BY DENNIS LYNCH | Construction on a portion of the Hudson River Tunnel project at 12th Ave. and W. 30th St. will last seven years, a New Jersey Transit (NJT) official said on Tues., Feb. 21, during the monthly meeting of Community Board 4’s Chelsea Land Use Committee (CLU). The project should last from about 2019 to 2026, “depending on funding,” NJT Chief Planner Jeremy Colangelo-Bryan said in his presentation.
Construction could impact the bike lane and pedestrian walkway in Hudson River Park as well as traffic along W. 30th St., Colangelo-Bryan said. Contractors will have to dig up parts of W. 30th St. and will use the “cut-and-cover” method, where a trench is cut and then covered with a roof, to return the street to partial, or full, functionality.
Colangelo-Bryan said he’s “pushing our engineers to commit to having a lane available at all times; whether or not that happens, I can’t say yet,” and later added, “The point is once the decking happens, it essentially returns function to its prior state for whatever period of time its on there.”
Colangelo-Bryan repeatedly stressed that the project was in its earliest stages and many decisions had yet to be made that could impact the final design. The completion of the joint NJT-Federal Railroad Administration environmental impact statement (EIS) would help solidify the project and answer outstanding questions. The EIS is conducted “earlier than 30 percent” into the project to keep options open, but it also means “that you don’t have as much information developed as you might want in terms of final designs and more fleshed out concepts,” Colangelo-Bryan said.
The project will require a ventilation shaft, proposed to be 150 feet in height, on the lot stretching along 12th Ave., from W. 29th to 30th Sts. That could obscure some views of the Hudson from a section of the High Line that crosses directly through the lot from the southeast to the northwest. CLU members noted that the owner, the Georgetown Company, had planned to build a tower there anyway.
Georgetown bought the property in 2002 and signed a $96.6 million easement with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 2010 to use the land for the project.
The CLU supports the project, but will still write a letter to NJT and other agencies involved to express concerns about the loss of views from the High Line, potential traffic issues, the project’s impact on a private project to build an emergency medical services facility on the south side of the construction area, accommodating buses that frequently park in the area, and impacts on the pedestrian and bike paths, CLU Co-Chair Betty Mackintosh said.
Luckily for all Manhattanites, the tunnel-boring machines will only bore from the New Jersey shore to Manhattan, and will spit all the sludgy silt and dirt back toward the Garden State. That means contractors won’t have to bringing in a ton of trucks to the city to haul the stuff out.
The Hudson Tunnel Project consists of the new tunnel and a total rehab of the existing Northeast Corridor North River Tunnel. The Northeast Corridor refers to the mostly Amtrak-owned line in the northeast of the country. A number of local commuter rails use the rail line as well — NJT uses the North River Tunnel for commuter rail service.
The new tunnel will allow workers to repair the North River Tunnel without impacting service. Funding for the “environmental planning work and preliminary engineering” for the project will cost $8.6 million alone and is paid by Amtrak, the Port Authority, and NJT.
Both Colangelo-Bryan and Amtrak infrastructure planning manager for the Northeast Corridor Petra Messick stressed that the existing tunnel was structurally safe and the only danger was of unreliability.
“The damage was really due to the interaction of the salts with the electrical systems of the tunnel and the concrete liner, and the danger there is really the unreliability of operations,” Messick said, adding that the systems are designed to be fail-safe.
The draft EIS should be published “hopefully in June,” Colangelo-Bryan noted.
NOTE: This article was updated on Fri., Feb. 24, to change the ventilation shaft’s height from two stories to 150 feet.
