East River Gas Tunnel
| East River Gas Tunnel | ||||
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 Inner shell made of cast iron tubbings in loose material under the East River
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| use | 2 × gas line heating oil line steam line high voltage cable telephone lines |
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| place | New York City | |||
| length | 767 m (2516 feet ) | |||
| Number of tubes | 1 | |||
| cross-section | 8.6 m² | |||
| Largest coverage | 12 m | |||
| construction | ||||
| Client | East River Gas Company | |||
| start of building | June 1892 | |||
| completion | July 1894 | |||
| planner | Charles M. Jacobs | |||
| business | ||||
| operator | Consolidated Edison | |||
| map | ||||
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| location | ||||
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| Coordinates | ||||
| Manhattan | 40 ° 45 ′ 55 ″ N , 73 ° 57 ′ 8 ″ W. | |||
| Ravenswood | 40 ° 45 ′ 40 " N , 73 ° 56 ′ 43" W. | |||
Map with all coordinates: 
The East River Gas Tunnel , also known as the Ravenswood Utility Tunnel , is an infrastructure tunnel under the East River in New York City . It was the first underwater tunnel in the New York area.
history
At the beginning of the 1890s, the East River Gas Company in Queens applied for the expansion of its delivery area, which from then on should include not only Long Island but also Manhattan . The city gas pipelines for Manhattan were to be routed through a tunnel under the East River. Planning and construction management was entrusted to Charles M. Jacobs , who was later also involved in the construction of the tunnels for the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad (now the PATH system ) and the Pennsylvania Railroad (now Amtrak 's Northeast Corridor ). After test drilling in the river, the contract was awarded to McLaughlin, Reilly and Company in June 1892 .
The company began construction of the tunnel in July 1892. The attack came from both sides in the direction of Roosevelt Island. After the excavation of the Manhattan side was hit on soft ground, the contract was suspended with the construction company and the work in directing continued under the direction of Jacobs. After driving through the first loose rock zone in January 1893, the company refused to continue building the tunnel under the existing contract. An interim judicial order prevented the compressors for maintaining pressure on the construction site from being shut down and the tunnel being flooded as a result. The client, the East River Gas Company, terminated the contract with McLaughlin and continued building the tunnel itself.
During the financial crisis triggered by the silver panic in the summer of 1893, work was initially reduced in the Manhattan attack, then in August work was completely stopped for three and a half months. In May 1894, work in the Manhattan tunnel had to be stopped again for six weeks because a fire destroyed the installation site and drainage was no longer possible. The fire broke out in Jones's Wood Picnic Grove and destroyed 4.5 acres of buildings.
The tunnel was completed in 1894. Until the 20th century it was the only tunnel under the East River and was the model for all subsequent tunnels for the subway , the PATH , the railroad and the roads. The tunnel is still in operation. He currently runs two natural gas pipelines , a heating oil pipeline , a steam pipeline , several high-voltage cables and several telecommunications cables .
construction
Driving Manhattan
The construction work began with the sinking of the attack shaft in Manhattan. The start was slow because the delivery of steam boilers and compressors was delayed.
Classic blasting was used in stable rock, and mechanical driving together with the compressed air method in loose material . Since there was little experience with decompression , four construction workers died of diving disease . The first loose rock zone was driven through without a shield, the following rock zone by blasting.
Too much water seeped through the originally installed masonry inner shell, so that it was replaced by cast iron tubbings during construction . These were supplied by the foundry Davies & Thomas from Catasauqua in Pennsylvania , the same foundry later also supplied the segments for the North River Tunnels and the East River Tunnels of the Pennsylvania Railroad , which form the access to the Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.
Another zone with heterogeneous subsoil caused great difficulties. The lower section of the drive was in solid rock, above it was black mud. The rock had to be blown away in front of the shield, which in turn led to the ingress of river water, which flooded the drive with litter and live crabs . In order to control the penetrating water, the pressure in the drive was increased to 3.3 bar, which was the highest pressure used on a construction site at the time. The workers could work no more than an hour and a half under these conditions.
