Excavation of City’s Water Tunnel Completed
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Mayor Bloomberg traveled 550 feet below street level yesterday to mark the end of excavation on the Manhattan water tunnel, the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history.
Work on the eight-mile water tunnel started nearly 40 years ago and has led to 23 lives being lost along the way. It was also delayed on and off because of the city’s fiscal problems.
The tunnel is scheduled to be fully lined and ready for use in 2012 and will nearly double the 1.2 billion gallons of water that the city can currently carry through its network of water tunnels.
Mr. Bloomberg said that while infrastructure projects such as this one are the not the most politically popular, they are crucial.
“Even in the first administration, when we faced record multibilliondollar, back-to-back budget shortfalls, we refused to shortchange this project,” he told reporters at the construction site. “Since coming into office we’ve committed close to $4 billion in funding for the third water tunnel, double what was invested by the last five administrations combined.”
He said that getting the tunnels finished is an important “insurance policy,” because the existing tunnels have never been taken out of service for inspection. Currently, almost all of the city’s water comes from upstate and flows through two tunnels far below ground that were built in 1917 and 1936.
“God forbid one of two tunnels suffers a collapse. We just cannot live without water,” Mr. Bloomberg said.
The excavation on the Manhattan tunnel is part of a larger citywide water tunnel upgrade. The first leg of the project was finished in 1998 and started delivering drinking water to resident in the Bronx, Queens, and parts of Manhattan at that time. Another stretch in Brooklyn and Queens is scheduled to go into use in 2009.
Yesterday, Mr. Bloomberg and the commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, Emily Lloyd, descended 550 feet in a narrow cage-like elevator into Water Tunnel No. 3 for one final ceremonial blasting.
Then he and Ms. Lloyd signed their names on the wall of the tunnel.
