The Almanac of Collapsing Records

The Pilot Bore Breaks Through — Tsugaru Strait, 1983

The pilot bore heading of the Seikan Tunnel, roughly one hundred metres below the seabed of the Tsugaru Strait, on the Honshū side

January 27, 1983 — twenty-three years into the digging of an undersea tunnel between Honshū and Hokkaidō, two crews boring toward each other from opposite shores, the last metres of rock standing between them

Two crews dug at each other for twenty-three years and finally shook hands through a hole in the dark. This breach reads the WORKER AT THE FACE under the Tsugaru Strait: a wet pilot bore a hundred metres beneath the seabed, water weeping through shotcrete, survey stakes and chalked figures on the rock, and a last metre of stone with strangers behind it. The witness is read only at the face and the handshake: the flooding, the lost years, the cost of the drive all held in the background, never staged. The fragment is the subject's own: the draught of air that arrived from a place you had never been, the hand that came through the gap and found yours — and the memory beneath it of a distance in your own life that closed, someone you worked toward for years without seeing, and the day you finally reached them.

From the record

the Seikan Tunnel under the Tsugaru Strait was begun in 1964 and its pilot bore broke through on January 27, 1983, connecting the Honshū and Hokkaidō headings
the tunnel runs roughly 240 metres below sea level and about 100 metres beneath the seabed, its undersea section some 23 kilometres long
the pilot bore was driven ahead of the main tunnel to survey the rock and drain water; the works were flooded several times during construction
the two headings were driven from opposite shores toward each other and met with an alignment error measured in centimetres
the tunnel workings ran continuously with constant pumping, and crews from the two sides had never worked together before the meeting

The era door

a steel bulkhead door in a concrete lining, the grey paint sweating with condensation, a wheel handle cold and slick under both hands

TSUGARU STRAIT — JANUARY 1983

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

Other records in the Almanac

The whole Almanac →

MEMORY IS RESISTANCE · IN SERVICE OF VELOCITY · YEAR 3037