People
take photos at water filling the Bowling Green subway station in
Battery Park in New York. Photographer: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty
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Bloomberg News
NYC Flooded Tunnels to Take Many Days to Drain
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Five
underground walls of water containing hundreds of millions of gallons
stand between New Yorkers and their lifeblood of full subway service.
It’s
going to take hundreds of pumps, including ones powerful enough to
drain an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than 15 minutes; the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers’ National Unwatering SWAT Team; and at least
several more days to get the job done. “We don’t dewater tunnels very often,” said Pete Snow, lead trainer for White Plains, New York-based Xylem Inc. (XYL), which positioned 200 pumps in the area before Atlantic superstorm Sandy. “These kinds of disasters are always a first run. We don’t get a dress rehearsal.”
Five subway tubes, two Amtrak tunnels and three of the city’s primary roadways remain under water after the largest- ever Atlantic tropical system slammed into the U.S. East Coast.
A 2011 New York state study estimated it would take three days to drain the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel between Brooklyn and the Battery in Lower Manhattan if it was flooded in a major storm. It’s already been four days. The tunnel is filled floor to ceiling for more than a mile -- an estimated 86 million gallons (326 million liters) of water -- in its two tubes
Subway tunnels under the East River would take between five to seven days, more if multiple tunnels were flooded, according to the study.
SWAT Team
The Corps’ water-removal team, headquartered in Rock Island, Illinois, has been in New York since Oct. 30, using 12 eight-inch pumps and 13 six-inch pumps shipped from New Orleans. The team consists of 10 to 12 civilians with expertise in civil, electrical, mechanical and hydraulic engineering, contracting, and emergency management, supplemented by people from throughout the Corps, according to an agency fact sheet.Ken Wells, a spokesman for the Corps of Engineers, didn’t provide comment. The Corps “is meeting with other private pump suppliers to determine the availability and capacity of pumps that could be delivered to the New York area,” it said on its website.
Once bigger pumps arrive, it won’t take much time to drain the tunnels, Joseph Lhota, head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said at a tour of the Carey tunnel yesterday. Until then, the job is going slowly, he said.
The bigger the portable pumps, the better, said Duane Gapinski, Corps of Engineers program manager for HDR Engineering Inc. in Omaha, Nebraska. Gapinski, as an Army colonel, led water removal work in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
15 Minutes
The pipes attached to those diesel-powered pumps measure as much as 42 inches in diameter. While the largest pumps can pump out 100 cubic feet (3 cubic meters) a second, enough to drain an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than 15 minutes, it will take hundreds of them to dry out New York and “it’s not like there are a gazillion of them out there,” Gapinski said.While the pumps can be transported on flatbed trucks, they must be removed from vehicles by crane, and multiple trucks are needed to transport the pipe that goes with them.
“It’s going to be pretty daunting to move that water out of there just given the dimensions,” Gapinski said. “Given how much water and where it is, it’s going to be quite the challenge.”
“Relatively speaking, they don’t move a lot of water,” he said in an interview.
Katrina Lessons
Smaller pumps are easier to move, though they drain water at a fraction of the speed of the largest machines. Portable pumps used in New Orleans after Katrina moved such small volumes of water that they weren’t very valuable, Fred Young, the civilian who headed the Army Corps of Engineers’ task force to dry out that city.“If you have areas that are inundated and you are using small pumps, it’s going to take a long time,” Young said.
As urgently as New Yorkers want their public transportation running again, rushing is dangerous, said John Kenny Jr., who oversaw the removal of water from 61 miles of inundated subterranean passages and basements beneath downtown Chicago in 1992.
Chicago took two weeks to pump out the water and another nine months of additional work including the installation of metal doors to enable sealing off 11 sections of tunnel.
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