Thursday, October 17, 2013

New Water Tunnel Can Provide Water for All of Manhattan


There will be no new subway to board when the work is done, no elevator to ride to the top of a skyscraper. Even the name is shrouded in anonymity: Water Tunnel No. 3, the last in a trilogy that few New Yorkers would pay to see.


But as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg turned a ceremonial wheel in City Hall Park on Wednesday, sending waters gushing into a fountain, the city arrived at a seminal moment.


In one of the most significant milestones for the city’s water supply in nearly a century, the tunnel — authorized in 1954, begun in 1970 and considered the largest capital construction project ever undertaken in the five boroughs — will for the first time be equipped to provide water for all of Manhattan. Since 1917, the borough has relied on Tunnel No. 1, which was never inspected or significantly repaired after its opening.


“When I came into office,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “I asked, ‘What could literally close down this city?’ And a water tunnel failure would have really done that.”


The city has committed $ 4.7 billion on the project to date. A 10 1/2-mile section connecting Brooklyn and Queens will not be completed until 2021. It is intended to relieve the burden on Tunnel No. 2, which began operating in 1936.


“It’s not sexy,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference at a distribution site beneath Central Park. “And nobody says thank you.”


It has been a long road for the third tunnel. Though construction began more than 40 years ago, it had to be stopped several times because there was not enough money.


There have been mayors whose interest in the project appeared to wane and other hiccups that included a spell of what the city called rusty water, which recently left some faucets dripping brown during tunnel maintenance.


There have been 350-pound steel cutters, a 70-foot-long tunnel-boring machine and heaps of Manhattan schist. There have been generations of workers, known as sandhogs, charged with blasting through, hearing be damned, then resurfacing above ground to find, as one worker observed in 1973, that “you’re still shouting” long after a return home.


And there have been deaths, 24 of them, for many years “a man a mile,” in sandhog parlance. For those with decades of experience underground, or who had fathers or uncles or even grandfathers who toiled in one of the three tunnels, the memories are resilient enough to preclude even the faintest discussion of the better fortunes of recent years.


“When you’re a tunneler, you get a little superstitious,” said John McCluskey, a construction accountable manager for the Manhattan section of the project at the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.


In fact, no tunnel worker has been killed on the job since 1997.


For Mr. McCluskey, the tunnel has been his career’s work, spanning 21 years. He keeps a picture from a groundbreaking in Brooklyn in 1993, where he and other workers posed with Mayor David N. Dinkins.


Though the first tunnel may be taken out of service in the coming years, the source of the city’s water itself will not change. The three tunnels all originate at the Hillview Reservoir in Yonkers, near the Bronx border. From the reservoir, the first stage of the third tunnel extends south into the Bronx, then into Upper Manhattan, crossing the Harlem River and going down the West Side of Manhattan before an eastward turn into Central Park. It then crosses the East River into Astoria, Queens. That stage, about 13 miles long, was completed in 1993 and opened in 1998.


By 2006, crews had excavated a tunnel, 12 feet in diameter, down the West Side of Manhattan from Central Park to Canal Street, then into the eastern portion of Lower Manhattan. Four years later, the tunnel had been lined with almost three million cubic feet of concrete.


Outlining the future plans on Wednesday, city officials gathered in the concrete chamber below Central Park; it resembled the bunker of a cinematic supervillain — replete with sump pumps, giant valves and walls pocked with water stains that had aged to a medley of mossy greens.


The setting seemed to rouse Mr. Bloomberg, an engineering major in college, into an expansive mood. He held forth on geometric equations (“Pi r squared,” he reminded reporters, citing a formula for area), the history of the Brooklyn Bridge (“phenomenally dangerous work,” he said) and a 110-year-old, 950-page report in response to a looming water crisis, presented earlier by a deputy mayor.


“I’ll be reading that book later on,” he said.


Mr. Bloomberg has taken a particular interest in the project, noting for years that he has maintained financing even in the face of budget shortfalls.


In his zeal, though, the mayor might have tipped his hand about future plans long before anyone suspected he would eye an extended stay in City Hall.


In 2003, at the start of construction on the Manhattan leg of the tunnel, Mr. Bloomberg slipped on rubber boots and a yellow slicker, descended 550 feet below the city’s streets, and confided in one of the workers.


“I want to still be mayor when this is finished,” he said, “so I can dedicate it.”





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