1920. “Pacific Highway through a Washington red cedar stump, 20 feet in diameter (man and automobile in tunnel of giant tree stump)."’ Photo by Darius Kinsey, Seattle. View full size.
Sonora Desert Museum - Tucson, Arizona on Flickr.
Where you can visit the subterranean living rooms of honey bees, ringtail cats, kit foxes, bats and other desert animals, or see close-up the roots of desert plants. That’s what these visitors are enjoying 12 feet below the earth’s surface in the unique Tunnel at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona
(via At ‘Great Escape’ Site, Tunnel Is Excavated by Modern Engineers - NYTimes.com)
Hugh Hunt with facsimiles of items used in a replica tunnel that he helped a team of contemporary Royal Air Force fliers build. They named it Roger after Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, the principal organizer of the 1944 escape.
…In an effort to establish more clearly how the escape was accomplished — and, in a sense, to reclaim the narrative of the breakout — British-based engineers, battlefield archaeologists and historians traveled into the pine forest outside Zagan last summer to unearth the secrets buried there for a television documentary by Wildfire Television in London that was broadcast in late 2011 in Britain. They were accompanied by modern-day Royal Air Force pilots, as well as veterans of wartime bombing raids, now in their 80s, who helped build the tunnels at the encampment known as Stalag Luft III.
The team’s task was to employ “reverse engineering” by uncovering the tunnels and what remained of the tunnelers’ jury-rigged equipment to replicate the wartime fliers’ ingenuity. Ultimately, the team members were stunned that, even without the menace of the ever-watchful Nazi camp guards, they were unable to match their wartime counterparts fully, particularly in the most crucial skill, digging a tunnel 30 feet below the camp surface without repeated collapses of the sandy soil above…
(via Taliban Prison Break Sets Hundreds Free at Afghan Prison - NYTimes.com)
A tunnel that took months to dig was discovered in a cell of a prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Hundreds of inmates escaped.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Taliban leaders carried out an audacious plot on Monday to free nearly 500 fighters from southernAfghanistan’s largest prison, leading them through a tunnel dug over more than five months and equipped with electricity and air pipes, which suggested that the insurgents remained formidable and wily opponents despite recent setbacks.
The plan was so closely held that one young Taliban fighter who got out said he knew nothing of it until a fellow inmate tugged his sleeve to wake him in the night and led him to the three-foot-wide tunnel, which ran more than half a mile from a hole in a cell’s floor, under security posts, tall concrete walls and a highway, and came up in a nearby house. From there, a waiting car took the fighter a few miles away, where he hailed a taxi to safety…