When the Rock Fights Back: Akkerman TBMs Prove Their Worth in the American West

There is a moment on every hard rock bore when the machine either earns your trust or doesn’t. The cutterhead engages, the formation pushes back, and every decision made in the design process (the torque spec, the disc geometry, the bearing load) either holds up or it doesn’t. Over the past year, two projects on opposite ends of Arizona and Nevada answered that question convincingly, and the contractors who ran them weren’t shy about saying so.

Oak Creek, Arizona: Hidden Work on a Scenic Highway

Most people driving Arizona’s Highway 179 through the red rock country of Oak Creek are watching the canyon walls, not thinking about what’s happening twenty feet beneath the asphalt. That’s exactly the point.

SSC Underground of Phoenix, AZ, working alongside Arizona Trench Company, was contracted to install trenchless utility crossings beneath the roadway, keeping the surface undisturbed while the real work happened underground. The equipment they chose for the job: an Akkerman 480-D Tunnel Boring Machine.

The first drive broke through into the receiving pit cleanly. SSC’s crew captured the moment, the retrieval of the cutterhead as it emerged from the rock face, and it became the kind of milestone photo that says more than any spec sheet. The second drive required a different kind of skill before boring even began. With a confined launch pit and no room for error, SSC’s team used two excavators working in tandem to lift the TBM into position. It’s a maneuver that demands clear communication and precise coordination, exactly the conditions that separate experienced trenchless crews from the rest. They executed it perfectly.

On May 18th, SSC posted the completion of the second 270-foot drive, 60-inch Hobas pipe installed for an electrical duct bank, crew celebrated, project closed out. Two drives. Two clean breakthroughs. Surface on Highway 179 never touched.

What struck me reading SSC’s posts wasn’t just the result. It was the pride. These are crews who know their equipment, trust it, and show up every day ready to prove it.

North Las Vegas, Nevada: 20,000 PSI and a Turtle Named Tortuga

If Oak Creek was a story about precision and discretion, the Southern Nevada Water Authority project in North Las Vegas was something else entirely. It was a straight-ahead fight with some of the hardest rock a conventional pipe jacking TBM is likely to encounter anywhere in the country.

BT Construction of Henderson, CO, working alongside Ames Construction, launched their Akkerman 480 Series II TBM in late June with a clear mission: accurately bore 500 feet through hard rock to connect a critical water supply line for the new Apex Industrial Complex, a facility that would depend on the finished tunnel to deliver 20 million gallons of water per day. The crew named the machine “Tortuga,” a nod to the desert tortoises that share the Mojave landscape. It was a small gesture, but it said something about the culture of the team running the project.

What followed was seven weeks of work in Nevada summer heat through rock that tested the limits of the machine and the people operating it. The formation measured 20,000 psi, well into the range where lesser cutterheads walk off bearing surfaces and disc holders begin to fail. The Akkerman rock head held.

On August 13th, Tortuga broke through the far wall. BT Superintendent Matt Hooker summed it up better than I could: “This is probably the straightest tunnel I’ve ever seen. It’s within the width of a BB.” The cutterhead, he noted, came out sounding exactly like it did when it went in and looked ready to keep boring.

What These Two Projects Tell Us

Oak Creek and North Las Vegas couldn’t be more different in purpose. One is an electrical conduit crossing tucked beneath a scenic desert highway. The other is a 60-inch tunnel engineered to carry 20 million gallons of water per day to a growing industrial complex. Different owners, different applications, different demands. Yet both called for the same solution: an American-made Akkerman TBM.

These two projects are not outliers. Across the country, skilled trenchless contractors are pushing conventional TBMs into increasingly demanding conditions and achieving results that would have seemed unlikely a generation ago. It is their expertise, their crews, and their willingness to take on the difficult work that makes these machines perform. Akkerman is proud to be the equipment of choice when the stakes are highest, and equally proud of the people who put that equipment to work.

The machines went in, the rock pushed back, and the crews bored through. That’s the story.

Jason Holden is Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer at Akkerman, Inc., a manufacturer of trenchless equipment headquartered in Brownsdale, Minnesota.