By lyndamyer
Due to winter commencing in the Snowy Mountains, the Snowy 2.0 construction site’s activity is hotting up.
This massive pumped-hydro project has employed more than 1,000 people, also 50-t and 25-t excavators are working hard on the headrace tunnel adit on the TBM portal in rugged, wintry conditions at Tantangara.
While a major breakthrough has been achieved at Lobs Hole, at the Emergency, Cable, and Ventilation Tunnel portal, the tunneling process is underway, with the Lady Eileen Hudson TBM on the move and its distance is more than 30m into the mountainside. The Lady Eileen Hudson TBM is the first TBM of this project and it is digging the 2.6 km main access tunnel.
Revealing names of the last two Snowy 2.0 TBMs
‘Kirsten and Florence’ announced as the winner names for two of the Snowy 2.0 TBMS by Snowy Hydro.
Named after groundbreaking Australian women from science, technology engineering, and maths (STEM), as part of the Snowy 2.0 TBM Naming Competition, astrophysicist Kirsten Banks and Australia’s first electrical engineer Florence Violet McKenzie received the majority of public votes.
While the three Snowy 2.0 TBMs have names currently, the name of the first of them is in the honor of Lady Eileen Hudson, the original Snowy Scheme ambassador, and wife of inaugural Commissioner, Sir William Hudson.
‘An astrophysicist, science communicator and proud Wiradjuri woman, who loves to contribute her excitement for the stars and is famous for her short and entertaining TikTok videos about space and astronomy’ is Kirsten Banks’s personality. Currently, she is doing a Ph.D. in the field of galactic archaeology, studying the stars of the Milky Way to uncover secrets of its formation and evolution.
Florence Violet McKenzie (1890 – 1982) is best known for her contribution to women’s technical education and for creating the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps during World War II. She taught women telegraphy so they could replace men in this civilian occupation, however, she also trained more than 12,000 servicemen in morse code.
The July updates of this project, which showing tunneling progress at the main access tunnel portal works at the Emergency, Cable, and Ventilation Tunnel portal and at the main construction site, are accessible in this video.
