Note: This commentary is unlike the other articles in this blog, and unless you have an interest in the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility, located on O'ahu, you might find this article to be long, dull and singularly uninteresting.
"It was like working on the inside of hell." That's how Charlie Boehner, pictured here in 1942, described the working conditions during the construction of Red Hill's underground fuel tanks and tunnels. Probably no one had more knowledge of Red Hill than Charlie, who had been working on the Delaware Aqueduct when he was recruited for the Red Hill project in Hawaii.
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A lot of hostility has been directed toward Hawai'i's Red Hill underground fuel storage facility over the past few years. It is certainly justifiable, and you will find no argument here. But I would like to ask readers to please put aside their anger for the moment. The events I intend to discuss took place 80 years ago. The serious problems that have occurred at Red Hill over the past few years are attributable to human error and should not diminish the magnificence of what occurred here eight decades ago.
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On the day after Christmas, 1940, an army of rugged tunneling men carved a passage into a Halawa hill and, laboring in secrecy for three years, transformed a ridge of volcanic rock into a vast subterranean network of underground tanks and tunnels. When the last group of workers finally emerged from the ground, they did so in triumph, having just completed the most spectacular engineering project in Hawai’i’s history. Today, we call it the Red Hill underground fuel storage facility. Eighty years ago, they just called it “The Underground.”
The Underground was constructed to provide a fuel storage site that was safe from enemy attack. Dozens of fuel tanks were situated on Pearl Harbor, and, on a sunny day, they were like huge glinting beacons beckoning enemy pilots. Ironically, one of the safest places to have been during the attack on Pearl Harbor would have been the top of a fuel tank. The tanks were not touched. Although some of the largest tanks were in full view only a half-mile from Battleship Row, the pilots ignored them and instead focused on ships and planes. Had the tanks been bombed, it would have been a catastrophe for American forces:
“All of the oil for the fleet was in the surface tanks at Pearl Harbor,” said Admiral Chester Nimitz. “Had the Japanese destroyed the oil, it would have prolonged the war for another two years.”
Why weren't the tanks attacked? When the pilots returned to their carriers, they recommended that they set out again and attack the fuel tanks and ship repair facilities. VADM Chuichi Nagumo, who was in charge of the mission, said that although they had caught the American fleet off-guard, "enemy fire had been surprisingly prompt," and he feared the losses his aircraft would take if they launched another attack.
In the Beginning
After an exhaustive search to determine the best site for the Red Hill facility, engineers selected a long ridge of volcanic rock that stretched from the Koolau range to the Pearl Harbor shoreline. Most of the land was owned by Damon Estate, and the Navy purchased 345 acres at a cost of $242 an acre. Due to the red dirt blanketing the ridge, the site became known as Red Hill. The beauty of selecting an elevated site in the mountains was this: The oil that would one day be sent via pipelines to Pearl Harbor, Hickam and even as far away as Barbers Point would not require pumps to propel it. Gravity could do all the work!
Before work began on the tanks, row after row of wooden barracks were hastily erected in Halawa Valley. Over the next three years, 3,900 men would work on the project, and many of them would live directly alongside the job site. They included America's foremost tunneling men as well as hundreds of carpenters, electricians, welders, steelworkers, engineers and laborers.
They began work on December 26, 1940, descending into the bowels of the earth to tackle a job that was unprecedented in scale and scope. For nearly three years, they labored in secrecy, battling extremes of heat and fatigue, hazardous working conditions, skepticism, supply shortages, blackouts and the privations of war.
Two-thirds of the Red Hill workforce were recruited locally. About 800 were Japanese. Barred after the attack from working on Pearl Harbor due to misguided fears that they could not be trusted, they were welcomed at Red Hill, where they filled the skilled labor positions as carpenters, welders and electricians. Filipinos also made up a large portion of the work force. According to one account, “their size and nimbleness ideally fitted them for structural work in cramped places.”
Mainland workers were recruited from the black depths of Colorado copper mines, the gold mines of the Dakotas, the coal and lead mines of Arkansas, and dozens of other mining sites across the nation. Many were trades workers, fresh from work on the grandest projects of their time - Boulder and Grand Coulee dams, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Los Angeles Aqueduct. They were restless and independent men who crisscrossed the country in search of the big projects that built America. In the Underground, they found their biggest.
At Red Hill, mainland workers and islanders joined together, their differences overshadowed by the massiveness of their undertaking. Mainland workers who had never seen Filipinos, Chinese, Hawaiians, Japanese and Portuguese found themselves sweating and swearing side-by-side in Red Hill’s underground melting pot.
