Mexico/US Border Drug Tunnels Just Keep Getting Better and Better Alexander Abad-Santos - The Atlantic Wire
go to original July 10, 2012

Ventilation, electric lights, and wagons so your arms don't get tired from carrying all those drugs - those wonderful upgrades were found in a drug-smuggling tunnel from Sonora, Mexico to Arizona by the Mexican army this week. It's the 22nd tunnel discovered in the past three years, The BBC reports.

The video still gives us and anyone with a slight case of claustrophobia a queasy feeling, and according to The Associated Press, it's about four feet high, plunges to a vertigo-inducing depth of about 59 feet below ground, and is about 750 feet long. Yes, if we were narcotics officials we'd probably let our robot do the work for us (they have those you know).

Wired notes:

    What you don’t know: where the other end is, who’s in it, what they’ve left behind. Is it booby-trapped? Is it big enough for a person to walk through? Is the air quality lethal? Who’s on the other end and where?

    In about 10 or 15 minutes, without putting an agent into a terrifying hole leading to unknown danger, the Tunnel Task Force team can deploy a custom robot to gather some of those answers. Using an 80-pound robot that combines air sampling equipment, lights, a camera mounted on a robot motoring on tank treads, which is itself tethered to a broad, yellow coated bundle of wires that reels out behind it. Agents can get the robot about 500 feet into a tunnel to start to figure out if it’s safe to send an agent in and what gear the agent is going to need.

And they've included video (below) of an actual and elaborate (this particular tunnel has a ventilation system and lighting) tunnel, driving the point home (for your claustrophobic correspondent at least) about the value of these robots.

You can read the whole article over at Wired

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