Municipal engineers are getting ready to confront a century of underground gunk when they inspect a massive tunnel that brings drinking water to the city.
Water Tunnel No. 1, which runs from a Yonkers reservoir through Manhattan to Brooklyn, hasn’t been checked out and repaired since it was finished in 1917.
Officials fear if they shut the ancient valves, they’d never be able to open them again.
But that changed Wednesday, when an 8 1/2-mile Manhattan portion of new Water Tunnel No. 3 was activated.
“Completing this leg of the tunnel means that for the first time, Midtown and lower Manhattan won’t be relying on a single source of water,” Mayor Bloomberg said at press conference in a valve room 20 stories below Central Park.
“Once we fully complete Tunnel No. 3 . . . we’ll finally be able to take Tunnel 1 off-line for maintenance,” he said. “It’s hard to argue that a little preventative maintenance every 100 years or so isn’t a good thing.”
Work on No. 3 began in 1970 but progress was slowed by budget problems. No. 2 is operational and was opened in 1936.
“I’ve been doing this since ’92, so this is an exciting moment,” John McCluskey, the Department of Environmental Protection manager for the third tunnel, said of the completion of this leg. It will provide about 350 million gallons of water a day for Manhattan residents, officials said.
The first portion began supplying water to parts of The Bronx, Astoria, Queens, and uptown Manhattan in 1998. The final legs of the 60-mile tunnel, extending into Queens and Brooklyn, are expected to be finished by 2021.
“There is no other infrastructure project that means more to protecting New York City’s future than the third water tunnel,” Bloomberg said.
“It’s not sexy, and nobody says thank you, but we all should be sleeping better because of this.”