Digging Ely

Very little goes underground here — mainly water and sewer. The soil is full of rocks (sometimes boulders), making it expensive to dig. And the soil is underlaid by a vast slab of hard igneous rock (the "rock ledge" as it's usually referred to). At no place is there much soil (maybe a few feet?), and in many places the rock ledge rises above the dirt.

When Ely was founded they must have used a lot of diamond-tipped drills and dynamite and man-hours of labor to cut channels in that hard rock for water and sewer pipes.