A construction company has been given an urgent contract by the City of Toronto to bring up a boring machine that has been trapped down in the west end for nine months after getting entangled in steel wires.
The contract, worth just under $9 million and given to Clearway Construction Ltd. last month, is “a matter of urgent urgency, since there was a substantial health and safety concern to the public,” the city claims.
The tunneling machine has been impaled underneath Old Mill Road near Bloor Street West since June of last year, and its presence has caused a lot of issues for the neighborhood’s infrastructure in recent months.
As part of the city’s Basement Flooding Prevention Program, the machine was first buried in the ground in March 2022 to build a 900 millimeter diameter storm sewer along Old Mill Road north of Bloor Street West.
The sewer’s purpose is to direct rainwater away from nearby homes, lowering the possibility of basement and house flooding.
The machine stayed on course for the majority of its journey, but in May it ran into a problem that forced it to stray off its course, necessitating its rescue and realignment.
However, less than a month later, the machine’s front cutting end got caught in steel “tiebacks”—buried wires that had once been used to support shoring from two nearby mid-rise development excavations.
