How The Corps Removed 500 Million Gallons In 13 Days In NYC

Israel Builds Airport in Desert — Xylem rushed to provide pumps for a variety of projects, including a lake in New Jersey flooded by a sewer outfall

Photo Courtesy of Xylem

"If you get above a 12-inch discharge [size], then you have a rigid pipe application that requires heavy equipment and takes days to stage and mobilize," says Roger Less, design branch chief with the Corps' Rock Island district, which had answered the call for help with Hurricane Katrina and gained a Corps-wide reputation as unwatering experts. "At 10 inches or smaller, you're portable. You can move in hours rather than days."

In the subway tunnels, "there were no access points to pump out low areas," says Roger Perk, assistant manager of projects and programs with the Rock Island district. "We would access the shaft, pump out as deep as we could, then start lateral pumping. At the access point, we pumped the water up vertically."

The Corps also worked with the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to make sure that pumping operations—on average 10,000 to 20,000 gallons a minute—would not compromise the tunnels' structural stability.

Triple Approach

Portability and flexibility were crucial for pumping out the 9,117-ft-long Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, recently named the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Crews with the MTA, the Coast Guard and Donjon pumped out water from the Brooklyn portal, the midpoint and the Manhattan portal of the tunnel, respectively, with the Corps coordinating.

"Each side of the tunnel was a bit different," says the Corps' Owen. "We ran flexible pumps from the Brooklyn side, a vertical hose in the center and fused, bigger pipes at the Manhattan side."

Crews used a ventilation shaft in a building on Governors Island right at the tunnel's midpoint, says Ronald Pinzon, Corps project manager for the effort there. "From water level to the bottom of the shaft, it's about 180 feet. We cut through the shaft and ran pumps in tandem."

The Coast Guard combined two pumps, each with a capacity to pump water up to a height of 90 ft, to create a capacity of 170 ft, says Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Broko Boland. "We had trained and talked about it but never had occasion to do it." The Coast Guard called on colleagues from California and Alabama, he says, adding, "We had 100 people and 15 boatloads of equipment."

By Nov. 10, crews pumped out 60 million gallons from the tunnel. In all, the Corps and its collaborators pumped out 470 million gallons of water from 14 locations, using Battery Park City as an emergency staging area to run hose, off-load barged equipment and fuel, house and feed workers, and provide information to the public.

Aileen Cho, ENR's senior transportation editor, is a native of Los Angeles and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Many of her experiences with engineers and contractors have inspired material for her alternative theater productions way, way off Broadway. For ENR, Aileen has traveled the world, clambering over bridges in China, touring an airport in Abu Dhabi and descending into dark subway tunnels in New York City. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun. Aileen is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Long Beach, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.

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