The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (29 page)

Ryan was bleeding profusely from his head. “Jimmy was hurt pretty bad,” Krausa said. “God bless him, he was still looking for people, trying to help them. I don’t know how he could walk.”

In the corner, trapped between a concrete pipe and the wall, was a sandhog named Mike Butler. Most of his leg had been cut off, the crushed bone exposed; his foot, where the skin and tissue had been butterflied open, was pinned, so that he couldn’t move. “He was bleeding to death,” said Ryan.

Someone pulled out a penknife and, guided only by the unsteady beam of a flashlight, tried to pry him loose. His heel wouldn’t budge. “I told him we were going to have to cut part of his foot off,” Gluszak said. “He said, ‘Do whatever you have to do.’”

While one sandhog held a cigarette to Butler’s lips, another began to slice off his heel, severing what remained of the tendons and bone. “I took off my shirt, and wrapped his foot up in my undershirt and put a tourniquet around his leg,” Gluszak said.

While Butler was being freed, the other men pulled Wademan down from where he had been suspended. As he hit the ground, they heard a groan. He was still alive.

It had been one of the worst accidents to date in the third water tunnel. Butler later had the rest of his leg amputated. Wademan’s legs and hips were broken, six of his ribs were shattered, and he suffered severe head trauma. Ryan got a hundred and twenty stitches in his forehead and chin; he also had a broken knee, six fractured ribs, and two separated shoulders. It took him eight months to recuperate. When I asked him why he returned to work, he replied, “I’m a sandhog. That’s all I know.” He never went back to the scene of the accident, and he grew even quieter. “The accident took the life out of Jimmy,” another sandhog said. “The exuberance.”

“They ain’t gonna do any psychological work on me,” Ryan told me. “They ain’t ever gonna penetrate this head.”

Shortly after Ryan resumed working, he noticed that his father was having trouble breathing. “He’d walk thirty feet and have to stop,” Ryan said. Then Joe Ryan started to cough up black phlegm. When Joe visited the doctor, X-rays showed spots on his lungs. He had contracted silicosis, a disease caused by years of breathing dust.

Jimmy Ryan said his father had always told him that sandhogs die unexpectedly. They die of cave-ins and blowouts. They die of explosions and electrocutions. They die of falling rocks and winches and icicles. They die of drowning. They die of decapitation and the bends. They die without legs, without arms. They die by plunging hundreds of feet or simply a few. They die quickly and, more often than not, painfully.

In May, 2003, on Ascension Thursday, Ryan put on a neatly pressed tweed jacket and a tie and drove from his home, in Queens, to St. Barnabas Church in the Bronx for a service in honor of all those who had died in the third water tunnel. The stone church had stained-glass windows that could be opened, admitting the unfiltered sunlight. Ryan sat toward the front, his jacket tight around his broad shoulders. Packed in the pews around him were Christopher Ward, the D.E.P. commissioner; Anthony Del-Vescovo, the contractor; and dozens of sandhogs and engineers. “Let us pray for all those who have been hurt or killed in construction of City Tunnel No. 3,” the priest intoned.

“Lift them up,” a sandhog responded. “Lift them up.”

Ryan knelt against the front of his pew as the priest read the names of the twenty-four men who had died in the tunnel. “Lord have mercy on them,” the priest said. When the service was over, Ryan and the others headed down the street to an Irish pub. “My father was one of the lucky ones,” he said. “He held on until 1999. That’s when the silicosis finally got him.”

  “I’m John Ryan. I think you met my father.”

The young man was standing by a shaft for a tunnel on the corner of Thirty-sixth Street and First Avenue. Short, with compact arms, he looked more like his grandfather than like his father. He was twenty-eight, and his face had yet to develop the hard etchings of a sandhog. It was broad and frank, with bright-green eyes; red hair poked out of the front of his hard hat.

The other sandhogs called him “Jimmy’s kid,” but he had little of his dad’s reticence. “You never know what’s going on up there,” he said of his father, with a smile. “I’m more of a bullshit artist.” He looked up at the crane that was lowering materials down the hole. “I used to think my father was out of his mind. I was about eight years old when he got hurt. I still remember it. He didn’t want to stay in the hospital and came home in a wheelchair. That’s when I first realized what it meant to be a sandhog, and I said, ‘Christ, I ain’t ever gonna do that.’” He peered down the hole. “It’s in your blood, I guess.” Holding out his arms, he added, “We’ve probably got more muck in our veins than anything else.”

