Tunnel Borers : Metro Rail ‘Tramps’: Life in the Pits

Usually, it doesn’t take a newspaper story to tell people that tramp miners have hit town. They usually announce themselves by tearing up a bar. But Los Angeles is so big they haven’t even been able to decide which bar.

It’s been depressing, said Doug Brewer, known among the miners as Dog. “I mean, who would want to live here?�

Dog and a couple dozen other tramps who travel the country from one tunnel-boring job to another came to Los Angeles recently to dig the first segment of Metro Rail, from MacArthur Park to Union Station.

But Dog said there was another, more compelling reason for his presence: “Just bad luck is all I can tell you.�

How It All Began

Dog let his lilt hang in the air for a moment, then took off like a country song.

“Well, I started out as a coal miner in Tennessee, and they sank some railroad tunnels in the little old town I’m from one time, and . . . I was drunk in a bar and this guy started telling me . . . how he was going to put me to work . . . and. . . .�

To make a long story short, Dog said he’d wound up working on water tunnels in Atlanta and sewer tunnels in Arizona, then bought into a bar.

“Miners don’t have any business running bars,� he said with a grin. “They all drink too much.�

So the bar went bust and Dog, who’s “got an old lady and kids in Arizona, and probably a husband-in-law--I don’t know that for sure,� kept on following the tunnel work.

It was nearly 5:30 p.m.--time to go to work. Dog strapped to his waist a small silver box called a self-rescuer that would allow him to breathe his own breath if air in the tunnel turned foul.

Then he and a dozen other tunnel workers on his shift massed briefly at the first landing of a rough-hewn wooden staircase that led to the tunnel entrance at the bottom of a 60-foot shaft.

They gathered next to the “brass board,� which carried the names of every man who worked on the tunnel. Under each man’s name was a hook, and from each hook dangled a brass disk, one side black, the other red.

As each man checked into work, he turned his piece of brass so that its red side faced out. That way, in the event of trouble, rescuers would be able to tell at a glance that the men with the red pieces were the ones who were lost.

The men were frank in describing themselves. They call themselves “tramps.� And one, Bob Edwards, explained what that means.

“Just a tramp,� he said. “Here today and gone tomorrow. It don’t matter. Whoever’s got the most money is where we go to work.�

Edwards said he typically spends his time after work seeing how drunk he can get. But he bristled at the suggestion that there was anything odd about the life.

“It’s high dollar, buddy,� he said, sticking out his chin. Then he illustrated his point.

“If a job breaks tomorrow that pays $20 an hour, I don’t really give a ---- about this job,� he said. “This job pays $17.31. . . . I know you can’t put it in the paper, but all I am is just a whore.�

As the men reached the bottom of the shaft, they were greeted by start-up howls from a generator and a constant roar from a huge fan that pumped fresh air into the tunnel.

Then they boarded a train for a nearly mile-long ride to the tunnel’s working face. As the train took them around a first gentle curve, the shaft--and daylight--dropped from sight. The 22-foot diameter tunnel seemed to have no end.

Although electric lanterns were hung every couple of hundred feet, it was dark. And wet. Water rained on the miners in spots as they rode in the open car.

Leaks are to be plugged later when a temporary concrete lining is made permanent with the pouring of more cement. But during construction, the concrete lining didn’t even make a full circle. Pieces of plywood were used to line the tunnel’s top.

Veteran Train Driver

The train was driven by an old-timer, Thomas Terry, 60, who worked on his first tunnel in Chicago in 1958, and his most memorable in Sylmar in 1971.

The Sylmar tunnel was the last big one dug in the Los Angeles area before Metro Rail. But its progress was interrupted tragically, with a methane gas explosion that killed 17 men.

Terry was nearly among them. He had volunteered to work that day for a man who had covered for him when he’d had to go to the dentist, but the man had said no.

“I was home,� Terry recalled, but he corrected himself immediately. “I was in a bar� when word came that the man had died.

Terry said he headed back to the tunnel to pick up the pieces of friends. “We were in there for three days taking the bodies out,� he said.

Terry said he got himself out of tunnels a couple of years after that and started running elevators up the sides of high-rise buildings under construction. But when he heard about Metro Rail, he decided to come back.

“My wife was a little hesitant when she found out I wanted to go back,� he recalled. But then he smiled, like a little boy with a secret. “She knew I liked tunnels, though,� he said.

After a ride of about seven minutes, Terry pulled his train in as close as he could get it to the working face, and the miners piled off.

They had to walk past six other train cars, which was a little tricky because the train occupied the only relatively flat place. But the miners managed--balancing themselves with one hand against the train and walking at 45- to 60-degree angles, high up on the tunnel’s side.

Past the cars, they could walk along the tunnel bottom--in slippery mud 4 to 6 inches deep.

They were well underneath the Harbor Freeway at 7th Street, in a brightly lit work area that smelled like rotten eggs.