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This was not a job that attracted the frail or the weak-kneed. Perhaps the best description of the tunnelers came from Joe Kaulukukui, a graduate of the University of Hawaii and former star quarterback on its football team. Joe was only 23 when he was hired as Red Hill's athletic director, and he soon found himself having to deal with a work force that was "hard-boiled, rugged, and tough."
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Like moles, the miners crawled though narrow tunnels to points so far below the surface of the earth that they could smell the spices of Shanghai. Backs bent, and using little more than picks, shovels and dynamite, they worked around-the-clock, often in temperatures exceeding 100-degrees. On some days, the heat was overwhelming, and workers on the scaffold would faint and be saved only by a safety rope that tethered each worker to the scaffold. Still, there were at least one or two workers who plunged down the shaft (see photo of shaft) to their death.
The air was so oppressive that the inventive miners rigged up an underground air conditioning system - wooden airplane propellers powered by generators. Still, the dust and heat from curing concrete often left the atmosphere so unbearable that workers were unable to complete their shifts.
“It was like working on the inside of hell,” said Charlie Boerner of Maui.
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Death was a constant companion. On average, a worker died every two months, 17 men in all. When death beckoned, the ending was often sudden and violent. There was Denny Boyes, newly-married, who left the tunnel in the night with a load of muck and was found underneath his overturned earth-mover with battery acid running into his face. There was the fellow who was buried when a cave wall buckled; two workers were asphyxiated in the shaft; there were men who were electrocuted or dragged into the conveyor belt and pulled to a grisly death, and others who misstepped and plummeted down the shaft, and there was even one who did not stop his car when an armed Marine guard yelled “halt!"
Two of the most bizarre deaths occurred from drowning. After each tank was completed, it was slowly filled with water, and workers in a dugout canoe would paddle inside the tank, looking for telltale bubbles, the sign of a leak. One day, an enormous bubble was accidentally released from a water pipe at the bottom of the tank. Rising silently through the depths, it burst onto the surface, overturning the canoe and tossing the workers into the water. Weighed down by their welding equipment, two workers drowned. Days later, a Navy diver dove more than 200-feet to retrieve one of the bodies. It was said to be the deepest dive of the time . . . and it occurred not in the ocean but inside a mountain!
The Attack on Pearl Harbor
The attack on Pearl Harbor began just minutes prior to the 0800 shift change on December 7, 1941. Although it was a Sunday, work at Red Hill went on around-the-clock and observed no holidays. When the night shift ended on that fateful morning, the workers poured out of the tunnels like ants.
One of the workers, Joe Halvorsen, described the scene: “A plane came out of the haze and flew up Halawa Canyon in front of our mess hall. The pilot, seeing some thousand or more men standing on the hillside, tipped his wing to get a better look. He was so close that I could count his teeth. The machine gun opened up on him but missed.”
There was one death. Daniel LaVerne, age 25, was a tough, professional boxer and youth boxing coach. He lingered a few seconds at the tunnel entrance and was strafed by enemy aircraft.
On the afternoon of the attack, a procession of trucks laden with a grisly cargo creaked slowly up the hill. Underneath their tarps were many of the Pearl Harbor dead. In the valley that runs alongside Red Hill, a power shovel and bulldozer hastily excavated several long trenches. Red Hill’s carpenters constructed coffins, and surveyors determined exactly where each should be placed. By nightfall, 204 bodies had been laid to rest. The last seven were Japanese airmen. In 1947, the US military exhumed all the bodies, and the cemetery was closed. (Note: I have not been able to determine where the Japanese bodies were taken. If any readers have that answer, please feel free to share it.)
A 160-bed emergency hospital was constructed in the Red Hill camp; and more than a thousand workers were sent to Pearl Harbor and Hickam to fill bomb craters, repair dry-docks and do salvage work.
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Recalled David Koblick, a Red Hill worker: “I was drafted into one of several rescue teams. It was assigned to Hickam Field. Many details of those next few hours are gone from memory. I got home a day or two later after hours of heart-breaking rescue work at Hickam’s bombed-out barracks."
"My family was evacuated to the mainland in February 1942,” he continued. “The Underground was now a war project, and I was not allowed to leave.”
