New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has just finished the initial drilling phase of the East Side Access project to bring the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central Terminal. What are they doing with the tunnel boring machine? Giving it a funeral. (NYTimes link, use this if you need to get past the paywall) Instead of removing the $8 million machine, the contractor responsible for this portion of the project has decided it will be cheaper to leave it in place at the end of the tunnel. This is not without precedent; some of the TBMs used for the Channel Tunnel were turned off the tunnel mainline and left buried.
posted by spitefulcrow on Jul 25, 2011 - 45 comments

Not for want of a glove: first person video of a skier buried, then rescued from an avalanche. He also got very lucky to be honest. In the time that he's buried, you can hear his breathing already accelerate. The ruffling noise back and forth is his chest rising and falling and the noise that his jacket makes. The intermittent whimpering noise you hear is him trying to swallow and get some air since the avalung wasn't fully in his mouth and instead just to the corner of his mouth. Avalanche at 1:19. Blue sky and view of the rescuers starts at 6:07.
posted by maudlin on Sep 27, 2009 - 42 comments

Previously on MetaFilter, you remember the Plymouth Belvedere that was buried in a downtown Tulsa time capsule 50 years ago? The Tulsarama! folks were going to unveil it on Friday, but on opening the vault today they discovered it's full of standing water. Someone (or his/her descendant) will win this fine car impending environmental disaster if they correctly guessed Tulsa's 2007 population in 1957.
posted by dw on Jun 13, 2007 - 28 comments

On June 15, 1957, a new gold and white 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Sport Coupe was buried in a time capsule in downtown Tulsa, OK. The car was entombed in a concrete vault beneath the then lawn of city hall as part of Tulsa's semi-centennial.The interment, forgotten by Chrysler Motors according to one report by a former employee, is sparking interest largely due to the fact that the car is scheduled to be exhumed on June 15, 2007 as part of Tulsa's centennial celebration. It was buried to establish the timelessness of Plymouth design, an assertion that has proven both ironically wrong and ironically right. Oh, the car goes to the person who correctly guessed the population of Tulsa in 2007 at the time the car was buried, or that person's heirs. The problem will be finding them.
posted by VMC on Jul 11, 2006 - 47 comments