In the belly of the mountain at Devils Slide

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Mercury News By Julia Scott Posted: 03/03/2010 06:14:08 PM PST

MONTARA — Being inside the tunnel at Devils Slide feels a little like being in an Indiana Jones movie — minus the terrifying killer boulders.

More than 3,000 feet deep in San Pedro Mountain is an eerie, half-lit universe of grinding and pounding as machines scrape and drill and blast the rock apart. Hard-hatted workers carrying flashlights pass by in tall rubber boots and orange construction vests. Sparks punctuate the semi-darkness. Dripping water coats the ground, creating muddy currents that flow toward daylight.

Every day, workers at Devils Slide get 5 feet of rock closer to conquering the longest, most-ambitious tunnel project in modern California highway history. They detonate dangerous
explosives, mine rock, lay rebar, spray concrete — over and over again, in rotating shifts 24 hours a day.

It's painstaking work, but well worth the rewards. Caltrans is 79 percent of the way through the mountain and is on schedule to break through to the north side of the mountain in late fall. Workers will then connect the tunnels to a cantilevered bridge that spans a valley in Pacifica.

Standing in the dank recesses of the northbound tunnel, it's hard to believe that just two years and six months have passed since the late U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos broke ground on the double-lane $300 million tunnel that will reroute Highway 1 traffic away from the landslide-prone cliff side.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime sort of job, if you know what I mean," said Ivan Ramirez, Caltrans senior engineer for the project.

A recent visit to the excavation site, 3,205 feet into the belly of the mountain, felt like a vaguely dangerous yet thrilling spelunking expedition to the center of the world. After suiting up with an emergency oxygen supply, visitor walked more than half a mile past dozens of workers laying concrete over metal rebar that covers the "crown" and "ribs" of the tunnel. The rebar itself is installed over a thick, yellow PVC membrane designed to keep the tunnel dry. Final touches will include alarms, a fire and traffic alert system, permanent lighting and ventilation.

Powerful fans circulate oxygen through the tunnels, allowing workers to breathe in spite of being enveloped by a mountain that stretches 656 feet above the rock they're standing on. The fans can't mask the smell, though — a combination of diesel exhaust and paint from the curing compound applied to the concrete.

"There's a lot of chemicals in here. That's what tunnels smell like," shrugged Ramirez.

For 10 hours a day, this is the only world workers inhabit. They don't get out to see daylight. They take meal breaks at a picnic bench in one of the tunnel's cross-passages.

Suddenly, there's no more tunnel to walk through — just a flat gray wall with a tunnel excavator parked in front of it, trimming the crown of the tunnel into a smooth dome with a carbide-tipped cutter head. Sparks fly as the yellow machine grinds down the jagged rock with care and precision. A worker stands next to the excavator, hosing down the cutter head to keep the dust down. Tonight, workers will set another round of plastic explosives.

"He has to learn how to measure how much he needs to cut, and that only comes from experience!" Ramirez yelled over the din.

Turning around, the entrance to the tunnel has shrunk to the size of a dime.

Won't someone run against Munks? Please?

Mercury News Editorial  Posted: 3-6-2010

Come Friday, San Mateo County Sheriff Greg Munks will probably breathe a huge sigh of relief. That is, unless someone in law enforcement actually shows the temerity to declare his or her candidacy for sheriff between now and then. We're hoping such a person emerges.

Otherwise, the county will almost automatically be represented another four years by a top cop who was busted early into his first term during a law enforcement raid of an illegal Las Vegas bordello.

Munks became a regional joke after he and Undersheriff Carlos Bolanos were caught up in the April 11, 2007, "Operation Dollhouse" raid two miles off the Las Vegas Strip. Even those who don't begrudge him his off-duty behavior in a state where prostitution is legal have to question his judgment for finding the rare brothel there that was actually illegal.

Unfortunately, Munks hasn't even tried to muster a plausible explanation for that night, steadfastly refusing to publicly answer questions. Almost three years later, we're still left with his initial and only public statement about the matter: "I believed I was going to a legitimate business. It was not."

If the sheriff of a county in the metropolitan Bay Area can't figure out he's in a brothel until the place is raided, maybe law enforcement isn't his natural calling.

But as we've pointed out before, the scandal transcends the sheriff alone. What the incident showed was that county supervisors were either too politically entrenched with Munks or flat out spineless to ask him for a public accounting of that April night. Instead, they lamely declared themselves powerless to question another elected official, dithered around and, after being lightly chided by two local congresswomen, created an "ethics commission" that doesn't meet and whose "members" weren't all told they had been selected.

The county's top prosecutors didn't cover themselves with glory, either. Because this happened outside their jurisdiction, they publicly washed their hands of the whole mess. What they did privately was a different matter, though.

"It isn't easy getting beaten up in the media, but hopefully it will all be yesterday's news by tomorrow," District Attorney Jim Fox wrote four days after the incident in an e-mail obtained by Palo Alto Daily News reporter Shaun Bishop.

And from Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe, who wrote Munks that same morning: "To those who matter, your decades of outstanding work in law enforcement are all that count and your integrity is not in the slightest marked by the modern media's efforts to make a story out of a non-story. Hard as it is to think now, remember it will be yesterday's news and irrelevant by tomorrow." Wagstaffe, by the way, is running for district attorney — also unopposed so far — to replace the retiring Fox.

In a county with 20 cities, certainly there has to be at least one police chief or other law enforcement officer courageous enough to give the sheriff a run for the seat, if only to coax some kind of public accounting out of him. The code of silence is deafening.