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An island-wide blackout began the night of the attack, and no exception was made at Red Hill. Since 90 percent of the work was done underground, the blackout had little effect on those who labored in the tanks and tunnels; however, the outside crew worked under the “light” of a 20-watt bulb placed inside an upside-down tin can suspended at a height of three feet. Several fatal accidents can be attributed to inadequate lighting.
Joe Halvorsen described the death of newly-married Denny Boyes, a death that probably
would have been avoided had blackout conditions not been in effect:
"One night, after several days of rain, the motorman Denny took a trainload of muck out of the tunnel to be dumped over the edge and did not return at the alloted time. We went to look for him and got permission from the marines to turn on a flood light and discovered that the motor {possibly some sort of mucking machine} had gone over the edge and was partly buried. We found Denny still pinned in the cab with battery acid running over his face and into his hair. We dug him out and returned to the tunnel. No one felt like working.
"Our shift boss came and ordered us back to work. One of our crew knocked him to the ground. Then we all walked out of the tunnel."
Rigid security measures followed the attack. A Marine guard detachment was sent to Red Hill and remained there until the project was completed. Some of the workers were not prepared for the inflexibility of a Marine under orders, and a worker named Gault was shot and killed when he did not heed the sentry’s call to halt. Afterward, the following limerick appeared in the camp newspaper, the Red Hill Weekly, which was never accused of being overly politically correct:
“Here lies the remains
of war worker Gault;
He paid no heed
When a sentry yelled “Halt!’”
Joe Kaulukukui, Red Hill athletic director, vividly recalled the onset of war and the maturity it brought over the men. "In the beginning, I do not believe we realized the importance of what we were involved with. December 7, 1941, was to change all that. There was a dramatic shift in attitude and morale. Hellraisers now came forward after long hours underground and volunteered themselves for more hours. They donated blood and bought war bonds."
In the Belly of the Beast. When this shaft was first drilled, it was only 12-feet in diameter. Workers were sent down the tank on wooden platforms similar to the one pictured, and, using picks, shovels and other equipment, they widened the shaft to 100-feet. As the shaft was widened, the wooden platforms had to be reconstructed so that they were large enough to hug the tank walls. All the rocks and dirt dislodged by the workers tumbled down the "trash chute," the dark area in the middle of the shaft. Note the ropes tethering the workers to the platform. No one wanted to fall down that trash chute! (But at least two did.)
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A Preposterous Plan!
Some of the greatest engineering minds in America were recruited to work on the project. One was James Growden, a hydraulics engineer with the Aluminum Company of America. It was he who developed the concept that would revolutionize the project, transforming it from a run-of-the-mill underground tank facility into an underground storage system that had no equal.
To adequately define the planning and construction of this project would require that this article be extended for 100 pages. To spare readers, I’ll try to sum it up in a few paragraphs.
Prior to Red Hill’s construction, underground storage tanks were traditionally built horizontally. An impediment to horizontal tunneling is the removal of excavated soil and rock, usually termed “muck” by miners. Eighty years ago, the removal of muck was a primitive, time-consuming task that required heavy machinery and large gangs of laborers, all crammed into the confines of a narrow tunnel.
Initially, Red Hill’s fuel tanks were designed to be constructed horizontally, but Growden proposed an idea that would “turn the blueprints sideways.” He unveiled this plan during a dinner at the Halekulani Hotel, where he sketched it onto the back of a cocktail napkin. If Growden’s plan worked, only a small amount of the muck would require manual removal.
In just two years and eight months, Red Hill’s builders transformed a hill of volcanic rock into a vast subterranean network of tanks and tunnels. Inside that underground universe, concealed and safeguarded by more than 100 feet of rock and earth, was one of the greatest secrets of World War II: 20 underground fuel storage tanks, each 250-feet in height and connected by miles of tunnels.
A cutaway of Red Hill reveals the 20 underground tanks. Each tank is approximately the same height as the Ala Moana Building, and the tanks can hold a total of 252 million gallons of fuel when all are filled, which has not been the case for many years. (A handful of tanks are already empty.) The two horizontal lines are the tunnels that run throughout the facility. An underground elevator connects the two. The deepest point in the facility is 450-feet underground. The primary contractor for the project was Morrison Knudsen, and the final price tag was $43 million.
