Passenger Trains > And you thought riding the NY subway was boring...

Not always. This one (from the NY Post) strikes a little close to home, since I routinely oversee drilling work in NY City and also routinely ride the F train.

As for "how could this happen?" it is amazingly easy. I have had several near misses with mismapped underground utilities, but in this case it looks like a total f/up on the part of the contractor.

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That was a “bit” too close for comfort.

Modal Trigger
A giant drill bit nearly skewered an F train packed with passengers when an MTA contractor missed its mark while digging a well, officials said on Thursday.

The train, which was loaded with around 800 passengers, had just pulled out of the 21st Street-Queensbridge station in Long Island City around 11:45 a.m. Thursday when the drill came spiraling through the top of the tunnel and narrowly missed penetrating the top of one of the train cars.

The operator heard a thundering noise on the roof and stopped the subway with the emergency brakes — and then discovered the drill extending from the roof of the tunnel to the floor, which struck down just inches from the side of the train, officials said.

The bit, which measures 10 inches in diameter, shattered the glass of several of the train’s windows and gouged its steel frame, the MTA said.

Officials blamed contracting company Griffin Dewatering New England Inc. for the nearly tragic blunder, adding that the crew was working from above ground to extend an underground well as part of the East Side Access project.

The project will connect Long Island Rail Road with Grand Central Terminal.

“Somebody made a mistake; maybe a surveyor or a field engineer,” said a source. “They drilled into the street but didn’t realize they were right over the F train tunnel. They weren’t supposed to be in that spot.”

The passengers were forced to walk through a rescue train that pulled up behind the halted train which made it only 700 feet from the 21st Street station, and gave them passage back to the platform.

Stephanie Cruz, 21, of Queens was on the train, and said that riders didn’t know how serious the situation was.

“I wasn’t worried, I just assumed it was normal MTA crap,” said Cruz. “Something’s always breaking, you’re underground so you’re pretty much secluded from knowing if there is any real danger.”

She was then stunned when she saw the photos of what actually happened. “I’m like holy s–t.” she said. “It’s hard to believe that happened…How could someone screw up that bad?

Northbound F train service was halted for hours as the MTA investigated the bizarre mishap before being fully restored Thursday evening.

Workers from Griffin Dewatering, which could not be reached for comment, installed a steel plate to fill in the misplaced hole.

This was a really impressive drill bit. The visible part of it in the subway tunnel looked to be 20 feet high.

Are there any photos available.

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/10/30/drill-bit-plows-into-subway-tunnel-grazes-train-car-in-queens/

Wurli1938 Wrote:
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> Are there any photos available.


The NY TV stations had several pictures in their reports.

WNYW
WCBS
WABC

Lackawanna484 Wrote:
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> This was a really impressive drill bit. The
> visible part of it in the subway tunnel looked to
> be 20 feet high.


Just an ordinary string of soil augers. To clarify, the "drill bit" is only the tip, the part that cuts the soil. The corkscrew pipe that you see is a series of bolted-together 5 foot auger sections that transport the cuttings to the surface as they spin and as the hole advances.

The sheer ineptitude of this is staggering. At the top of the tunel, the driller would have known immediately that he hit a void, just from the speed of advance into the hole. In order to reach the bottom of a tunnel that's what (?) maybe 15 feet high, he had to stop at least TWICE to add new 5-foot auger sections. In 30 years in this business I've met some pretty bone headed contractors, but I've never met somebody who would keep drilling under these conditions.

That's insane! I guess it just illustrates the difficulty of digging a tunnel under an existing city with all its sewers and basements and subways and electrical conduits.

Tor in Eugene

I can see this idea making its way into a scare movie...

Ray

I thought this post would be boring, but perhaps I took it for granite!

Norm

Norman Orfall
Helendale, CA
TIOGA PASS, a private railcar

Well, it started out as a boring, specifically a soil boring...

Delightful front-page coverage in the New York Daily News, too.

I've heard of "drilling" railcars, but this is extreme.

