Water Scarcity - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 101

over sixty miles, from Hillview Reservoir in Yonkers, south through the Bronx and
down the length of Manhattan, and into Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. A key
element of the new system is that valves for the new tunnels are housed in a series of
underground distribution chambers, which allow for maintenance. The largest of these
is the system's command center, the Van Cortlandt Park Valve Chamber, a 620-foot-
long, 42-foot-wide, 41-foot-high vaulted room hidden twenty-five stories beneath Van
Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx. It contains eight-foot-wide conduit pipes with meters
that measure water flow, seventeen steel lateral tunnels, nine vertical shafts, two giant
manifolds, and thirty-four precisely designed valves made of stainless steel, rather than
bronze, in Japan. Once the new system is complete, DEP engineers will be able to use
these valve chambers to route water around any problematic sections of tunnel, ensur-
ing that the city's water supply is never interrupted. For security reasons, the exact loca-
tion of the DEP's valve chambers is not publicized; they are extremely difficult to access
and designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Aboveground, the Van Cortlandt Park Valve
Chamber is marked only by a small guardhouse and a door leading into a grassy hill-
side, which masks one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure in the city.
Nearly six hundred feet belowground, Ted Dowey sloshed ahead of me through the
muddy, cold, ankle-deep water of Tunnel No. 3. After fifteen minutes, we came to a
junction in the railroad tracks and saw a half dozen shadowy silhouettes moving in the
gloom: sandhogs. Large men, dressed in orange or black hard hats and yellow slickers,
hogs always work in “gangs” of six, for safety and efficiency, and often develop special-
ties, such as drilling, electrical work, or dynamiting rock.
Tunnel No. 3 turned forty years old in 2010, and some hogs and pencils have spent
their entire careers working on it. The hogs are a tight-knit fraternity, mostly of Irish
or Grenadian descent (islanders from Carriacou—one of the Grenadine islands, in the
Caribbean—are particularly well represented), with a few men of Italian or Hispanic
origin. There are no female sandhogs. The only woman I saw on my trip underground
operated the elevator cage in Shaft 26B. Families of sandhogs intermarry, hand posi-
tions down through generations, are superstitious about the dangers of their job, and
are well compensated. Standard pay is $35 to $38 an hour , and experienced hogs can
make $100,000 to $120,000 a year.
Hogs have their own language , rituals, and specialized tools—spud wrenches, sink-
ing hammers, jackleg drills, drift pins, lump hammers, scaling bars, side cutters, flash-
lights, dynamite, “battleships” (buckets), “rabbits” (sponges), and “muck sticks”
(shovels). Before the advent of automated tunnel-boring machines , which went into use
in 1992, Tunnel No. 3 killed twenty-four men in twenty-five years. No sandhogs have
died in Tunnel No. 3 since Anthony Oddo was crushed by a sixteen-ton winch that