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If readers can picture the ridge where Red Hill was constructed, imagine that a long tunnel was dug into the mountain near its base (note the bottom tunnel in the illustration). Inside this tunnel was an elaborate system of conveyor belts - designed by Goodrich Tire Company - that led to a large work area outside the tunnel. Next, 20 narrow shafts, one for each future tank, were sunk from the top of the Red Hill ridge straight down to this tunnel. The shafts, which were circular and 12 feet in diameter, ran through the imaginary center of each of the proposed 20 tanks. (For security reasons, the portions of the shafts between the ridge top and the tanks were later filled with cement, which is why they are not visible in the illustration.)
As far as the miners were concerned, Growden’s plan might have been ingenious, but it was also skin-crawling. Huddled on a wooden platform, a small group of miners was lowered down each shaft on a round wooden platform that was 12-feet across. As they were lowered, they passed layers and layers of hard rock so close that they could reach out and touch the cool walls. When the platform finally ceased its descent, usually at depths ranging from 110 to 175 feet, the miners found themselves in the cool and silent heart of the mountain, surrounded by a shadowed wall of ancient rock. A pinprick of light signaled the surface far above. Miners with even a touch of claustrophobia were left pale and shaken and never made a second trip down the shaft. It wasn’t uncommon for men to freeze in fright. According to “Builders for Battle,” which has the best account ever written regarding Red Hill, some men would “grow faint and freeze. We’d have to send down a man to pry ‘em loose.”
The miners’ first order of business was to widen the shaft, first to a diameter of 30-feet and then to 100-feet. As the shaft was widened, larger wooden platforms were used for the workers. All of the platforms hugged the perimeter of the shaft, leaving a gaping hole in the middle. {See photo} It was time to test Growden’s plan. For those readers who have lived on an upper floor in a condominium, imagine that the hole in the center of the platform is a huge trash chute. (You will never find that description in an engineering textbook!)
Blasting and cutting at the rock walls, the miners began to hollow the massive tanks, eventually increasing the shaft’s diameter from 12-feet to 100-feet. As the miners loosened the rock, it slid and tumbled into the “trash chute,” hurtling hundreds of feet through the dark depths of the shaft. Heavy chains broke the fall of larger rocks, and the debris came to rest on the sturdy conveyor belts. The debris was then carried by the belts to a “jaw crusher,” which smashed it into manageable pieces. The rubble was then carried by the belts to a rock quarry outside the tunnel. All of the five-million tons of muck excavated from Red Hill was put to good use. Some was used to resurface highways; some was mixed with cement and used to construct buildings on Pearl Harbor; and the rest was used as landfill. Kuahua Island in Pearl Harbor was connected to the shoreline using Red Hill landfill.
Growden’s plan, which some had labeled “preposterous,” worked remarkably well. Approximately 75 percent of the rock which was unearthed and removed during Red Hill’s excavation was “untouched by human hands.” Each time a worker’s pick struck the wall or a blast of dynamite removed a stubborn section of rock, the loosened material simply tumbled down the shaft to the conveyor belts. This saved a tremendous amount of time and labor and was a primary reason the project was completed nine months ahead of schedule . . . despite a world war!
The first of the 20 tanks was completed on September 26, 1942. Due to the urgencies of the war, it was placed immediately into service, despite the fact that work was still progressing on the remaining 19 tanks. It issued its first fuel on October 27 to the submarine USS Tarpon. The last of the 20 tanks was completed on September 30, 1943.
The Howling Owl
Ninety-percent of the work took place underground. To aid in the transport of materials, 13,000 linear feet of train tracks were removed from Oahu’s cane fields and laid in the lower tunnel. A two-car train pulled by a miniature “locomotive” with the colorful name “Howling Owl” propelled the train through the Underground, hauling workers and equipment to various stops along the route.
The origin of the name “Howling Owl” is long lost. One theory suggests that the train’s mournful hoot is similar to the hoot of an owl. Another theory claims that the name stems from the Underground Railroad used by escaping slaves in the southern United States. Slaves planning to flee were told to await the signal - a howling owl.
The train is still in use today and, travels beneath Moanalua freeway and nearby communities, such as Foster Village, Aliamanu Military Reservation, and Coast Guard housing, where some residents have claimed their homes vibrate when the subterranean train passes below.
