Crews begin unloading Bertha off ship

SEATTLE — Crews on Elliott Bay started unloading some of the 41 pieces that make up Bertha on Saturday.

Bertha, a tunnel boring machine, is a 900 ton load and workers only got a small fraction of it.

Over the next two weeks, the parts will make their way to a work site. Then it will take a few months to assemble Bertha.

KIRO 7 Eyewitness News spoke with Matt Preedy, a Washington State Department of Transportation program administrator, about the machine.

“What you’re going to see here today is a lot of smaller stuff. The big show is going to be when we lift the cutter off and move that over to the job site,” Preedy said.

Bertha will be used to dig a tunnel under downtown Seattle to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

KIRO