A Lifeline Is Built Deep Under New York City -- Mammoth Water Tunnel Is Engineering Triumph

NEW YORK - In bedrock that predates the last ice age by millions of years, as deep in the ground as a skyscraper is tall, a new lifeline is being built for New York City.

The city's commissioner of environmental protection, Joel Miele, calls it "the largest infrastructure project in the Western Hemisphere."

It's a mammoth water tunnel, 64 miles long, able to carry 1 billion gallons a day. The concrete-lined tunnel ranges in diameter from 10 to 24 feet and lies 800 feet underground at its deepest point.

Construction began in 1970 and is expected to be completed in 2015. It will cost between $5 billion and $6 billion.

The project has even attracted attention from Hollywood: The plot of "Die Hard With a Vengeance" turned on robbers driving dump trucks loaded with gold from the Federal Reserve through the waterless conduit.

By any measure, the system is an engineering triumph. But it's especially remarkable in an era when "infrastructure" usually connotes something that was built by a bygone generation and that now needs repairs, instead of something new.

"We've gotten into this lament that there's nothing but potholes in New York City. But that's not the whole story," said John Jay Iselin, president of Cooper Union, the prestigious Manhattan engineering college whose founder, Peter Cooper, helped build the city's first water system in the mid 19th century.

Recently, Cooper Union bestowed its "Builder of the City" award on George Fox, a 1940 alumnus whose company, Grow Tunneling, built most of the new tunnel.

"He's devoting his life and his energy to New York's future," Iselin said. "His greatest work will only be appreciated in another era."

A futuristic work

Fox, 76, recently retired as president of Grow after spending two decades digging the new tunnel. But his familiarity with the subject has not lessened his awe.

"It's `Star Wars' underground," he said. "It's science fiction. It's futuristic.

"We have 7 1/2 million residents in the city, and I don't know how many come in to work each day from the suburbs, but they turn a spigot and boom! they got fresh water. I don't think I'm a hick, but I think it's kind of miraculous."

The new system, called the Third Tunnel, system parallels two existing tunnels, one completed in 1917 and the other in 1937. The old tunnels have never been taken out of service, so the new tunnel will allow engineers to drain and rehabilitate the old conduits one at a time.

Daily water usage in New York City is about 1.5 billion gallons. Together the original tunnels carry that much, but they were not designed to do so. The Third Tunnel can carry 1 billion gallons on its own and will always be used in tandem with one of the old tunnels.

The new system is being built in four stages. The first 13 1/2-mile stretch from the Bronx through Manhattan and Brooklyn to Astoria, Queens, will be ready for use in about a year.

Stage 2 will extend the Brooklyn-Queens line and hook up with a tunnel built in the 1960s to supply Staten Island. The last two stages will provide a new connection to a second reservoir in Westchester and will deliver more water to the Bronx and Queens.

The heart of the new system is a chamber, 250 feet beneath Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and three city blocks long, that houses 36 gigantic valves. Here water will be apportioned and routed throughout the city. If a problem ever arises, the valves can isolate and block individual legs of the system. The old system offered no comparable controls.

Long job for `sandhogs'

Fox emphasizes that he is only one of hundreds who have helped create the Third Tunnel, from city engineers to Local 147, formally called the Compressed Air Workers Union but known in the trade as "sandhogs."

"They been working on it so long, a lot of guys since 1970, they've seen it go from the groundbreaking 'til now," said Richard Fitzsimmons, 36, the union's business manager and a sandhog - like his father - since he was 18. "These jobs are long. I'm probably going to be retired and they'll still be working on the tunnel."

The sandhogs' main job is to demolish the rock for the tunnel opening. Their nickname dates to the 1870s, when they hauled out sand for the footings of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The work was always dangerous and continues to be so. Twenty-one men have died in the past 20 years building the Third Tunnel.

But the work is getting easier. For years, tunnels were created by chiseling - later drilling - a hole in rock, stuffing in explosives and blasting out debris. Now machines equipped with rotating steel blades can bore smooth holes in the rock - even the type of exceptionally hard rock found beneath New York City.

The first years of construction on the Third Tunnel averaged 20 feet of progress a day using the drill-and-blast method. In the past five years, the tunnel-boring machines have been getting through 50 to 90 feet a day.

The water tunnels link aqueducts that bring the water downstate with a network of 6,000 miles of pipes that supply every building and hydrant in the city.

System uses no energy

No energy is used to move the water; the system relies entirely on gravity. The pressure of the water is so strong that it flows to the top of a six-story building without being pumped.

Fox says the fact that the Third Tunnel will most benefit future generations never bothered him.

"We are so caught up in the firing line, in the problem of building the tunnel, that we don't have much time to reflect on the big picture," he said. "They don't cut ribbons for water tunnels, but they should."