The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (28 page)

Ryan is not, by the standards of the trade, a particularly superstitious man—he doesn’t carry a lucky crescent wrench or refuse to go down on Friday the thirteenth—but he maintains a constant watchfulness. And now, while the others told jokes, Ryan stood off by himself, quietly inspecting the walls to make sure there were no cracks that might cause chunks to shear off.

After a while, he trudged to the end of the tunnel, where there was a pile of smoldering rubble. At lesser depths, sandhogs had been known to uncover jewelry, murder weapons, false teeth, a chest of coins, a Colonial dungeon. “In the sewer tunnels, you sometimes find rats,” Ryan said. “But this far down there are only sandhogs.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag, which he carefully unwrapped, revealing not his lunch but a pack of Marlboros. He was the only one who, in spite of the stinging dust, seemed always to work with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth—like the detectives in the old dime novels he likes to read.

Some of the men propped a ten-foot ladder against the rubble and Ryan started to climb it, the embers of his cigarette leading the way. “Come on,” he said. When I reached the top, he pointed down the tunnel, as if to say, Go on, take a look. And I saw a dozen figures moving through the dusty haze. There was a cacophony: men slamming picks into the jagged rocks, drills probing new holes, buckets moving back and forth amid sparks that flickered like fireflies. After five months of blasting and mucking, of two shifts working sixteen hours a day, of engineers and contractors measuring the quickest route, they had advanced only two city blocks, from Twenty-ninth Street to Thirty-first Street. But as I peered from one end to the other at the ceiling of rock, dripping with water and bathed in sulfurous light, I could sense the first hint of a design.

“So, what do you think of our cathedral?” Ryan asked.

  Later, as he was taking off his boots in the hog house, Ryan told me, “You know, my grandfather did the same thing.” He clapped his boots together. “He came to this country in 1922, from England. He started working first on the Holland Tunnel, but then they started the second water tunnel and he moved over to that. It was even bigger than Tunnel No. 1. It was pretty brutal. That much I can tell you.”

In 1929, to keep pace with water consumption, which had increased by thirty-five million gallons per day since the first tunnel was built, the city began to construct Tunnel No. 2. Once again, another aqueduct was built, this one drawing water from the Delaware River. (It is still listed in the “Guinness Book of World Records” as the world’s longest water-supply tunnel.) Once again, villages were flooded and cemeteries were dug up.

Nick Ryan, Jimmy’s grandfather, was tall, with a muscular physique and red hair. Jimmy Ryan is said to resemble him, but Nick was more of “a wild man,” as his grandson puts it, with a distinct hint of understatement. He was known for his penchant for whiskey, which in those days was often consumed in the tunnel. He had little, if any, formal education. Most of the sandhogs of his generation were recently arrived immigrants, typically from Ireland, Italy, and the West Indies, who would show up for work in their only set of clothes and wrap plastic bags around their shoes. The Board of Water Supply would sometimes put them in camps, and try to teach their children to read and write; the townspeople occasionally complained of “immigrant hordes.” Black-and-white photographs taken at the time show Nick’s gang standing in the tunnel, only a few beams of timber supporting the crumbling rock over their heads. Instead of a hard hat, Nick Ryan wore something more like a cowboy hat. In a 1936 log from one of the earliest meetings of Local 147, to which Nick belonged, there is a warning to the men not to pack pistols.

“Even during the Depression, most men wouldn’t take these jobs,” one miner who was in the union with Nick Ryan recalled in an oral history. “Nobody was going to go down and work with a shovel all day and then work in compressed air. We had some hard, hard people, and you had to be a rough commander. . . . They told you, Do it or get the hell out. So the only ones, as the insurance adjusters will tell you, that survived were the most fit.”

Nick Ryan endured chest pains, broken limbs, bleeding sinuses, and caisson disease—the bends. Then, in 1937, with his family still in need of money, Nick Ryan took his eighteen-year-old son, Joe, down the shaft with him. “That’s how my father learned how to survive underground,” Jimmy Ryan recalled.

“Years ago, it started as a father-son business,” a sandhog whose father worked side by side with Joe Ryan told me. “The fathers brought the sons in, then the brothers brought the brothers in, and the sons brought the cousins in. I don’t know how you word this, but no one ever asked you your pedigree if you came here. They didn’t care if you had a criminal record—as long as you worked you could stay in the hole.”

