Doesn’t really protect you from the rain Though it does look a little drier in there, behind the black-and-orange polypropylene netting And standing here under my umbrella I can imagine That a little protection from the wind would be nice…

They spray the perfume to mask the smell of the digging. They’re digging to reach bedrock, which is quite a ways down, cranes lowering hundreds of feet of cable into roughly rectangular holes, huge carbide-tipped cutting heads churning away to break up the moraine. If you did this dry, or worse yet lubricated with water, then the sides of the holes would collapse; you don’t want this, so you pump in drilling mud to create a slurry which can then be pumped back out, and the holes maintain their integrity and end up as neat orthogonal shafts plunging from the chaotic cityscape into the stable geology below it.…