The smell indicated the presence of hydrogen sulfide--a gas they knew could explode, but only in much higher concentrations. The gas had been there for a few days. It had spooked a couple of workers, who had quit.

But their quitting spelled job opportunities for Bob Edwards and his pal, Dan Trapp.

Both single and in their early 30s, Edwards and Trapp live in trailers in Oroville in Northern California when they’re not working. Oroville has a large colony of tramp miners, owing perhaps to a lot of tunneling work in the area over the years as part of the state’s massive water redistribution efforts.

They had known about Metro Rail for months. “Wherever there’s a job in the United States, we know about it,� Edwards said. “And I can call and find out what the working conditions are, the living conditions are, the wages, and whether the outfit’s a gyppo or not.�

“A gyppo,� he explained, “ain’t buying no supplies. You know, when you’re looking for a wedge and there ain’t a wedge laying there, or you’re looking for a timber and there ain’t one there.�

But they’d postponed coming to Los Angeles because of “the traffic, the people,� Edwards said.

Finally, they’d decided to give it a try after coming off a yearlong job near Yosemite National Park and deciding against the only other tunnel projects they knew of--in Phoenix, where the pay was much worse, and in Hawaii, where, as Edwards said, “I just can’t figure I’d make any money. There’s too many pretty girls and the weather’s too fine.�

As for the gas, Edwards said, “It don’t scare me.�

He noted there are people whose job it is to monitor the gas and evacuate before there is enough concentration to explode.

“Besides,� interjected Trapp, “if it does blow up, you’ll be dead before you know it.

“So that don’t matter.�

“Yeah,� Edwards agreed, “it really doesn’t matter--underground.�

Asked what he meant, Edwards launched into an explanation that sounded like a description of physical labor as a meditative state.

“Well,� he said, “you got all this work ahead of you, looking you right dead in the face. And as long as you get your hands dirty and start working, you . . . ain’t got time to look around and say, ‘Oh, my God, I’m underground.’ �

The nature of the work, though, is changing.

A tramp miner’s working life used to be divided between soft-ground tunnels and hard-ground tunnels. Now it is divided between mining-machine jobs and nonmining-machine jobs.

Soft-ground tunnels had to be dug painstakingly by hand, while hard-ground tunnels were advanced by a method called “drill and shoot,� which involved drilling a hole for dynamite, then detonating it.

It was dangerous work that built camaraderie, and fed on competition as men raced to have their dynamite ready to blow first.

But while there is still a lot of that kind of work around, mining machines have increasingly replaced hand labor, particularly on large tunneling jobs such as Metro Rail.

That is not to say competition is dead.

Tunnel contractors still need experienced hands to dig the first few hundred feet of tunnel before a multimillion-dollar mining machine can be put into place.

Work Breeds Enthusiasm

And those first few hundred feet can still breed enthusiasm.

Witness Greg Moseley’s:

“Me and Lupe and Scott did six foot one day and went home two o’clock,� Moseley recalled proudly of some hand-digging on Metro Rail.

“Everybody else still working.� He chuckled in satisfaction. “We was kicking ass that day.�

But after the first few hundred feet, the need for highly skilled diggers drops off. Then tramps are used mainly to do things such as lay rail and utility lines within the tunnel, while equipment operators run the machines that handle the dirt.

“It’s not like it used to be,� Dog said. “It used to be a craft. Now it’s like following the mining machine.�

The machine is an automated digging device housed at the front of a steel tube that is slightly larger than the diameter of the finished tunnel. The tube functions as a shield that protects workers from cave-ins by supporting the earth at the tunnel’s working face.

The digging device at its front is designed to fit local soil conditions. Sometimes it is a series of carbide bits that grind rock. For the soft ground in downtown Los Angeles, it is a backhoe-type shovel.

Cutting Done by Tube

Most of the cutting is done by the tube itself, which has sharp teeth on its circular edge. The teeth enable the tube to cut through soft ground like a cookie cutter cuts through dough.

The backhoe-style shovel then scoops out the dirt inside the circle cut by the teeth and deposits it on a conveyor belt, which dumps it into empty train cars for the ride out of the tunnel.

Operating the mining machine was Earl Brandt, a big man, who, to get to the controls, had to climb a ladder that looked as though it had been scrounged from a miniature submarine.

His perch was a chair surrounded by control levers that afforded an extremely narrow world view--a wall of gray-brown dirt that was the tunnel’s face.

Brandt had done a neat job with his shovel. The dirt was smooth--as though a giant had scraped it with his fingernails. But things haven’t always gone that smoothly from Brandt’s perspective.

