NYC Way Down Underground

Lesley Stahl Takes A Tour With Sandhogs Building $6B Water Tunnel

(CBS)  Sixteen years ago, Harry Reasoner did a story on 60 Minutes called "New York is Falling Apart," in which city engineer Paul Donnellan leveled with Reasoner about the condition of the old valves, which are the ones still in use today.

"We’ve had numerous failures. Gears have broken," said Donnellan. "Stems have broken. Internal parts have broken."

It turned out the metal used to make these valves had a fatal flaw.

"All of the critical equipment is made out of this material," said Donnellan. "And if it’s under stress, it goes through a process called stress-corrosion cracking. It could give you a catastrophic failure."

Have studies been done of the possibility of something catastrophic happening? "If a tunnel were to collapse, first answer is, there's no easy answer to what you would do to provide water for everybody in this city," says Bloomberg.

The only thing to do is plow ahead with Tunnel No. 3. These days, the work never stops. At dawn, when the graveyard shift heads out, the day shift is reporting for work.

The miners building Tunnel No. 3, and all tunnels in New York, call themselves "sandhogs." They start and end their workday in a place called the “hoghouse,” where they can grab a bite, change clothes, and clean up at the end of their shift.

Every sandhog is a jack of all trades: They’re all carpenters, mechanics, electricians, and of course, miners.

In the tunnel, the work can be claustrophobic, dusty and so noisy that a lot of the men have hearing loss. They’re supposed to wear earplugs, but often they don’t. Thousands of sandhogs have worked on Tunnel No. 3. Most are either Irish-American or from the West Indies. It’s been that way for generations.

"Pretty much all the sandhogs down here have their father in the business or something like that," says one miner, whose father and grandfather were sandhogs. "None of their fathers wanted their sons in it. My old man never wanted me in it. But once it gets you, once it gets in your blood, there's no other job like it."

But it’s more than just love; it’s also money. Most sandhogs make six figures, though it’s something they don’t like to talk about.

Ryan McGinnty is a college graduate who gave up a white-collar job to work in the tunnel. "I worked in an office, 60 hours a week, no money," he says. "I don’t know. And then I come down here, and I like the people. It's a different world. … Good guys."

When they began building Tunnel No. 3, the sandhogs still mined the way they had for centuries, with explosives, or as the men call it, "drill and blast." But now, they have a powerful ally, a massive tunnel-boring machine nicknamed “the mole.”

Men are shown fitting the face of "the mole" with hardened steel wheels that will grind away at the bedrock and reduce it to just pebbles and dust, better known as muck. The muck is then transported by conveyor belt to railcars and then dumped onto other belts that lift it out of the tunnel. The mole weighs 300 tons.

How did they get the machine down there? "The machine was working somewhere in, I believe, it was working in Norway," says Greenberg. "They took it apart, shipped it across the ocean. It arrived at our site. And then at our site, they refurbished it."

"They take it down in pieces, obviously, and then you build it down in the tunnel?" asks Stahl.

"And then you put it back together," says Greenberg. "Like putting a big jigsaw puzzle back together."

The high-tech mole works faster, and with more precision, than the sandhogs used to with explosives. The machine carves a perfectly round tunnel through the bedrock. "It looks as good as a concrete-lined tunnel," says Greenberg.

And "the mole" has dramatically speeded up the whole process. "This particular tunnel has been averaging close to about 100 feet a day," says Greenberg. "That’s almost twice as much as years ago with the drill and blast. It’s also a lot safer."

A lot safer?

"This is a lot safer," says Greenberg. "Because you don’t have as many men working with the drills and the blasting as you did before."

"The more fractured rock you have, the more dangerous the area is," says Eamonn O'Donnell. He and his brother, Jim, followed their father into the tunnel more than 25 years ago.

"When we started, there were people that died every year," says Jim O'Donnell.