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Suburban Underground Vadders
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Downtown Tunnels - Austin
Click on the pictures to enlarge!
This is the middle tunnel. Quite a bit more narrow but still tall enough to stand in.
When the middle and right tunnels merged into one I saw this laying on the ground. Looks like a water meter lid. In any case the only things I can make out are the star and “Austin Texas” in the circle around it.
Now, looking back you can see that these two tunnels merge into one again. I’m not sure but I think that means that the 3 way split goes from one tunnel to three and then back to one again. I’m not really sure about this.
The tunnel started getting a little low at this point as we could no longer stand upright. Even with the power of CMH4’s Big Garity © flashlight we couldn’t see the end or any turn.
We had seen a lot of curbside drain slots along the way but when we came to this one I realized that I might be able to push the manhole lid open and slide it to the side without much of a problem. While contemplating this we could see people parking at the apartments across the street.
Even though neither of us had done it before, we thought we would try to pop the lid and walk back to the car using the street rather than backtrack. We waited for a time when the street was clear and then this truck pulled up and stopped right in front of the drain slot and then backed up into a parking space.
After waiting a little while longer I pushed the lid up and felt dirt rain down on my head. Pushing the lid to the side wasn’t quite as easy as I thought it would be because it was all level with the grass surrounding it. Once I got it out of the way, we packed everything into my backpack and CMH4 boosted me up and out. Next, he handed me the gear and tried to get himself out. He tried to jump and grab a hold of the collar but slipped and bloodied up his elbows. I did the best I could to help him out from the surface and closed the lid.
Though we both got a little bruised up, I still think it was a pretty successful attempt to exit via manhole.
We pretty much traveled across the entire central downtown area to get back to the car and from what the GIS map said, we had traveled 16 blocks from the starting point to when we exited.
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