The Secret Digging
This web page is the result of a story in The Honolulu Advertiser years ago and now Aloha Airlines magazine.
1 of 5 National Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks
(Brooklyn Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, Panama Canal, Red Hill)
Many of the men recruited were from the mines of Appalachia, the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. Workers were lowered into the hole that was drilled for the center of each tank. There they would chip away at the rock, until they had created a hole 100 feet in diameter and 250 feet deep each, for a total of 20 enormous tanks, with a total capacity of 252 million gallons of fuel. The work was claustrophobic and then as the hole became bigger, scary because of the dark heights. At times a worker would "freeze" and would have to be pried loose and hauled out to be revived. Two thirds  the workers were recruited from the local shipyard and cane fields.  Many of them were of Japanese-American ancestry, it was said they were fiercely patriotic and dam good workers. The 3000 men worked in secrecy 24 hours a day, 364 days a year, from Dec. 1940 until Sept. 1943, they couldn't even tell their families what they were doing.





The tunnel from red hill to Pearl Harbor is 15 ft high and electric trains are used to traverse the distance.