Dressed in boots, sweatshirt, overalls and a white hard hat, Mark Maksimovich clambers down an aluminum ladder into a shaft three storeys deep and then crawls into a tunnel the height of a Mini Cooper. It is 7 a.m. and this channel beneath Avenue Rd. is where he will spend the next seven hours.

This is his workspace.

“It’s a tough job, very physical, but you get used to it,” says Maksimovich, as he surveys the 80-metre-long tunnel he and his team have excavated in the past six weeks.

When they’re done, they will have dug 120 metres beneath Avenue, from Castlefield to Roselawn Rds.

Maksimovich, 43, is an expert in hand tunnelling, which involves kneeling in a damp, cramped space to slice away at tonnes of soil using nothing more than shovels and air spades. With a laser as their guide, the task is still arduous — one wrong swing of the shovel and there goes your utility service.

Tunnelling is one of two methods being used to construct the $60 million Avenue Rd. water main, from north of Dupont St. to south of Lawrence Ave. W. Crews are laying 5.4 kilometres of pipe, some as deep as 15 metres, in one of Toronto Water’s largest and most complex projects. Work started last June and is due to be complete by late 2012.

Other sections of pipe are being installed in trenches.

Tunnelling is less disruptive but more complicated and needs launch and retrieval shafts. It is also the obvious choice for sections where the water main must be installed deep, below the existing maze of utilities, says Larry Korson, the city’s manager of water supply.

“Because tunnelling was for short distances, we didn’t need a tunneller,” says Korson, explaining the choice of hand tunnelling.

Drainstar Construction, the general contractor, has hired three specialist companies for the tunnelling: Jimmy Mack & Son Construction Ltd., Elliott Underground Ltd. and Armagh Contractors Ltd.

Maksimovich is the son in Jimmy Mack & Son, vice-president of the company started by his father in 1984. He began hand tunnelling in 1982 and did it for a few years before enrolling at Mohawk College in Hamilton to study civil engineering and technology.

He graduated in 1992 and has since worked full-time.

The 6-foot tall, well-built man with graying hair and a shy smile says he hand tunnelled for more than a year before taking up other roles on the job.

A crew of four or five people usually works on a project, whether it’s six metres or 50 metres below the surface. Two or three people do the digging, one stays at the opening of the tunnel to synchronize activities while another operates a crane above, lowering supplies and hoisting excavated dirt.

Before they begin, they are given a map of the surrounding utilities and the path the tunnel will take. “We usually know what to expect,” says Maksimovich.

But they are always ready for the unexpected.

As the hole progresses, 2.5-metre-long sections of large steel casing pipe are pushed in with compressed air to shore up the tunnel. The water main will be installed within and be encased in concrete for stability.

A “locomotive” — a platform on tracks propelled by compressed air — ferries workers to their task and brings back buckets of soil. About 15 cubic metres of earth — 30 tonnes — is dug out daily, resulting in roughly seven metres of progress.

On a recent icy morning at Avenue and Castlefield, Manuel Macaes operates the crane, Maksimovich sits hunched at the opening of the tunnel awaiting a signal that the next bucket of earth is coming while two workers shovel 80 metres away, deep in the tunnel.

Fresh snow surrounds the shaft, some water is standing at the bottom — melting snow — icicles have formed on the sides of the tunnel and far inside, as far as you can see . . . you can’t see anything at all.

“It’s not scary but your body takes a lot of abuse,” says Macaes, who has worked with Maksimovich since 1998 and has done hand tunnelling too.

Arduous physical labour isn’t the only challenge. Crews can encounter anything from boulders to a high water table, even flowing soil.

Nothing untoward has reared its head yet in this tunnel, but at Avenue Rd. and St. Clair Ave., crews discovered a high water table, which is unsuitable for a tunnel. Millions of litres are still being pumped from beneath the intersection to prepare the ground for tunnelling.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Maksimovich’s toughest job was tunnelling a sanitary sewer at Jane St. and Rutherford Rd. in Vaughan. “The ground was very wet and those were long tunnels.”

Another tough job was near the Moffat Creek in Cambridge, Ont., where his crew ran into gravel with water, sandy soil and boulders.

But there’s not one job he hasn’t been able to finish.

“If there’s a big problem on one side, you start digging at the other and then when the two get close . . . you make them meet,” he says.

Workers must really know what they’re doing, says Maksimovich. “I don’t think there are more than two dozen skilled people doing this in the whole province.”

Skill aside, it also helps to be under 6 feet tall, sturdy as a fire hydrant and patient as a spider.

Maksimovich and his crew are contracted to do at least four more tunnels in the Avenue Rd. project.

“There’s always work in this field,” says the father of three who lives in Hamilton. “Can’t remember a time when it’s been slow.”

What Maksimovich does remember is the fear he feels the first time he looks into a pit — where he’ll be climbing in and out at least twice a day for lunch or tea breaks.

“I’m scared of heights,” he says, as he swings over a corner of the shaft and clambers down the aluminum ladder.

The Star is chronicling on an ongoing basis construction of the Avenue Rd. water main through its tunnels, trenches and excavators, but mostly through the people who make it happen.