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Torisgod Wrote:
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> That's insane! I guess it just illustrates the
> difficulty of digging a tunnel under an existing
> city with all its sewers and basements and subways
> and electrical conduits.
>
> Tor in Eugene


Yes indeed. Just to drill a soil boring in NYC is a pretty complicated deal. Here's a view from Manhattan, on a relocation project I was working on where the street surface had been pulled up. Just the shallow stuff showing here--anything like a water line that needs to be below frost can't be seen, sewers are lower than that, and of course the subways are deeper than that, and the big water tunnels are down several hundred feet.

In my career, I've hit sewer lines, water lines, communication cables, even nicked (but didn't penetrate) a high pressure 3-foot gas main that fed the largest ceramics furnace in North America. Fortunately, no injuries and I had an official utility markout in every case. (So I'd still be dead, but blameless). Hitting a subway tunnel and continuing to drill is first class incompetence, though. Everybody in the office is just shaking their heads on this one.

Best line I've heard so far: "Well those guys are paid by the foot, you know."

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Thanks for the descriptive picture. Is that the Federal Reserve Bank of NY on the left? Lots of interesting stuff in their basement. It's a main gold transfer point for international settlements, etc

Incredible how congested the area is.

"What ever you do don't drill in this spot, here, I'll mark the it with an 'x'..."

Heh my dad hit a deionized water line not once but twice, It wasn't marked out, dug a footer for a pole and hit it. Got to the next location he looked at the locating people and said well if it runs from that building to that other building wouldn't it run here too, nah they said. Hit it again. Some stuff just isn't marked or found. And engineering plans can be wrong.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/31/14 17:42 by NSDTK.

Many years ago, I read an article about New York City infrastructure (back before we called it "infrastructure"). The author told of how in really congested areas, like 42nd & Broadway, there's hardly enough actual "dirt" left "to bury a lead pencil." Utility location experts have to go through dozens of old drawings (some of them probably look like papyrus from the tomb of King Tut) in hopes of finding all the conduits, pipes, water mains and other underground hardware. But sometimes the crew will find an unknown pipe, so they have to break out the power drill or the Sawzall and go for it.

NSDTK Wrote:
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> Heh my dad hit a deionized water line not once but
> twice,....

I worked at the phone company. One day a contractor dug up one of our cables. It cost the company $300,000 (around 1973 dollars) for repairs and potential lost revenue. The backhoe operator told his boss, "Hey, looks like a phone cable here." The boss told him, "Not supposed to be any here, go ahead a dig it up." OOPS!!

On another occasion a farmer was putting up a new fence and his auger hit the buried cable FOUR times.

Both of those took out between 500 and 2000 long distance circuits. After fiber cables were deployed, on two occasions AT&T got hit with farmers burying dead cows. They just dug a hole next to where the cow fell, push the cow in, cover it. They lost service on 100,000 to 300,000 or maybe more circuits.... voice, data, video, you name it, even some railroad communications (had to include the rail content.) There are markers above ground all along the route. Six inches below the surface the have a 2 inch wide orange tape to warn contractors, another one two feet below that, and finally the cable down at 3 feet in an orange conduit. Hard to say, "I didn't know it was there."

All of those were marked correctly, except maybe for the first one, but that didn't stop anyone. The joke was, "Underground cable are locating devices so that backhoe operators know where to dig."

John

Drill bit through an underground tunnel also happened not too long ago in London. The tunnel is one that is now used by main line trains but it was for many years part of the London Underground network.

http://www.constructionenquirer.com/2013/03/12/piling-firm-all-foundations-pierced-london-rail-tunnel/

cricketer8for9 Wrote:
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> Drill bit through an underground tunnel also
> happened not too long ago in London. The tunnel is
> one that is now used by main line trains but it
> was for many years part of the London Underground
> network.
>
> http://www.constructionenquirer.com/2013/03/12/pil
> ing-firm-all-foundations-pierced-london-rail-tunne
> l/

...and there was this debacle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_flood

TAW

Ooops! I saw this on the Model Railroader forum I thought it was on someone's model railroad as it looked like a long drywall screw through benchwork!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/01/14 13:13 by wabash2800.

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