Members of one of Red Hill's softball teams. Note the team's name on their shirts: "The Underground." There were also boxing, wrestling, volleyball, football, ping pong, badminton, horseshoe and swimming teams. A pool was constructed near the barracks. Some of Waikiki's best entertainers performed on weekends, although they had no idea what was being built. (That was the plan, anyway, but they probably knew every time a new 2x4 was added.) Joe Kaulukukui, Red Hill's athletic director, is in the front row, third from left. Joe was one of numerous Hawaiians who worked at Red Hill. His brother, Jim, is to his right, and K. Kaleikau is to his left. Sam Kahanamoku, Duke Kahanamoku's brother, is not in the photo, but he was an equipment expeditor at the project. According to the remembrances of R. Keith Leventon, "Sam was a great addition to any party because of his cheerful demeanor and his ability to pick up his guitar or a ukulele and play and sing almost anything." Another Hawaiian, Joe Kunane, was the steel fabrication superintendent. (Photo courtesy of Buzz Larson)
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The "Sissy's Climb!"
Some of the best trades workers on the island could be found at Red Hill, and when other island projects encountered insurmountable hurdles, skilled Red Hill workers were brought in to lend a hand. One place where they were needed was in an area that is quite familiar to many island residents: Haiku Valley.
World War II required that O’ahu have a reliable and powerful radio transmitter, and engineers determined that the best site for this was a lofty peak at an elevation of 2,800-feet at the back of Haiku Valley.
Before construction could begin, the engineers realized the beetling heights that led to the top of Haiku Valley needed to be scaled. This left a dilemma: Where do you find the type of men who could scale a near-vertical cliff of crumbling lava? There was only one answer: Red Hill.
At Red Hill, the engineers located two fearless fellows named Bill Adams and Louis Otto, both experienced “high scalers’ from the midwest. Armed with a coil of rope, a rock pick, and as many steel spikes as they could carry, the two daring fellows set out to conquer the near-vertical, crumbling slopes that led to the summit.
Clinging precariously to the towering heights, they inched up the frightful precipice. It was often raining, and thick clouds and fog limited visibility. Every few feet, they hammered a spike into the cliff wall, and when they exhausted their supply, they came down for more. Twenty-one days after they began, they finally pulled themselves over the 2,800-foot ridgeline. The Windward coast stretched dizzyingly before them.
Another crew of workmen followed the spikes in the cliff, constructing a 9,000-foot stairway with 3,922 steps that Adams and Otto derisively labeled a “sissy’s climb.” Today, that sissy’s climb is known as the Stairway to Heaven and has broken the nerve of many a hiker, sissy or not. The stairway is now off-limits to hikers (trespassers have been arrested), but if the day comes when it reopens, try to imagine scaling those cliffs without the benefit of a staircase!
A Triumphal Return
Approximately 80 years ago, the fellows in the photo were excavating the vast underground labyrinth that we know today as the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility. When completed, the massive facility was not only one of America's most vital wartime projects, it was also recognized for many years as the greatest system of underground storage tanks ever built. Its successful construction, despite obstacles of unprecedented magnitude, is a testament to the ingenuity and resolve that built this nation.
The workers' triumph was subdued, as the project had been a closely-held secret for decades, and all personnel were required to sign an affidavit that they would mention the facility to no one. Because of this, the thousands of workers who built the Red Hill facility were overlooked and forgotten. They never had a ceremony with the governor; they never had their names inscribed on a plaque.
In 1943, when their task was done, they drifted home in anonymity, sworn to secrecy, their extraordinary accomplishment hidden by many tons of rock and dirt, and they never dreamed that more than a half-century would pass before the world would learn of their staggering achievement. But the world would learn. On a balmy, summer day in 1995, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) recognized the Underground as a National Historic Civil Engineering Monument, which placed the fuel facility in illustrious company. Other ASCE landmarks include Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Erie Canal, the Statue of Liberty and other prominent projects. Invited back to mark the occasion were about 80 of the aging men who built this underground colossus - Kaulukukuis and O'Briens, Domingos and Leventons, Hamadas and Helmicks - a diverse, cross-section of America that 54 years earlier had put aside their vast differences and become a cohesive construction team, working shoulder-to-shoulder deep in the sweltering pit that was Red Hill.
They came from across the nation, some with canes and some with walkers, bent and weary men, but men whose eyes lit and whose steps lightened as they descended once again into The Underground and glimpsed the wartime project they had not seen in five decades. With uneasy steps they trod through the tunnels; they felt the gunite and sniffed the air, and they journeyed back to a time when they could hear the strike of the picks and the rumble of falling rock, when the dust and the grit and the acridness from the dynamite blasts filled their lungs, where men cursed and sweated and died in shadowy tunnels.
Philip Genovese, of Connecticut, recalled "the thunderous crescendo of a hundred jackhammers" as well as "the supernatural feeling of space, wonder, and awe that I experienced in the silence underground."
