge."
3 News found an expert in the crowd to explain how it works.
"It's got drill bits at the front of it," says big machine enthusiast Philip Banks. "It's drilling rock. It's extracting it out the back. It's actually building a concrete shell as it goes to keep itself protected, so it's part driller, part tunnel construction machine."
Alice, named by a school boy who won a competition, is almost 15 metres in diameter and 90 metres long. It takes 16 people to work it and has a maximum speed of 8cm/h.
"It's reasonably big," says Mr Banks. He hasn't seen bigger.
It will drill two tunnels, both 2.4km long, and connect the existing Southwestern Motorway to the Northwestern, finishing a loop that will allow traffic to bypass central Auckland.
The projects costs $1.7 billion and is due to be finished by 2017. Drilling will start after Kabour Weekend.
Most left happy, able to put their names to a piece of very expensive history.
3 News
source: newshub archive
