They Were Driving Through a Tunnel. Then the Water Rushed In.
"A leak in the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and the race to plug it revealed the fragility of New York City’s aging transportation network.
Titus Ogilvie-Laing was driving through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel last month in his beekeeping company’s van when he spotted something alarming. A stream of water was blasting out of the ceiling and pouring onto the enclosed roadway.
His mind flashed to a video he’d seen not long before: Dozens of vehicles were trapped in a flooded tunnel in China, with no way out. It was the sort of viral horror story that sticks with you — a nightmare scenario that New Yorkers don’t like to contemplate — and it suddenly felt a little too close to home.
His co-worker in the passenger seat, Matthew Flood, a native New Yorker, used his phone to capture the underwater waterfall.
“That’s a lot of water,” Mr. Flood, 27, recalled thinking aloud. “There’s no way that’s normal.”
Mr. Ogilvie-Laing, 33, focused on getting through the tunnel and out from under the East River — a waterway he was separated from by an 84-year-old feat of engineering that he did not fully comprehend.
By the time the beekeepers descended into the tunnel that day, the workers who maintain it had already been trying for hours to figure out what had gone wrong. The answer, they would eventually discover, was an apparent mistake made high above the gushing water — one that revealed the fragility of New York City’s aging transportation network.
But from the scramble to solve the mystery and quickly repair the leak, a different sort of picture emerges: of the resilience of the city’s infrastructure and of the everyday ingenuity and expertise required to maintain it.
A salty discovery
Workers for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the tunnel, first noticed the curious downpour in the eastbound tube around 10 a.m. Leaks are not unheard of, and at first it appeared routine. An initial report indicated that officials suspected that the water was coming from a broken main on the Queens end of the tunnel.
But there was no evidence to support that guess. So, as the water continued to pour in, a tunnel worker performed a simple test using the most sensitive of instruments: his tongue.
The water, the worker discovered, was salty.
Immediately, it was clear that this was no burst pipe. City mains carry fresh water; salt water could only be rushing in from the river above.
The beekeepers, it turned out, had reason to be alarmed, according to Marouane Temimi, an associate professor of civil, environmental and ocean engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.
Mr. Temimi, who studies flooding, said that when he drives through one of the underwater tunnels in the New York area, he, too, frets about the potential for disaster.
“As a driver, I worry always,” Mr. Temimi said.
“A mighty river is above my head and what I’m driving through is just a man-made structure,” he said. “It could fail.”
It was just after noon on that day in September as Mr. Flood and Mr. Ogilvie-Laing were headed back to the Long Island City base of their employer, Best Bees, after tending to hives at the Chrysler Building.
And the cause of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel’s sudden failure was now clear. Floating on the river, high above the tunnel, was a barge working on an entirely different infrastructure project, probing deep into the water with a large, red drilling rig.
The guilty party
The barge bobbed near the outer edge of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, where traffic whizzes past the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, its skyline dominated by the United Nations headquarters. Just south of the U.N., the Robert Moses Playground, dedicated to the master builder, sits atop the western mouth of the tunnel.
The crew that day was sampling the soil below the river ahead of the planned construction of an esplanade along the East River that will skirt the U.N. campus.
Like so much construction that happens in a crowded city riven by waterways, designing this segment of the pedestrian path was no simple task.
To construct along the water’s edge would require driving piles into the bedrock beneath the river, and the soil samples were to determine the geological conditions so that engineers with AECOM, the contractor hired by the city, could design a plan.
The barge was operated by Warren George, a New Jersey-based outfit hired by AECOM that bills itself as “the oldest drilling and grouting company on the East Coast of the United States.” (Neither firm commented for this article.)
City officials have not said where exactly the drill was supposed to drop through the water to the bottom of the river. But below the water’s surface, invisible from above, is a pair of 31-foot-wide tubes buried perpendicular to the island of Manhattan, between 41st and 42nd Streets: the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.
Somehow, the Warren George crew managed to plunge a drill through 50 feet of water, then 50 feet of soil, then through the cast-iron liner of the south tube without realizing that a critical transportation artery was directly beneath it.
Around 10 a.m., the drill pierced the outer shell of the tunnel, and the water began pouring in.
Traffic below slowed. Cars slipped through the 1.2-mile tunnel, including a van carrying two nervous beekeepers back to Long Island City.
It is not clear what transpired on the barge over the next two and a half hours. Around 12:30 p.m., someone from AECOM called the M.T.A. and told the agency that a subcontractor’s drill had punctured the tunnel.
A rush to repair
The call confirmed what the authority had already surmised. Water from the river was streaming into the exhaust duct above the south tube and cascading down onto the pavement.
Catherine T. Sheridan, president of M.T.A. Bridges and Tunnels, ordered both tubes of the tunnel immediately closed to traffic. Drivers lined up on either side of the river had to instead use one of the bridges — the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge to the north or the Williamsburg Bridge to the south — to get across.
The transportation authority summoned the contractors it had on call for emergencies: HNTB, an infrastructure planner based in Kansas City, and Posillico, a local construction company.
Within hours, a crew of 16 workers employed by Posillico was on site. Five of them climbed into the ceiling of the south tube and drove a wooden plug into the two-and-a-half-inch hole to stanch the inflow.
Ms. Sheridan said she did not know how much water had seeped from the river into the tunnel. But it did not compare to the inundation that shut the tunnel for 10 days after Hurricane Sandy swamped the city in 2012. This time, said the M.T.A. chairman, Janno Lieber, “there was never more water than the tunnel’s normal drainage system could accommodate.”
The north tube, which was unaffected, reopened to two-way traffic around 3 p.m. and the south tube was cleared for use at about 5:30 p.m.
Engineers at HNTB then set about designing a permanent fix. On Sept. 5, a Posillico crew working inside the tunnel installed a steel plate over the plug, Ms. Sheridan said.
The next day, workers from the drilling company, back on their barge but now under the supervision of HNTB, pumped grout into the hole through a long steel tube. When it hardened, the grout formed a permanent seal of the hole.
Mr. Temimi, who spends his days devising defenses against natural disasters like Sandy, said “man-made errors” like this one were “almost impossible” to predict.
“We were lucky this time,” he said. “The hole could have been bigger and the damage could have been more significant.”
Officials of the transportation authority said they had no estimate of the cost of the whole episode, but Mr. Lieber said he expected the city or its contractors to foot the bill.
For the beekeepers, the only effects beyond their momentary terror were the white residue the river water left on their van and whatever sense memories they would retain. “The dried water on the car definitely smelled bad,” Mr. Ogilvie-Laing said.
Mr. Flood said the idea of one of the underwater tunnels in New York City collapsing with him in it had occurred to him more than once, given the infrastructure’s advanced age, “but I’ve never thought about people poking a hole in a tunnel.”
Patrick McGeehan is a Times reporter who covers the economy of New York City and its airports and other transportation hubs. More about Patrick McGeehan"
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