Daily News from New York, New York • 100

bling? ork crum CRUM8UNO FROM PAGE FIVE 3 Lanes Southbound ROAD CAVE IN 3 Lanes Northbound ust how fust is Nw est Sidles High Water jymmmmmwmngPiattorm aEl1- P- hb-pjbJU -4AVCCF' 1ft. I-NM I II 1:1 II II II I I II II Low Water i imm wn a rM rx vi ixs -w ii ma ii baxxi i Steel Sheet Pllli iKVAW BkKJ UA II UAU bSfl ni I II II 1111 II 11 Creosoted mmgM LUI KiH-n tPI II II 111 I. if I WLJ m. Ti IxTTr 1 II II II Timber Pltem un tne tast Hiver unve, tne problem is simple: the fill Fender Bedrock 7 under It is sliding into the river through holes in the steel barrier that separates the fill and the water. The solution is not so simple because it involves money and lots of it Dredge Une BOB JUFFHA3 DAILY NEWS under the pavement It is this dirt that is being drained from beneath the By ARTHUR BROWNE ONLY THING standing be- 1 tween New York and the col-Li lapse of the East River Drive (or the FDR, as many people call it) is a 40-year-old, half-inch-thick steel curtain so rust-corroded in spots that a child could pierce it with a screwdriver.

It's not going to happen today, and perhaps not tomorrow, but if nothing is done, engineers say, the road will crumble within the next five to 10 years. When that happens, it will become as real a symbol of the crumbling city as the defunct Westside Highway. The sad fact is that, out of sight of the 90,000 motorists who travel the 10-mile roadway every day, the structure of the East River Drive is not-so-slowly reaching the end of its useful life a victim of time and neglect And nature: the swirling tides of the East River are, literally, consuming it There is no question that the collapse already- has begun nor that it could cause a major disaster. The problem was snapped sharply into focus last month when a gaping hole opened in the northbound drive near 42d St, nearly swallowing a Mercedes driven by a Wall Stret stockbroker. It revealed a cavern 40 feet long, 10 feet wide and nine feet deep beneath a roadway that should have been firmly supported by a sandwich of concrete and dirt more than 10 feet thick.

Somehow, the "sandwich" had disappeared. Since then, the city Highway Department has discovered a similar 35- foot-long cavern beneath the drive just south of the collapsed section, and a smaller void under the northbound roadway near 49th St They are all symptoms of the same disease a corrosion of that hidden steel curtain-that already has forced the city to ban buses and newspaper delivery trucks from long stretches of the road. Extensive repairs can save East River Drive and perhaps extend its life another 50 years, according to city Highway Commissioner Henry Fulton, but the repairs would cost least tens of millions of dollars" far more than the $23 million that the city scraped up in 1978 from the state and federal governments to pay for the rehabilitation of the drive's southernmost portion the South St Viaduct The concrete roadway of the viaduct an elevated stretch of the road running from just north of the Battery to Montgomery St, literally has turned to powder. The cause again: neglect and age compounded by a healthy dose of the corrosion of salt air and pollution. But the Drive has other far more complicated, hidden and dangerous troubles.

Much of the six-lane highway, for example, sits on neither land nor fill. For virtually its entire length, the northbound lanes are perched over the water on 40- to 50-foot-long timber pilings driven into the mud on the river bottom. At low tide, it is even possible to glide in a row boat among the eerie shadows of the blackened timber forest under the road. The pilings support what is called a relieving platform of timber and concrete. This, in turn, supports a six- to eight-foot layer of dirt that sits directly Where is the dirt going? According to Fulton, it is seeping out into the river through holes in the corroding steel curtain.

The curtain, technically known as a steel sheet piling, is embedded, in interlocking sections, in the mud at the inland edge of the timbers. Its only function is to provide a barrier between the water and the fill at land's edge and under the road. At high tide, the steel is completely submerged. At low tide, six to eight feet of its top Is exposed to the air and the slapping waves of the river. Rust and corrosion are inevitable.

"I'd say that the useful life of steel piling is 40 to 50 years, just about where we are now," says Fulton. "It's clear that it is reaching the end of the line." By NED STEELE and SHARON ROSENTHAL EORGE ZAIMES doesn't blame the pigeons. The pigeons have been "tak every two years in order to receive federal dollars to upgrade them, the job of monitoring New York City's bridges was left to five inspectors. The city didn't even keep a list of its seriously deteriorating crossings. And during the depths of the fiscal crisis, one city official admitted, "we did absolutely nothing peanuts!" Everywhere, bridges have reached their twilight years many none too gracefully.

They are carrying more cars and ing care of business," as it were, on the Brooklyn Bridge ever since anyone can remember, and last Sunday when two of the span's diagonal cables snapped! seriously injuring a pedestrian one explanation offered was that acids contained in pigeon droppings had eaten away at the cables. "Pigeons make their contributions," said Zaimes, director of engineering in the state Transportation Department's Office of New York City Affairs. "But sometimes I think pigeon droppings is what helps glue the bridge together." Zaimes' gallows humor is perhaps understandable considering the acknowledged sad state of so many of the city's 2,100 bridges, which range in size and complexity from the mammoth Queens bo ro Bridge to the 21-foot West Drive Bridge over Meadow Park Arch in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. A New York City Transportation Department survey of city bridges and overpasses, released last found that 13 were in "poor" condition while another 36 were rated only "fair." The latter includes the four busy East River crossings (392,460 vehicles a day). City and state officials say the likelihood of any major disaster is negligible.

they are unmistakably relieved that after years of neglect these lifelines in a city of islands are scheduled to undergo the most awesome bridge rehabilitation plan in the nation. Too late to save the 19 bridges that have been closed since 1978, but none too early for a city that pioneered bridge building nearly a century ago with the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The rehabilitation plan calls for pouring $1.1 billion over the next 10 to 15 years into roughly 200 of the worst spans. And it would zero in first on The Big Four by: Stripping the Queensboro Bridge of 19 miles of crumbling roadway to its bare steel skeleton. Preventing the Manhattan Bridge from twisting eight feet out of line each time a subway rumbles by.

Stopping the Brooklyn Bridge, from "leaking like a sieve." Challenging the Bridge Division of U.S. Steel to solve the so far unsolv-able problem of removing thick cakes of rust from the intricate cable network of the Williamsburg Bridge. Until 1978, when the passage of the U.S. Surface Transportation Act forced cities to inspect their bridges freight once routinely assigned to railroads. On the Williamsburg Bridge, for example, those trucks are now.

sideswiping and weakening cables. Salt has been eating away at metal foundations and truss work almost as ravenously as It devours winter snow and ice. And preventative maintenance work has become an impossible luxury when citizens are crying for more visible signs of progress. "In New York City," said one state official, "the capital dollars go for resurfacing of streets, potholes, welfare and Medicaid. The only time people scream about bridges is when they fall down.".