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.
Ryan was bleeding profusely from his head. “Jimmy was hurt pretty bad,” Krausa said. “God bless him, he was still looking for people, trying to help them. I don’t know how he could walk.”
In the corner, trapped between a concrete pipe and the wall, was a sandhog named Mike Butler. Most of his leg had been cut off, the crushed bone exposed; his foot, where the skin and tissue had been butterflied open, was pinned, so that he couldn’t move. “He was bleeding to death,” said Ryan.
Someone pulled out a penknife and, guided only by the unsteady beam of a flashlight, tried to pry him loose. His heel wouldn’t budge. “I told him we were going to have to cut part of his foot off,” Gluszak said. “He said, ‘Do whatever you have to do.’”
While one sandhog held a cigarette to Butler’s lips, another began to slice off his heel, severing what remained of the tendons and bone. “I took off my shirt, and wrapped his foot up in my undershirt and put a tourniquet around his leg,” Gluszak said.
While Butler was being freed, the other men pulled Wademan down from where he had been suspended. As he hit the ground, they heard a groan. He was still alive.
It had been one of the worst accidents to date in the third water tunnel. Butler later had the rest of his leg amputated. Wademan’s legs and hips were broken, six of his ribs were shattered, and he suffered severe head trauma. Ryan got a hundred and twenty stitches in his forehead and chin; he also had a broken knee, six fractured ribs, and two separated shoulders. It took him eight months to recuperate. When I asked him why he returned to work, he replied, “I’m a sandhog. That’s all I know.” He never went back to the scene of the accident, and he grew even quieter. “The accident took the life out of Jimmy,” another sandhog said. “The exuberance.”
“They ain’t gonna do any psychological work on me,” Ryan told me. “They ain’t ever gonna penetrate this head.”
Shortly after Ryan resumed working, he noticed that his father was having trouble breathing. “He’d walk thirty feet and have to stop,” Ryan said. Then Joe Ryan started to cough up black phlegm. When Joe visited the doctor, X-rays showed spots on his lungs. He had contracted silicosis, a disease caused by years of breathing dust.
Jimmy Ryan said his father had always told him that sandhogs die unexpectedly. They die of cave-ins and blowouts. They die of explosions and electrocutions. They die of falling rocks and winches and icicles. They die of drowning. They die of decapitation and the bends. They die without legs, without arms. They die by plunging hundreds of feet or simply a few. They die quickly and, more often than not, painfully.
In May, 2003, on Ascension Thursday, Ryan put on a neatly pressed tweed jacket and a tie and drove from his home, in Queens, to St. Barnabas Church in the Bronx for a service in honor of all those who had died in the third water tunnel. The stone church had stained-glass windows that could be opened, admitting the unfiltered sunlight. Ryan sat toward the front, his jacket tight around his broad shoulders. Packed in the pews around him were Christopher Ward, the D.E.P. commissioner; Anthony Del-Vescovo, the contractor; and dozens of sandhogs and engineers. “Let us pray for all those who have been hurt or killed in construction of City Tunnel No. 3,” the priest intoned.
“Lift them up,” a sandhog responded. “Lift them up.”
Ryan knelt against the front of his pew as the priest read the names of the twenty-four men who had died in the tunnel. “Lord have mercy on them,” the priest said. When the service was over, Ryan and the others headed down the street to an Irish pub. “My father was one of the lucky ones,” he said. “He held on until 1999. That’s when the silicosis finally got him.”
“I’m John Ryan. I think you met my father.”
The young man was standing by a shaft for a tunnel on the corner of Thirty-sixth Street and First Avenue. Short, with compact arms, he looked more like his grandfather than like his father. He was twenty-eight, and his face had yet to develop the hard etchings of a sandhog. It was broad and frank, with bright-green eyes; red hair poked out of the front of his hard hat.