Shorter and more compact than his father, Joe Ryan was known as Red. A ferociously driven and, to those who didn’t know him well, intimidating man, he carried the burden—and perhaps the anger—of someone who had given up a football scholarship at Wake Forest University to work underground, helping to support a father who was sometimes out too late to make it to work on time. After Nick Ryan died, in 1958, his son briefly ran a gas station. But before long he returned underground—to the place that he knew best.

  By the fifties, the city was already in frantic pursuit of more “pure and wholesome water.” This time, it was not simply demand from an exploding population, or even droughts, that provoked alarm. This time, it was something that few, if any, had ever contemplated.

In 1954, unbeknownst to most residents of the city, several engineers went into a shaft to try to turn off the water supply in City Tunnel No. 1, to see if the tunnel needed repairs after being in operation for almost half a century. “Imagine your faucet after only ten years,” Christopher Ward, the D.E.P. commissioner, said. “These things had been pounded away at for decades.”

At the bottom of the shaft, sticking out of the tunnel, was a long bronze stem with a rotating wheel at the end. It was supposed to control the six-foot-diameter valve inside the pipeline. But when the engineers started to turn the handle, using all their might, it began to tremble and crack. “There was too much pressure on it,” Ward said.

“They were afraid if they turned it any more the whole fucking thing would break,” Richard Fitzsimmons, Jr., the business manager of the sand-hogs’ union, said.

After decades of building the world’s greatest water system, the city had stumbled across its weak point, a single flaw that had rendered an otherwise invincible body mortal. “It scared the bejeezus out of people,” Doug Greeley, an engineer in charge of the city’s water distribution, said. There was no effective way to shut off the water, no way to get inside and weld a crack, no way to know if a tunnel was about to burst.

By the late sixties, officials had decided that something had to be done. “One of the original tunnels was seventy years old, and we were unable to repair any valves,” Ed Koch, who was a congressman at the time, recalled. In some cases, he said, “we didn’t even know where the valves were.” Koch, who later served three terms as mayor, added, “You can exist without food, but you can’t exist without water.”

On a cold January day in 1970, the ground was officially broken for the third water tunnel, which would dwarf both of its predecessors. Designed to be constructed in four stages, it would extend sixty miles, from the reservoir in Yonkers through the Bronx and down to the southern tip of Manhattan, and then into Brooklyn and Queens. The project would include another underground aqueduct. More important, at the center of the entire system would be thirty-four specially designed valves that would be made not of bronze but of stainless steel, with shorter stems that could withstand greater force. (Most were manufactured in Japan, where city inspectors lived for two years to insure that they were made according to precise measurements.) All of the valves would be contained in a single centralized chamber, where they could be easily reached and turned off.

Construction on the chamber began in 1970 and was not finished until 1998. Though the tunnel sections that will feed into the chamber have not yet been completed, the D.E.P. gave me a glimpse inside the vault—which is in the Bronx, not far from the sandhogs’ union hall. There is nothing above ground to indicate the vault’s existence except a small guard tower and a sealed door that leads into a grassy hillside. “Ordinarily, we’re not supposed to let anyone in,” Greeley told me, standing outside the door.

Like many of “the pencils,” as the sandhogs call the engineers, Greeley is a fastidious man: he has a neatly trimmed mustache and was wearing a blue blazer and a tie. The main door, which he unlocked as if it were a safe, was constructed out of solid steel. “They built this place during the Cold War,” he said. “It’s supposed to withstand a ten-megaton nuclear bomb.”

As he pressed his weight against the door, it gradually gave way, emitting a loud sigh. It was damp and cool inside; the corridor was made of concrete. After descending a flight of metal steps, we rode an elevator twenty-five stories down. As Greeley opened another thick door, he said, “Prepare to have your perception of the water supply permanently altered.”