After the shield had fully penetrated the mud, the pressure could be reduced again and jacking rates of up to 1.8 meters per day were achieved. The shield was moved forward by twelve hydraulic cylinders that were operated with water at a pressure of 340 bar. The force exerted by the shield on the tunnel face was 5300 kN. After the jacking had penetrated the rock of Roosevelt Island, it was completed to the planned point of penetration within two weeks, with jacking rates of around 30 m per week being achieved.
Ravenswood tunneling
The Ravenswood tunneling caused problems right from the start. On the one hand, there was no good feed water and too little coal available for operating the steam boiler; on the other hand, a great deal of water penetrated the excavation pit, which caused problems when the shaft was being sunk. In March 1893, work at Ravenswood was stopped after the attack hit muddy ground that the contractor could not handle. After the construction company had stopped work and the pumps had been turned off, the tunnel that had been started ran full of water. In August 1893 the water was pumped out and the compressed air process prepared. It turned out, however, that there was a large washout above the tunnel and too much water penetrated to continue working as before. Consideration was given to dismantling the Manhattan attack shield once the work there was complete and using it in the Ravenswood attack. The idea was abandoned in order not to delay work in the event of unforeseeable events at this construction site, which is why a second shield for the Ravenswood attack was ordered in December 1893. After driving ten meters through a difficult zone of loose rock, it was again possible to work with blasting without a shield. Construction of the tunnel made good progress and quickly reached Roosevelt Island, where the breakthrough occurred on July 11, 1894. The two attacks met with a deviation of 1.5 centimeters in the horizontal and 3 centimeters in the vertical.
measurement
The challenge of measuring the driving directions for the two attacks was that the direct line of sight between the two shafts through the Hospital for Incurables on Roosevelt Island was interrupted. The measurement point was therefore on the Manhattan side on the roof of the malt house of the Chas brewery. C. Clausen moved to First Avenue , which was in line with the tunnel. The direction of the advance was transferred to the level of the tunnel by two plumb bobs attached to the opposite walls in the shaft . The distance between the plumb lines was 2.4 m. Their movement was dampened by hanging the 6 kg weight in a water container.
Building
The tunnel connects the gas works on the banks of the East River in Ravenswood with a shaft on 71th Street in Manhattan. It passes under the two arms of the East River and Roosevelt Island . The two shafts at the end of the tunnel and the middle section under the island are in stable rock, the sections under the East River in loose material from the river's sediments . In the loose rock, the tunnel has an inner shell that consists of bolted segments. The outside diameter of the tube is 3.3 m, the inside diameter 3.1 m. Next to the gas pipes there is a small factory railway for maintenance work.
literature
- Charles M Jacobs: A general report upon the initiation and construction of the tunnel under the East river, New York, to the president and directors of the East river gas company . New York 1894 ( digitized ).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ ConEd Ravenswood tunnel. Ferreira, 2017 (English).
- ^ Charles M. Jacobs, 1894, p. 7.
- ↑ The Silver Panic (1893). boerse.de, accessed on March 29, 2020 .
- ^ Charles M. Jacobs, 1894, p. 20.
- ↑ Jones's Wood swept away. In: The New York Times. May 17, 1894, p. 8 (English).
- ^ Adam Sadowsky: How the First East River Tunnel Was Built in NYC 1892. In: Untapped New York. October 10, 2014, accessed April 19, 2020 (American English).
- ^ Charles M. Jacobs, 1894, pp. 14-15.
- ^ Charles M. Jacobs, 1894, p. 18.
- ^ The Davies & Thomas Foundry. In: The Hopkin Thomas Project. Retrieved March 28, 2020 .
- ^ Charles M. Jacobs, 1894, p. 22.
- ^ Charles M. Jacobs, 1894, p. 19.
- ^ Charles M. Jacobs, 1894, p. 25.
- ↑ a b Charles M. Jacobs, 1894, p. 10.