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60 Minutes II: The Chunnel
Wednesday, February 6, 2002
The Columbia Broadcasting System

No wind in the hair, salt air in the lungs, just the gentle clicking of the rails at 100 miles an hour in the pitch darkness underneath the waves.

* Across The Channel
* Revisiting An Engineering Marvel
* Some Brits Hate It
CBS
In a 60 Minutes classic, we re-visit an engineering marvel. They call it the Chunnel - what else would you call a tunnel underneath the channel that separates Britain from France.

When we first reported this story more than a decade ago, many in Britain worried about the negative impact the tunnel would have. And some of those worries have come true as thousands of refugees from places like Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq have tried to illegally enter the tunnel from France and make their way to Britain. Steve Kroft reports.

In late December, more than 500 asylum-seekers broke through barbed wire fences and stormed the tunnel. French police captured all of them, but not before they managed to shut the tunnel down for 10 hours. It was the third such incident since Sept. 11.

In 1990, the Chunnel was still being built. It was built from Sangatte, France, south of Calais, to the suburb of Folkestone, England, beneath a body of water Shakespeare called a moat built by nature herself. Threee hundred feet beneath the sea, 9,000 workers moved tons of earth and equipment to change that.

The French dug northwest, the British southeast at a rate of 33 yards and $5 million a day. They met, and by 1993 reduced Shakespeare's moat into a dark blip on a high-speed rail train between Paris and London. It changed the face of Europe forever, like it or not, and there were plenty of people who did not.

In pastoral Kent, where the tunnel touches British soil, village vicars preached against it from the pulpit.
(More: CBSNews.com News Source)
2002 © CBS Worldwide Inc.

Dan