Word: drilling
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Shaft. Around that narrow hole, a community rallied to the first radio call for help, and a nation anxiously waited for word of the lost child. Drills, derricks, bulldozers and trucks were rushed to the lot from a dozen towns. Three giant cranes lumbered through Los Angeles behind police escort. Firemen ran an air hose down the well, began pumping air down by a rotary pump. A little more than an hour after Kathy's fall, a power-drill crew began to sink a shaft alongside the abandoned well. On the other side, big clamshell shovels clawed an open...
...midnight, the shaft was down 41 feet; by 4 a.m., down 65 feet. Then the drilling stopped; the shaking of the drill might cave in the sandy California soil in the bigger pit. As dawn broke hot and clear over the San Gabriel Mountains, the snorting, clangorous power shovels had dug a pit 57 feet deep. "Whitey" Blickensderfer, 43, an unemployed ex-sandhog, was lowered into the crater with a partner-little, gnomelike O. A. Kelly, an out-of-work carpenter and ex-miner. By midmorning, they had tunneled to the well pipe, cut a small exploratory window...
They decided not to dig any further in the open excavation, and concentrated instead on the narrow shaft. All that hot, still afternoon, the big drill ground away. The shaft had to be lined by 24-in. casing, to prevent a cave-in. It was Saturday, and all afternoon the crowds thickened. By midnight, 12,000 were standing in the chilly spring night-grave, subdued neighbors, sightseers and dating teenagers, men & women in evening dress. In a car a little back from the scene, David Fiscus and his wife sat out their vigil. To sympathetic queries, he said wearily...
Digging by Hand. The drill ran into trouble just short of the 100-ft. mark. In relays, men were lowered by a hoisting bucket to dig the rest of the way by hand. It was grueling work. Dirt and rocks as big as a man's head had to be hoisted up bucket by bucket. Burly Bill Yancey, a 38-year-old sewerage contractor who had been on a wartime underwater demolition team, dug for two hours and 20 minutes before he was hauled...
Eliot House Dance Committee, R.O.T.C. Drill Team...