The vault resembled an airplane hangar; it extended more than two hundred yards, with a domed ceiling that was forty-one feet high and walls that were cloaked in condensation and algae. Lights hung from the top like crescent moons. Suspended twenty feet off the ground, one after the other, were the valves, or, rather, the pipes that contained them: seventeen thirty-five-ton steel cylinders with studded bolts that reached horizontally from one side of the forty-two-foot-wide vault to the other. Each cylinder contained two valves. A metal gangplank ran alongside them, and Greeley walked excitedly to the first cylinder, running his hand along the torpedo-like shell. “This way, if a tunnel develops a crack, we can shut it off from here,” he said. “Everything’s right at your fingertips.”

If a valve broke, the cylinder could be lowered down to the bottom of the vault, and carried out on tracks. One piece, Greeley explained, could be removed without disrupting the rest of the system. The old tunnels had run in a straight line from the reservoirs into the city, but City Tunnel No. 3 was designed with various redundant loops (upper Manhattan has a loop; Brooklyn and Queens have a loop) that would pass through the chamber, so that parts of the city can be taken off-line without cutting the water supply entirely.

Putting his hand on a small wheel that jutted out of the cylinder, Greeley said, “Here we can turn the valves on and off electronically or, if there’s a power outage, even manually. Of course, if you did it manually, you’d have to turn it twenty-nine thousand times, but if you had to you could get a couple of guys down here and crank it away.”

It was cold in the chamber, and Greeley shuddered as he held out his hand to demonstrate another innovation. “They’re called butterfly valves,” he said of the sluices inside the cylinder. Unlike the old guillotine-like sluices, these gates rotated slowly into position. “That takes off the pressure and makes it easier to close,” he said, turning his hand clockwise. Though he had been in the vault dozens of times, he paused for a moment and looked out at the dozens of valves. Then he said, “Once the third water tunnel is finished, all the water in the city will flow like Zen.”

  In 1969, just before construction on the first stage of the third water tunnel began, Jimmy Ryan’s father took him below the streets. “When I was eighteen, he said, ‘Come with me,’” Jimmy Ryan recalled. “He was old school. You never asked what your father did. . . . Then they put us in this big bucket. I had no idea what to expect. It got darker and darker. My father told me to stay close and watch what he did. And that’s how I became a sandhog. I was born into it.”

Jimmy Ryan became known as the Red-Headed Hippie. “That was the style back then,” Jimmy told me, somewhat defensively. “Even the old-timers had sideburns.” If he was slightly rebellious, he had his father’s unrelenting drive: he told me that he wanted to prove to his “old man” that he could do the job. Jimmy also had a forthrightness that made him popular among the men. “I can’t say a bad word about Jimmy,” Buddy Krausa, one of his old foremen, said, adding that Ryan was the type “who would never steal a crescent wrench.”

After short stints on other jobs, the Ryans moved to the third water tunnel. On a summer day in 1982, Jimmy Ryan, Krausa, and a dozen or so other sandhogs went down a hole near Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx, where they were connecting a tunnel that would feed into the new valve chamber. The section had already been bored and they were in the final stages: building a steel form—it resembled the skeletal hull of a ship—around the contours of the carved-out earth, then pouring in concrete. To reach the cavern’s ceiling, Ryan had climbed atop eighteen feet of scaffolding.

Around noon, some of the men stopped for lunch, but Ryan and a few others were still working when another sandhog, George Gluszak, who was a mile up the line, saw two twenty-ton agitator cars, which were used to mix concrete, racing down the tunnel. They had broken free from the brake car and were picking up speed along the steady decline. Some of the men tried to throw things on the tracks to slow them down, but it had no effect.

Jimmy Ryan was drilling when the cars slammed into the scaffolding, catapulting him twenty-five feet through the air. “Everything turned upside down,” Ryan said. “I was knocked unconscious, and when I came to, all the lights had gone out. All I could hear were moans.”

Krausa, who had not been injured, felt his way through the tangle of steel, rock, and machines. He could hear the other men calling out for help. Eventually, he found a flashlight and pointed the beam in front of him. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen,” he said.

Sandwiched between two flatbed cars was Johnny Wademan, who had been drilling alongside Ryan. The two cars had collided under his shoulders and he was suspended in midair, his legs dangling, his arms outstretched. “He looked like Jesus Christ,” said Gluszak, who, along with his team, had run through the darkened tunnel to the scene. One of the men shouted that Wademan was dead.