Homeless in Vancouver: They'll be back drilling in preparation for possible SkyTrain tunnel along West Broadway

For over 10 hours on Friday, a crew from Foundex Explorations Ltd. were engaged in extracting soil samples from a hole they drilled in the roadway of the 1400 block of West Broadway.

The work was related to a possible tunnel under the street for an extension of the SkyTrain Millennium Line out to UBC's Point Grey campus.

The work on this one little hole resumed Saturday morning and it’s a fair guess that the work will be continuing all weekend. That's because each evening, workers leave behind much of their equipment, notably the big, truck-mounted drilling rig.

This means that for the weekend at least—for the duration of the work—no buses will be stopping in the 1400 block of West Broadway. People used to catching either of the eastbound buses, the 9 Boundary or the 99 B-Line, in this block will have to cross Granville Street and use the temporary stop in front of the Cactus Club in the 1500 block (for both the 9 and the 99) or walk east to the 1300 block where they can catch the 9 in front of the gas station.

Not much to see but that didn't stop me from looking

Friday evening I took some photos of the inactive drilling rig but there wasn’t much to see. The hole itself was completely obscured by the drilling apparatus.

One fact of note is the drill itself—an RRD150 resonant drill made by a local company called Resonance Technology International, located in Coquitlam.

In a resonant drill, the counter-rotating parts of the drill head set the drill pipe to vibrating exactly at its natural resonant frequency. This somehow results in a drill that is very good for collecting soil samples.

While I don’t quite get how a sonic/resonant drill works, I understand that it’s exploiting mechanical resonance, which has been known to cause whole bridges to crumble. I can easily imagine the way that vibration could loosen a blockage of aggregate such as soil and gravel.