“Nobody wants their kid to go into it,” Jimmy Ryan told me later. “You’ll always hope they’ll find some kind of pencil job.”

“I grew up wanting to be a baseball player,” John Ryan said. “Then I dropped out of college, and one day my father came in the bar where I was working and said, ‘All right, mister, you want to bartend? Come with me.’ I’d never been in the hole before. I was scared. I won’t lie to you.”

“I can only imagine what he was thinking,” Jimmy Ryan said. “We try to help each other.”

John Ryan’s great-grandfather brought home only a few dollars a week from his work on the water tunnel; today, sandhogs earn as much as a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. Though many are descended from tramp miners, they now often emerge from the hog house in tailored suits, their hair perfectly combed, as if they were bankers or accountants. Chick Donohue, the head of the hog house, has a degree from the Kennedy School at Harvard and is well known in city politics. He wears his Harvard ring on one hand and his sandhogs’ union ring on the other. “That way, if I can’t outsmart ’em with the left, I hit ’em with the right,” he told me.

Just as sandhogs have gradually transformed the city, the city has gradually transformed the sandhogs. Some now arrive at the hole in a Cadillac or a BMW. John Ryan, who is engaged to be married, is buying a Colonial house in Nassau County. “A lot of guys are drawn to the money,” he admitted. He paused. “And there’s the camaraderie. That’s a big part of it, too.” He paused again, as if still searching for the deepest reason, then added, “Hell, I like it down there.”

After five years on the third water tunnel, John Ryan had risen to foreman. His current mission was to build the city’s newest “mole,” a two-hundred-and-thirty-ton drill that would be placed at his father’s site, on Tenth Avenue. Experimented with as early as the seventies, the mole was officially introduced in the water tunnels in 1992, and had become the sandhogs’ most critical instrument—comparable, in the world of tunnelling, to the invention of the printing press. In February, 2003, the latest mole was transported from New Jersey to Manhattan, in pieces weighing sixty to a hundred and thirty tons, on a flatbed truck; the payload was the largest ever to cross the George Washington Bridge. The components were then lowered into the Thirtieth Street hole by a special crane that could withstand the enormous weight.

One day in February, after the mole had been assembled in the tight confines of the tunnel, John Ryan invited me to go down with him and see it. The pipeline was twelve and a half feet in diameter. The mole had already been driven nearly half a mile, and to reach the heading we had to ride a railroad car called a “man trip,” which rattled from side to side. Groundwater seeped out of the surrounding rock, splattering against the walls as we sped past. After about five minutes, we came to a sudden stop. In the distance, I could see a monstrous machine that looked more like a space shuttle than a drill. The mole’s hydraulic engines churned, and its blinking lights gleamed. “Come on,” Ryan said excitedly, walking toward it. “That’s only the trailing gear.”

This gear—including a conveyor belt that carried out the crushed rock—took up most of the tunnel. A narrow gangplank had been built on the tunnel’s side. Occasionally, to pass one of the fifteen or so sandhogs, we had to turn sideways, pressing our faces against the damp rock. As we went deeper, the mole began to resemble a colossal organism: its giant cylindrical arms gripped the walls and pushed the machine’s mouth forward through the rock. In some compartments of the mole, engineers were peering at computer screens; the mole had lasers that registered the precise type of rock at the heading.

A siren sounded, and the men began to run up and down the plank. “What’s happening?” I asked nervously.

“Nothing,” Ryan said. “We’re just starting it up.”

The mole coughed and sputtered and shook. The temperature had been twenty degrees at the surface, but the mole heated the tunnel air to eighty degrees, and some of the men began to strip off their layers. After walking seventy-five yards, we reached the front of the mole: a round shield with twenty-seven cutters, each weighing three hundred and twenty pounds, pressed against the rock face, obscuring it completely. The cutters, driven forward by hydraulic propulsion, spun ferociously and noisily, chipping away at the granite, which was then carried out on the conveyor belt and loaded into muck cars. Ryan, who had grown up listening to tales of his forebears, said it was hard to believe that “my great-grandfather had only a goddam muck stick”—sandhog slang for shovel.

Indeed, until the mole was invented, tunnelling had changed only incrementally since the days of the Romans, who used fire and water to crack the rock and horses to carry it out. When a prototype of the mole was introduced in New York, in the seventies, many of the sandhogs feared it as much as they did caving rock.

