After Decades, a Water Tunnel Can Now Serve All of Manhattan - NYTimes.com

After Decades, a Water Tunnel Can Now Serve All of Manhattan - NYTimes.com: "There have been 350-pound steel cutters, a 70-foot-long tunnel-boring machine and heaps of Manhattan schist. There have been generations of workers, known as sandhogs, charged with blasting through, hearing be damned, then resurfacing above ground to find, as one worker observed in 1973, that “you’re still shouting” long after a return home.
And there have been deaths, 24 of them, for many years “a man a mile,” in sandhog parlance. For those with decades of experience underground, or who had fathers or uncles or even grandfathers who toiled in one of the three tunnels, the memories are resilient enough to preclude even the faintest discussion of the better fortunes of recent years."


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