Water Scarcity - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 97

CHAPTER 11
Water Scarcity
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years,
and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that
way.
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden, 1952
PLUMBING THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD
On a cold, bright afternoon in March 2007, I walked across a busy construction site on a
windy corner of Eleventh Avenue, on the far west side of midtown Manhattan, stepped
aboard an orange steel elevator cage, and dropped into an enormous hole in the ground.
The hole, called Shaft 26B, was the main portal to a new subterranean labyrinth, City
Water Tunnel No. 3 . Pressed around me were half a dozen men dressed, as I was, in yel-
low slickers, muddy rubber boots, and orange hard hats. “The tunnel can be dangerous,”
said Ted Dowey , the project's executive construction manager. “It can flood. Water pres-
sure can hemorrhage a pipe. And there's groundwater seepage through the rock—about
two hundred thousand gallons a minute along the nine-mile tunnel. If you don't pump it
out every day, the water'll shut it down.”
Dowey slammed the gate shut. “Okay!” he said. he construction elevator shuddered
disconcertingly, and with a grinding noise began to drop. We passed through a couple of
inches of asphalt, perhaps a foot of concrete, several feet of brown dirt, then continued
down through sixty stories of dark gray granite called Manhattan schist, 450-million-
year-old meta-morphic rock that is flecked with mica and prized for its ability to support
one of the densest clusters of skyscrapers in the world. At two hundred feet down, the
hole at the surface through which we could see blue sky was reduced to the size of a
quarter, and the light was growing murky. By three hundred feet down, we were com-
pletely enveloped in a warm, humid blackness. By five hundred feet, I heard the sound of
dripping water. After a long four-minute ride, Dowey said, “Almost there!” A single dim
light-bulb rose up from below, like some kind of phosphorescent deep-sea fish, then a
bell rang, and the cage bounced to a stop. Dowey opened the gate, and we filed out into a
world of smudged light, ankle-deep water, and soft gray mud. We were roughly 580 feet
underground, inside New York City's most urgent water supply project.