The basalt is taken to the Wiri Quarry in South Auckland where the project has established a crushing plant. It would seem logical to have established a crushing plant at the site itself, but read on.
Some of the crushed rock will be trucked back to Waterview to be reused on the project and the surplus is being sold as metal for gabions, road foundations and backfill. Gabions are those wire cages filled with rock that are used for erosion control and trendy garden walls, among other things. The project has also established a landfill at the quarry for disposal of the estimated 800,000cu m of material that will be removed from the tunnels themselves. This means that over the life of the Waterview project, the old quarry will be rehabilitated ready for redevelopment as a commercial area. This would seem to be why the crushing plant is at Wiri.
The tunnelling machine, otherwise known as an "earth pressure balance machine" (EPBM), will bore twin 14m-diameter tunnels of total length 2.5km, at a maximum depth of 45m, just part of the new 4.8km, six lane motorway. Tunnelling is expensive, and the cost of the custom-built EPBM plus the associated work accounts for over two-thirds of the project's budget. The tunnels it creates will be the largest ever built in Australasia.
Tunnelling is expected to start in early 2014, with the Western Ring Route, of which the Waterview Connection is part, completed and open by 2017.