[Image: Unfilled tunnels a weak link at border, Don Bartletti / LAT, 2007.]
Richard Marosi has written another super-informative article in the Los Angles Times as he watches over the smuggler tunnels under the U.S.-Mexico border. If you didn’t read his previous article on militarizing the tunnels, which I relayed earlier, go read it now for more background. With regards to sealing them, or filling them, so that smugglers cannot use the tunnels again, let me pass on the gist of what he says (forgive me while I cut-n-paste large chunks of his article below):

Seven of the largest tunnels discovered under the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years have yet to be filled. One of which is the longest yet found and extends nearly half a mile from San Diego to Tijuana. There’s another sophisticated passageway, he says, once known as the Taj Mahal of tunnels, which has been sitting unfilled for 13 years. Filling the seven tunnels would cost about $2.7 million, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials.


[Image: Unfilled tunnels a weak link at border, Don Bartletti / LAT, 2007.]
After the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2003, the responsibility for filling tunnels was assigned to one agency: Customs and Border Protection. An agency spokesman, said the CBP is trying to find money in its budget to complete the work. The 2007 budget for them, Marosi reports, is $7.8 billion.


[Image: Unfilled tunnels a weak link at border, Don Bartletti / LAT, 2007.]
In recent years nearly 50 tunnels have been discovered running under the border from San Diego to Arizona. Most are small, crudely constructed passages — called gopher holes — that are easily destroyed. For the larger passages, concrete plugs, Marosi tells us, usually close off the tunnels where crossers slip under the border at main entrance and exit points – still the areas in between remain largely intact. However, smugglers have used this concrete as re-purposed material for fortifying their own branch-off tunnels, and even just as markers of directions to dig away from. The tunnelers' continued success has forced U.S. authorities to team with structural and civil engineers and geologists, who have devised a special type of concrete that they hope will cave in if smugglers use it for subterranean structural support.


[Image: Unfilled tunnels a weak link at border, Don Bartletti / LAT, 2007.]
He then cites a couple of different instances of tunnels which have been used, filled, and re-used multiple times over the last few years, under private properties in and around Nogales (see video in this article).


[Image: Unfilled tunnels a weak link at border, Don Bartletti / LAT, 2007.]

Among the unfilled passages:

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