Breach of Queens-Midtown Tunnel exposes safety gaps, experts say

The Sept. 4 puncturing of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel by a crew drilling in the East River — which caused water to pour in and shut the vital transportation artery — highlights weaknesses in communication systems meant to safeguard against these types of mishaps, experts said.

Civil engineers and GIS specialists not involved with the project told Newsday that negligence and human error may have played a role in the incident. But even so, the region lacks a unified system for mapping and sharing information about the location of thousands of miles of underground transportation, water, sewer, gas, electrical and telecommunications lines.

They said the development of such a system, which could improve construction safety, has long faced pushback because of security concerns after 9/11, as well as institutional rivalries over data control.

"One of the things that makes managing the underground difficult is you've got public, you've got private, you've got city, you've got state, there's even federal" infrastructure, said Debra Laefer, a professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering.

"You've got all these ... different types of entities, and they're not sharing their data."

The contractor, Warren George LLC of Jersey City, was assessing the riverbed for a new segment of the East River Waterfront Esplanade in Manhattan, according to Josh Kraus of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, a public-private partnership funding the project.

About 12:30 p.m., a crew operating from a barge drilled a 2½-inch hole through 50 feet of soil and into the tunnel's cast iron liner, causing water to pour through the exhaust ducts. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority shut down the tunnel, which carries around 90,000 vehicles each weekday, for several hours until it could install a temporary plug.

An MTA spokesperson referred all questions about the investigation to the Economic Development Corporation. The organization declined to answer Newsday’s specific questions about when their review will be complete and whether results will be shared publicly.

"EDC is reviewing the incident, and all geotechnical investigation work is still suspended pending the results of that review. MTA-led repairs are complete, and engineers will continue to monitor the area," Adrien Lesser, an EDC spokesperson, said in a statement Tuesday.

A representative for Warren George, whose website indicates it has been in the drilling business since the 1940s, declined to comment on the incident when reached by phone Monday.

MTA doesn't participate in 811

Before drilling or excavating, all construction projects in New York State are required by law to notify 811, a nationwide "call before you dig" network funded by utility companies. The nonprofit that runs it keeps an updated map showing the rough outlines of which projects are located where, then connects diggers with owners of existing pipelines and tunnels for more detailed location information — which, on land, is often communicated by marking the ground with spray paint.

Roger Sampson, the executive director of New York 811, the organization that handles digging requests in the city and on Long Island, said there was no record of Warren George LLC contacting 811 before drilling for the East River Esplanade project, as is required.

But even if the contractor had contacted 811, 811 wouldn’t have been able to provide information on MTA tunnels, according to Sampson. That’s because neither the MTA, a public benefit corporation, nor city agencies like the Department of Environmental Protection, which maintains water and sewage lines, share data with 811.

Instead, the MTA asks anyone digging within 200 feet of its infrastructure to notify it directly. An MTA spokesperson declined to say whether Warren George did so before the mishap last week.

"Would [the contractor] know enough to contact the MTA?" said Sampson. "I've been part of this industry for close to 25 years. I've been trying to get the city ... [and] state on board to be notified [by 811] when an excavation is happening around their facilities. ... It's a safety issue. It goes to the reliability of the system."

Tom O’Rourke, a professor emeritus at Cornell University’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said 811 is "an extremely valuable system for reducing risk."

"But obviously, it's only as good as the mapping that identifies where the utilities are," he added.

Urgency, security concerns post-9/11

The MTA did not answer Newsday's written questions about why it doesn't participate in the 811 system, but experts said security concerns may play a role.

Alan Leidner was assistant commissioner of the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when he managed an emergency mapping team that aided first responders by collating infrastructure maps from the Ground Zero area.

Days after 9/11, the team realized there was a 200,000-gallon underground tank of Freon gas near several active fires, and it directed the fire department to take steps to protect it. Had the tank caught fire, the heated Freon could have produced phosgene, a deadly gas, risking more lives in lower Manhattan, Leidner said.

The experience showed him the importance of inter-organizational information sharing. But paradoxically, 9/11 also made underground infrastructure owners like the MTA more protective of their location data, fearing they would become targets for future attacks. Leidner said there was some legitimacy to those concerns, but he also blames institutional rivalries.

"To a lot of these utility companies, including city agencies, you owning your own data is power," said Leidner, who now sits on the board of the GIS Mapping Organization, a professional group. "There's sort of a sacredness about your data that some of these engineering agencies and utilities have."

Leidner has spent decades since then advocating for the city to create a single, unified subterranean map that would contain data from utilities as well as the city, state and federal agencies. Both he and Laefer expressed optimism that momentum is finally building to support such an initiative, though he had no estimate for when that might be done.

Laefer and her colleague Rae Zimmerman, an NYU professor emerita of planning and public administration, recently conducted a pilot study to create a unified map for parts of Sunset Park, Brooklyn and Midtown East, Manhattan.

Laefer said she hopes officials will continue to map the rest of the city.

"Something like that [unified map] could have absolutely and easily avoided" the company drilling into the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, Leidner said.

Past events

Last week's drilling mishap may have been a major headache for thousands of commuters, but things could have been worse.

In 2014, one of the MTA's own contractors nearly skewered an F train in Queens when they drilled in the wrong location while digging a well.

Youssef Hashash, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the recent East River incident called to mind a far more serious 1992 accident when a contractor installing pilings on the Chicago River punctured an abandoned freight tunnel beneath the city, causing millions of gallons of water to pour in and causing nearly $2 billion in damages.

As of Tuesday, all repairs on the Queens-Midtown Tunnel were complete, according to an MTA spokesperson.

Hashash said he hopes the Economic Development Corporation’s findings about the cause of the accident will be made public.

"It will be very, very useful for the community and the profession to understand why it happened," he said.