Joe Kaulukukui's closing remarks in his 1995 message echo the feelings of most Red Hill workers: "My years at Red Hill marked me deeply. I never pass this way without memories from that time. I am proud to have been part of this history."
Oddly, no above-ground plaque or memorial marks the passage of the Red Hill builders. For the most part, their names, including the names of most of the 17 who died, are forever lost. Their extraordinary accomplishment is buried deep inside a forested ridge, and the only visible evidence that anything out of the ordinary ever occurred on the secluded site are a series of massive iron doors in a lonely hillside.
Yet something very unusual and momentous did happen here, and it's a story that deserves to be told. It's a story that should not be erased due to the events and grave mistakes of the past few years. It's a story of a great diversity of men who banded together at Red Hill for a bold and brutal engineering endeavor. It's the story of a great undertaking that pitted man and his primitive machinery against thick walls of unyielding rock. And it's a story in which Hawaii - and all of America - can take great pride. Two-thirds of the Red Hill work force were recruited from the cane fields and warehouses and industrial shops of these islands, and in Red Hill's underworld realm, they joined forces with men from across the nation. In the Underground's shadowy twists and turns, men of all faiths and all colors bored into the very bowels of the earth, working together on a magnificent American project.
By its very nature, Red Hill can never have the visual effect of a Hoover Dam or a Golden Gate Bridge. It is, in fact, sometimes referred to as the "best hidden” of all the nation's civil engineering landmarks. Its story, however, needn't be hidden. It deserves no less a prominence in Hawaii’s history than Hoover Dam has in Nevada’s history or the Golden Gate Bridge has in California’s.
Granted, one day next year, Red Hill will be closed. But it should not be forgotten.
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ADDENDUM
The men pictured above and the facility they built cannot be blamed for Red Hill's problems today. The Underground was built well. Human mistakes, not faulty construction, have led to Red Hill's leaks and to the grievous errors that brought serious health problems into too many homes.
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By far, the best account of the construction of the Underground is found in "Builders for Battle," by David Woodbury, published in 1946 by E. P. Dutton and Company. The well-written account includes numerous detailed illustrations. The Red Hill facility is only one of several wartime construction jobs covered in the book.
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Some people ask why the Red Hill facility was constructed in the same area as the Board of Water Supply's Halawa Shaft. Actually, work on Red Hill began nearly a full year before work began on the BWS Halawa Shaft. Construction of the Hālawa Shaft began on December 6, 1941; work started at Red Hill on December 26, 1940.
The Hālawa Shaft took 3 years to build and was completed on December 1, 1944. Red Hill was fully completed more than a year earlier.
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Just a Thought: After all 20 fuel tanks are drained, it would be fitting to save one empty tank - as well as the locomotive and train tracks - and create an on-site museum. Visitors with healthy nerves would be thrilled to walk across a railed catwalk inside the tank and gaze down more than 200-feet to the bottom, hearing the echo of their voices - or screams - as they gaze into the shadowed depths. And if they could board the underground train for perhaps a ride of one-mile inside the tunnel, they would have a memory that would last for a lifetime. There are thousands of construction photos of Red Hill and its workforce, and those photos - and other documents - could be organized into an interesting museum that recognizes the wonderful patchwork of all of Hawaii's races that joined the mainland workers to construct this engineering marvel.
In addition, and this is a long shot, deep inside a rarely-visited cavern at Ka'ena Point, this writer literally stumbled over a huge machine (pictured) located in total blackness in the back of the tunnel. It appears to be a mucking machine similar to those used in the construction of Red Hill. The Army was building coastal defenses in the Ka'ena Point hillside, and this could very well be a mucking machine that was first used at Red Hill and then moved to Ka'ena Point, where it was abandoned when the war ended. Like I said, a long shot . . . but plausible.
Somewhere under Ka'ena Point: Is it a mucking machine?
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Thank you for reading “The Underground.” I hope you found it interesting. If you liked this article and would like to read a smattering of lighter, shorter material, just click on “Blog” near the top of this post. You’ll find about 20 articles on a variety of subjects. “The Pilot and the Captain” is a true story of World War II compassion. “My Father’s Friend” is a true story of an unlikely friendship. “The Girl Who Sleeps Under the Viaduct” is a true story of, well . . . a young girl who sleeps under the viaduct that runs by Honolulu International Airport. More articles are on the way . . . as soon as I write them! Again, thank you!
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William dupont adams aka bill adams is my grandfather