The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York • Page 89

PJ SUNDAY, MARCH 16, 1930 Tjie ANDHOGS Men of Courage, Energy and Skill By Hamilton Whitman in the hole," that is to say down ninety feet under the East River, grimy hard- driven "sandhogs" are rushing to complete tubes side by side, run a series of tile conduits. They will carry the power lines of the completed tunnel. Eighteen feet above, the white, curving arch of the cement lined tube gleams in the electric lights. And behind that smooth white cement are hidden the huge iron segments that form the main shell of the tube itself. Each segment is tons of cast iron, yet they are smaller than an ordinary door.

They are made heavy to stand the pressure of tons of water and sand above. One stands admiring the niceness of their joining, and the city engineer says casually, "We're about ninety feet under the river here." Then in the next breath, "It's funny that you picked today to come down. fifteen years ago today Marshall Maby was blown up through a tunnel like this in the the final touches on the newest link in the subway system that binds Brooklyn to Manhattan. And now, eight months ahead of their contract schedule, they are on the last lap of the job. Pressure is Off, concrete is being poured, and in a short time the.

trains will be running. For many months the work has gone ahead. In their gray-painted office, almost hidden under the Shadow of Brooklyn Bridge, engineers of the City Board of Transportation have plotted each move in the job of boring the giant tubes under river and jrjj II Under the river they drive the long tunnel and the tation built between them. In the new -tunnel this was Impractical, so the Board of Transportation engineers looked for a new system. Finally they hit upon it.

Trained gangs of miners, most of them Sjotcli. English or Irish, under bosses who have worked from New York to Mexico City, from Shanghai to Montevideo, went down into the dark, sandy depths and suhk a drift. They worked as miners work, shoring up each inch of tunnel with dry timber that would warn them if a slide was threatened. Light steel plates' were bolted into place and heavy steel beams replaced the timber shores. They worked out an entirely new method on the job.

And it worked. It worked so well that the American Society of Engineers made a special trip to see it. In the southwest where the Brooklyn Bridge station will be, they are pouring cement. Here the timber is still in place and men swarm in-the face of the tunnel like brown monkeys. They are all dressed in earth -colored overalls and their.

-hands and faces are stained to the same color. Underfoot is the tawny river sand that will be covered with many feet of concrete before the tracks are laid and the final gleaming white tiles are put over the cement. Their boss comes up and is introduced. Standing there, on a twelve-inch timber shore placed across the tunnel midway from the "invert" or floor, and the "arch," as they call the rounded roof, he talks casually of his job. And of other things as well.

He tells an anecdote of a bull ring in Mexico City, and in the same breath switches to ask the city engineer if he has heard from some mutual friend of theirs who is in China. He seems to take the fact that he is bossing the very newest triumph of underground work as a simple incident in the job. And he gives all the credit for its success to the men ninety feet above him, the city engineers. While he talks there is a terrifying rumble from down the tunnel. One thinks about Marshall Maby again and looks at the men.

They seem as unconcerned as ever. The rumble comes nearer. The timber on which we stand vibrates ever so slightly. THen from down the tunnel comes the cement train. Four dump cars loaded with cement are pulled by a tiny, powerful electric locomotive.

They jockey the train into place. The cars are dumped and the last of the cement begins to flow, sluggishly, into place. In a few months now they will be finished. And the men will be off the job and on their way to the Up above, once more in the light of day and the ordinary air of the street, one of the engineers in charge of the job provided details. The tunnel is two miles in length, from Chambers and Church streets in Manhattan, it dives ninety feet under the river at the deepest point and then rises in an easy curve to the Brooklyn end at Jay and Nassau streets.

The iron tubes are eighteen feet in diameter. Outside the tubes is a protective coating of cement impregnated gravel. Giant bolts, they weigh six pounds each, of high tension steel bind the iron segments together. Then to make sure that there will be no leakage the joints are caulked with lead and finished with cement. And just in case there should be any water seeping through the iron and cement, there are several sump holes, thirty feet deep, with automatic electric pumps to clear them.

When the new link is completed, and they are on their last lap now, the tunnel will stand as a monument to the unknown men who did the job. Brook-lynites who speed through to downtown Manhattan will probably never stop to think of the "sandhogs" who did the job, of the engineers who planned the work, and of all the myriad technicians whose efforts went into its making. And the men themselves certainly never will. They'll be doing their Job in China, in Mexico, perhaps right here in New York. But the job will be a mute witness to attest to then-energy, courage and skill, and will tell any one who wants to know just what the city got for its two and a half millions of dollars.

wHr rig: I (i ill lip 0 0i j. v. A Mil Imili li ii Their next job mat be in China or Mexico East River. He and two other men were caught in an air bubble and carried up to the surface when the tube they were working in was ruptured by the pressure." I took a careful look at the walls. The engineer who was my guide, and host, laughed at "Oh, you needn't worry." he said, reading my thoughts "you won't get any ride like that today." We walked back from under the river to the site of what will be the Brooklyn Bridge Plaza station.

Here, he explained, was where a brand new idea in subway construction was being used. The ordinary method of- building a station is by the so-called "open cut." A huge trench Is dug clear to the surface and the two tubes are opened City. They have burrowed their way, like blind moles, through two miles of river sand. They have Cut their way under more than thirty houses and commercial buildings and now they are almost done. New methods have been evolved on the job, put into practice and found successful.

They have done their work well. Begun in June, 1928, when the first caissons were dciven on the Brooklyn side of the river, they pushed steadily forward. Under an air pressure of nearly fifty pounds per square inch, almost four times the normal pressure, the men started digging. It is hard and it is dangerous to work at that pressure. The men could only work lVi hours at a time.

Then they had to be "decompressed" kept in a gradually decreasing pressure for one minute for every pound that they had been subjected to. What does it look like, this tunnel that the "sandhogs" have made? It's a maze of tracks. It's a forest of timber shoring. It's a resounding gallery beneath the river and the city, and it's a mighty Interesting place. One enters a "cage," an elevator to the layman, ftnd drops ninety feet into the main tunnel.

There Is a long, slightly curving cement tube stretching way to where a wooden bulkhead marks the exact center of the river section. Beyond is Manhattan. Along either side of the tubes, and there are two.