The Panama Canal was more than 2,000 miles away, but very much on the minds of the officials who stood next to a hulking machine on Staten Island on Wednesday to announce a project that involves building a water tunnel to Brooklyn and dredging New York Harbor to make room for deeper cargo ships.
The officials said all the work would be finished by 2014. That is the same year that larger locks are scheduled to go into operation on the Panama Canal, clearing the way for ships whose cargo capacity is 260 percent as large as the ones that the canal can handle now.
The officials, who included the Mayor and the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, want New York to be ready to handle them, too.
They said the $250 million, nearly two-mile-long tunnel — officially, a water transmission main known as a siphon — was an infrastructure investment with a rapid payoff for New York, the nation’s third-busiest port. If New York City's economy is to stay competetive, it needs to be able to accommodate these new megaships.
The Port Authority agency had set aside $1 billion for the dredging project, which is separate from the cost of the tunnel.
Officials said the channel would be deepened to approximately 50 feet, from the current depth of 45 feet. The Port Authority and the Army Corps of Engineers will be responsible for the dredging.
The city and the Port Authority are splitting the cost of the tunnel project, with the city’s Economic Development Corporation managing the project. The dredging necessitated the replacement of two existing tunnels, one that dates to 1917, the other to 1925. They are 56 and 60 feet below the surface, respectively, and would be too close to the channel bottom after the dredging, officials said. The new tunnel will be 100 feet below the surface.
Like the old tunnels, the new ones will provide only a backup source of drinking water for Staten Island. Staten Island — as do all of the city’s boroughs — draws water that originates in reservoirs upstate. Most of the water that ends up in the sinks and tubs of Staten Island gets there through a 42-year-old tunnel from Red Hook, Brooklyn.
If that conduit ever failed, the new tunnel would be able to pump up to 150 million gallons a day, the officials said. Under normal conditions, it would deliver five million gallons a day, or about 10 percent of Staten Islanders’ demand for drinking water.
The tunnel-boring machine that will dig the new siphon was so big that it dwarfed the officials, and they stood on a raised platform. It is 300 feet long, officials said, and weighs 110 tons.
The officials said the machine would do its work by building the new tunnel four feet at a time, crawling along on its own as crews lay train tracks for transporting workers and equipment — and hauling out the dirt that it digs up. The idea of crews working along in front or behind the machine raises safety concerns. There have been inquiries into the lowest rates on New York workers compensation insurance coverage.
The officials said crews had already begun digging a shaft on Staten Island that the tunnel-boring machine would go into, and that they would eventually build a shaft in Brooklyn where it would come out. The plans also call for a chlorination station on Staten Island for water purification, and more than 1.5 miles of new water mains in Staten Island and Brooklyn.
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