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If
you're wondering why the roads in Nogales, Arizona, near the border with
Mexico are riddled with square, symmetrical patches, the answer is that
those are the visible remnants of drug smugglers' newest creativity: temporary
drug smuggling tunnels!
In the latest innovation uncovered by law enforcement, smugglers in the border town of Nogales, Arizona were bringing drugs into the U.S. for the cost of a quarter.
The parking meters on International Street, which hugs the border fence in Nogales, cost 25 cents. Smugglers in Mexico tunneled under the fence and under the metered parking spaces, and then carefully cut neat rectangles out of the pavement. Their confederates on the U.S. side would park false-bottomed vehicles in the spaces above the holes, feed the meters, and then wait while the underground smugglers stuffed their cars full of drugs from below.
When the exchange was finished, the smugglers would use jacks to put the pavement "plugs" back into place. The car would drive away, and only those observers who were looking closely would notice the seams in the street.
It’s not easy getting trees to build a tunnel -they have to grow that way! But after many years, you end up with something spectacular. Check out a list of lovely tree tunnels from around the world, blossoming, growing, dormant, and even photographed in glorious autumn color. This photo shows a tunnel in Portugal. Link -Thanks, David!
(Image credit: Flickr user Raul Lieberwirth)
Why
are there secret ancient underground chambers and tunnels connecting old
farmhouses, churches and even cemeteries and forests in Bavaria, Germany?
Nobody knows - even the experts are baffled:
The vaults could not have served a practical purpose, as dwellings or to store food, for example, if only because the tunnels are so inconveniently narrow in places. Besides, some fill up with water in the winter. Also, the lack of evidence of feces indicates that they were not used to house livestock.
There is not a single written record of the construction of an Erdstall dating from the medieval period. "The tunnels were completely hushed up," says Ahlborn.
Archeologists have also been surprised to find that the tunnels are almost completely empty and appear to be swept clean, as if they were abodes for the spirits. One gallery contained an iron plowshare, while heavy millstones were found in three others. Virtually nothing else has turned up in the vaults.
There's one thing they do know: there are hundreds of these secret underground mazes all over Germany and Austria.
Link (Photo: Ben Behnke) - via BLDG BLOG
The blog 2M40 is about one underpass in Paris that has a clearance of only two meters and forty centimeters. Many truck drivers either do not read, do not understand, or do not believe the clearance warning. Several times a month, the underpass wins the battle against these drivers and 2m40 posts the pictures. The blog is in French, but the pictures tell the story. The tagline is “Un blog impactant,” which means “An impacting blog.” Link -via the Presurfer
Now this is a fantastic urban art: Artists Bar & Shay converted a drab tunnel in Tel Aviv into a rainbow tunnel!
Wooster Collective has a couple of more pics, though sadly not a word about the background story: Link
The tunnel under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn was New York’s first subway tunnel. It was built in 1844, then abandoned in the late 1850s. For over a hundred years, the tunnel seemed to be only a rumor, until an teenage urban Indiana Jones named Bob Diamond decided to unearth the tunnel once and for all. Link