He remembered a time on another tunnel when a flashing yellow light passed before his eyes. “I says, Hey, what the ----’s that,� he recalled. It turned out to be a construction barricade from the surface. “A guy damned near fell in behind it too.�

Endless Repetition

But there has been no trouble with the ground on Metro Rail. Just seemingly endless repetition. This is the way it works:

Behind Brandt, the train brings in the precast concrete pieces that are used to line the tunnel. Workers hoist the 7,000-pound curved segments, so that an automated erector arm can press them into position against the tube.

Then Brandt extends a set of hydraulic jacks that presses against the newly installed segments. The pressure from the jacks forces the tube forward, and also guides the tube. More pressure on the left makes the tube go right, and vice versa.

Brandt steers with guidance from a laser that engineers have hung from the top of the tunnel behind his machine. The laser points its beam at a paper target near the back of the machine.

The image of the beam striking the target is recorded by a video camera and is then transmitted to a television screen next to Brandt’s controls.

If he is steering correctly, Brandt will see the beam hit the target’s bull’s-eye on his screen.

When Brandt has moved the machine forward 4 feet, there is enough room to erect another set of the concrete segments against the rear of the tube. That done, Brandt extends the jacks again, and pushes off.

And the process is repeated. Again and again.

Crew ‘Highballing It’

Assembling 10 sets of concrete liner--an advance of 40 feet--on a shift is considered pretty good. For a while, the two shifts on this tunnel were together making 100 feet, bringing a bonus of $10 a man. The miners were really “highballing� then.

“Highballing means you’re really getting down and going with it,� explained Bobby Salazar, “ . . . giving your employer what he’s giving to you. He’s going to give you good money. You want to give him a good job.�

Salazar is unusual among the miners. He has a college degree--in theology.

It took him 20 years to get it. But going to college, he said, “takes the monotony out of working.�

He started out as a copper miner in Arizona, like his father before him, and took up tramping as the copper mines played out.

Salazar said he’s been in two cave-ins--each shocking only after the fact. “At the time you’re only thinking survival,� he said.

On this job, Salazar’s main task is to lay rail so that the train can advance as the tunnel does.

Hauling a 20-foot piece of rail, Salazar felt around in the mud for an anchor poured into a concrete segment that had already been laid along the bottom of the tunnel. Then he bolted the rail to the segment. It was backbreaking work, and in no time, he was covered with mud.

Shuns Office Work

But he said he would never trade his job for one in an office. “I worked in an office for a year and a half once,� he said. “But I couldn’t hack it. Too many false smiles.�

When the shift was done at 2:30 a.m., everyone emerged from the tunnel except Dog. He was stuck because the welder/mechanic for the next shift hadn’t shown up.

The others headed for the “dry house,� a trailer in the contractor’s staging area where there were wire-mesh lockers for each man, and showers.

The men cleaned up, had a beer and traded insults, while their “walking boss,� Lee English, tried to explain the ambiance.

“There’s a lot of drinking and partying and roughhousing,� said English, who, as the “walker� is in charge of operations in the tunnel and on the surface during the shift. “Kind of goes with the game, I think.�

“You wonder why you drink?� he continued. “Well, you don’t drive them damn tunnels drinking milk. That’s what I say.�

But after a little, rather tame carrying-on this night, the men went their separate ways.

“They’ve calmed down a bit,� said Allen Rush, a high-ranking official of the tramp miners’ union, Laborers International. “All they used to do was work and fight. They’d tear up a town.�

Goes Home Wearily

A little later, the errant welder/mechanic showed up and a tired Dog went home to the furnished one-bedroom apartment near 3rd and Vermont that he shares with another tramp.

The apartment was a big step up for Dog. He’d spent his first few months on Metro Rail living in a pickup truck parked next to the contractor’s staging area.

“People think you make good money,� he said. “We make $21 an hour--I do. But it takes a hell of a lot more than that� to support a family in one place and yourself in another.

The next afternoon, Dog’s roommate and some other miners were relaxing in the apartment. The radio was tuned to a country station; the beer was flowing.

There was a lot of talk--some of it about how they could do a more efficient job in the tunnel, when Dog walked in carrying a bag of groceries and wearing a T-shirt that said “Rude Dog.�

Dog had earned the moniker, having once laid down at the bottom of the shaft and exposed himself for laughs to a friend who was giving a tour to a Metro Rail public relations woman.

He peeled some $100 bills off a bankroll for his share of the rent and thought aloud about going home for weekend before rejecting the idea.

His, he acknowledged, “is not a glamorous life style. If you were going to describe it in one word, it’s more lonesome than anything.�

Then Dog picked up a paperback novel about Appalachia and showed a visitor a map at the front. “This is where I’m from,� he said.

As it neared 5 p.m., the others got ready for dinner at a Sizzler. Dog gulped his beer and prepared to head for work.

“Damn,� he said, “I don’t want to go.�

One last gulp.

“But I’ll tell you one thing. It beats the hell out of . . . crawling around on your hands and knees all day long in a coal mine.