“It’s like that old story about John Henry,” Chick Donohue explained, recalling the fabled contest between man and machine after the invention of the steam drill. “Well, when they introduced the first mole over in Brooklyn the cutters kept breaking, and the sandhogs would jump in with their shovels and picks. They knew they were competing for their jobs, and they were actually beating the mole! Of course, they then perfected the mole, and there was no contest.”

The construction of the first water tunnel required no fewer than eighty men to drill and blast for at least a week in order to advance a hundred feet. The mole, with a fraction of the manpower, can tunnel that far in a day.

Yet, even with the mole, the third water tunnel has already taken six times as long as either City Tunnel No. 1 or No. 2; some people think it won’t be completed, as scheduled, by 2020. “We should’ve been done with this thing twenty years ago,” Jimmy Ryan said. “But the city keeps fucking around.”

Conditions above ground have proved almost as difficult as those below. After the initial phase of a billion-dollar contract to build the tunnel was awarded to a consortium of companies, costs began to exceed estimates by the millions. When the city balked at the rising costs, the companies sued and the work stalled. Then, in 1974, when the city went bankrupt, construction was halted altogether. In all, nearly a decade was lost, and in 1981, with work proceeding only piecemeal and the ever-growing demand for water forcing the old tunnels to carry sixty per cent more capacity than intended, city officials were so desperate that they pleaded with the federal government to fund the project.

Meanwhile, charges began to surface that Tammany Hall–like machinations were contributing to the delays. The once vaunted Board of Water Supply, which oversaw the construction, had become a “Democratic patronage plum tree,” as one critic put it. Stanley M. Friedman, the Bronx Democratic power broker who was later convicted of racketeering, was given a lifetime position on the board, with a salary of twenty thousand dollars, as well as an office, a secretary, a chauffeured car. “When I came in as mayor, it was a lifetime job given to retiring politicians,” Koch told me. “They didn’t do anything.”

The board was dismantled. But in 1986 the man in charge of supervising purchasing for the water tunnel at the D.E.P., Edward Nicastro, warned that contracts were still not being properly monitored. “You’d be amazed at how easy it is to steal in the system,” he told a reporter at the time.

In recent years, the greatest delays seem to be caused not by efforts to defraud the public but by attempts to placate it. Where the old water board once plowed over communities, the D.E.P. is now impeded by them. In 1993, when it tried to sink a shaft on East Sixty-eighth Street, Councilman Charles Millard protested that his office had received calls from parents whose children were “finding it difficult to concentrate.”
NUMBY,
or “not under my back yard,” movements sprang up. In 1994, after engineers had spent two years planning a new shaft site, residents in Jackson Heights held a protest, carrying signs that said, “
DON’T GIVE US THE SHAFT
.” Engineers were forced to find a new location. “When we want to choose a shaft site, everyone says, ‘Oh, the water system is a miracle, but please find another place,’” Ward told me. “‘We’re building a co-op’—or hotel or park—‘there.’” A D.E.P. engineer and geologist, Scott Chesman, added, “Instead of taking seven years to finish, we’re on thirty years, and hardly any of it’s been done. It’s like the eighteen-hundreds again.”

Indeed, for the first time the historic Delaware Aqueduct—the eighty-four-mile underground pipeline that carries the water from reservoirs upstate down to Yonkers, where it connects to City Tunnels No. 1 and No. 2—has begun to crack. According to some D.E.P. reports, in 1995 the aqueduct was losing about five hundred million gallons a month from leaks, which were creating massive sinkholes in Ulster and Orange Counties; in 2000, the monthly loss sometimes exceeded a billion gallons. An investigation by Riverkeeper warned of a potential “collapse” of the aqueduct, which would cut off as much as eighty per cent of the water flowing into the city.

In the spring of 2000, the D.E.P. decided to send a team of deep-sea divers down to do repairs on one of the original bronze valves in the Delaware Aqueduct, in the Dutchess County town of Chelsea, which had cracked, spewing a torrent of water through a hole the size of a quarter at eighty miles per hour. “For about two or three months, we built a mockup of the valve and a mockup of the bottom of the shaft,” said John McCarthy, the engineer who oversaw the project. “We took the crew and experimented in a tank of about fifty feet of water, without any light, trying to simulate the conditions.”