The giant drilling machine tunneling its way through the ground underneath Amsterdam’s centuries-old inner city has reached Dam square.
At a speed of 15 meters a day it has already passed two state monuments — the former stock market and the Bijenkorf warehouse. The historic buildings incurred no damage.
The collapse yesterday of a buiding in the city center of Cologne, Germany, reverberated loudly in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
German authorities haven’t yet determined what brought down the structure, which housed Cologne’s historical archive, but the city is building a new subway line under the buildings that collapsed. Amsterdam is also building a subway line underneath its historic center, and buildings along the project have already sustained damage.
It is unclear whether constuction on the new North-South line of the Amsterdam metro will ever be completed.
After yet another financial setback work on the project has virtually halted — and today Tjeerd Herrema, Alderman for Traffic, Transport and Infrastructure, today resigned from his position.
The fire brigade has removed the occupants of four buildings at Vijzelgracht, in Amsterdam center, because their homes had subsided during then night as a direct result of construction work for a new leg of Amsterdam’s subway system