They dig. They dynamite. They dig some more. And then, assuming they make it out of their dank, dingy holes alive, they drink – heavily.
They are the sandhogs: unsung heroes of the city’s underworld without whom there would be no running water, no subways, no Lincoln Tunnel and for that matter, no New York.
The subterranean workers are an insular society that “do not play well with outsiders,” said filmmaker Eddie Rosenstein, who is behind “Sandhogs” a new History Channel series premiering in September.
For years, both the city and the sandhogs refused to grant Rosenstein access to this subterranean subculture. So Rosenstein, 44, a lanky Jewish guy from Pittsburgh who says he “looks like their dentist,” decided to dig further. in both the journalistic and literal sense.
Pestering the bosses at Local 147 with the kind of nagging persistence the sandhogs value above all else, Rosenstein became one of them – and soon had access to a world few New Yorkers are even aware exists.
“They wouldn’t trust me to put them on camera until they trusted me with their lives,” Rosenstein told The Post of the workers, who dubbed him the “Hebrew Hog.”
The 11-episode series – which should be required viewing for every New Yorker – looks at projects as vast and vital as the city’s long-awaited, third water tunnel, which has been under construction since 1970, and the East Side Access project linking the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Station.
Most people do not know how important the new water tunnel is, Rosenstein said.
“If one of the century-old tunnels – which have never been shut off – were to collapse, much of the city would have to be evacuated,” he said.
Rosenstein was taken under the wing of Morgan Curran, boss of the $1 billion Croton Water Treatment Plant project in The Bronx, who he describes as a “Michelangelo with explosives.”
The Post accompanied Curran and Rosentein for Friday night’s shift, commuting from the surface into the tunnel in a metal cage lowered clumsily by an enormous crane.
The project requires three tunnels connecting the new filtration plant to a water tunnel built in 1893. Wearing knee-high “muck boots,” the sandhogs perform all the tasks of tunnel digging, from blasting to drilling to carpentry to electrical.
The work is dangerous- “we lose a man a mile,” they say – and “there are no open-casket funerals.”
Those who do retire end up on permanent disability 80 percent of the time and often have permanent lung damage.
Water drips down from the ceiling of the dimly lit tunnels, a place so disorienting, it is unclear what time it is or which way is up. Curran, who has been working in tunnels since he was 16 in Ireland, said he “thought Eddie was just some guy with a home-video camera” at first.
Although this is in some ways the gilded age of tunneling, with so many projects going on at once, Curran at times laments that tunnel boring machines – or “moles” – have “finally been perfect[ed].”
“I prefer to drill and blast,” he said. “The boring machine .Ñ.Ñ. is boring.”
Curran and his ilk harken back to an older kind of masculinity and wildness that has been pasteurized and medicated out of the culture, Rosenstein said.
Though they are always on the edge, they love this work and never stop laughing, except when something goes wrong.
“I’ve seen cave-ins and collapses and fingers ripped off,” Rosenstein said. “One shift, 10 guys went to the hospital – and that’s even before you go drinking with these guys.”