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View from 600 feet below with city sandhogs

BY LAUREN JOHNSTON | amNY.com STAFF WRITER

June 20, 2006

In a shadowy, cavernous passageway 600 feet below midtown Manhattan, the temperature is about 55 degrees Fahrenheit year-round and it's always raining.

The ground is covered with a soppy muck that squishes and sucks at the bottoms of the rubber, knee-high boots that are requisite gear for those who work there.

This is the world of the sandhogs urban miners drilling through deep layers of bedrock nearly half a billion years old to build a third tunnel connecting city faucets to reserves of fresh drinking water upstate.

City Water Tunnel No. 3 is a four-stage construction project begun by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection in 1970 that is expected to cost about $6 billion and stretch more than 60 miles when completed in 2020.

The tunnel is part of a broader improvement plan to revamp the city water system which funnels 1.1 billion gallons of water daily throughout the five boroughs and is now fed by two tunnels built in 1917 and 1936 that have not been inspected since.

Each day, about 170 sandhogs laboring around the clock begin their workday on the west side of Midtown with a rumbling, four-minute elevator trip straight down a narrow mine shaft to a metal mesh platform overlooking the blasted cavity they call the "bell out" area.

The job is not for everyone.

"You gotta be willing to work hard, be alert and like getting dirty," said Jim Donovan, who started working as a sandhog 20 years ago when he was 18.

The work is strenuous, and it can be dangerous 24 sandhogs have died working on Water Tunnel No. 3. Accidents are a risk, and despite ventilation improvements, many sandhogs suffer some degree of the dust-related lung disease silicosis.

Richard Fitzsimmons, 46, business manager for the tunnel workers union Local 147, says about 80 percent of his sandhogs are eligible for workman's compensation when they retire mostly due to respiratory problems.

"DEP is pretty good when it comes to safety," he said. "If we report a dust problem, they will try to eliminate it. But there will always be some dust when you are doing heavy construction."

Despite these dangers, many sandhogs say they love the job.

For some it's the camaraderie, and the paycheck they are among the highest paid construction workers in the nation, earning about $100,000 in salary and benefits.

"It's an interesting job," said Patrick Brady, a 30-year-old Bronx native. "I enjoy it. It's hard work, but it's good pay and I have a good time."

For others, it's a fascination with the ancient mineral layers exposed as the tunnel is drilled.

"I love the rock," said Pierre LeFrancois, a DEP inspector who has been working in tunnels since 1960. "I'm a geologist, and the only place you can actually see the bare rock formation is underground."

The hum of machinery is constant at the work site and water drips from the jagged, rock ceiling and collects in puddles along railroad tracks that run nearly two miles through a 12-foot tunnel to the rock face the head of the tunnel excavation site.

Stage one of Water Tunnel No. 3 -- which stretches from Hillview Reservoir in Yonkers, through the Bronx and across to parts of Queens was activated in 1998.

Now in the second leg of stage two, the sandhogs are pounding out a passageway that shoots up and down Manhattan's far west side and snakes across town to a spot roughly beneath Second Avenue and 59th Street.

When stage two is completed in 2012 water will flow to parts of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan. Stage three will connect the upstate Kensico Reservoir to the Bronx and stage four, if necessary, will bring water to the eastern part of the Bronx and Queens in 2020.

In 'hogging' days gone by, they used a slow-going "drill and blast" method, but now they have "the mole" a massive-450-ton drill called the tunnel boring machine that runs on 13,800 volts of electrohydraulic power and grinds forward about 100 feet per day.

The cone-shaped head of the machine is fitted with 27 cutters that rotate and fracture the rock so it breaks off into palm-sized pieces that kick back to carts that transport debris to the surface.

Sandhogging tends to stay in the family and the men are often third, or even fourth generation.

Brady's father and grandfather were sandhogs. "A lot of people had their father working here a lot of these guys working here now worked with my dad," he said.

The word sandhog was first used in the 1870s to describe the laborers who burrowed below the East River to build the Brooklyn Bridge. And while few people see them in action we see the results of their work daily in the city's bridges and tunnels

"I wish every person went to college and didn't have to do this kind of work, but the bottom line is somebody has to do it," said Fitzsimmons.

"We bring clean water and, nothing happens without clean water."