		Volume 17, Number 4

"Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT"
is published quarterly by the
Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Bldg. 1-383, 77 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139

Editor: Debbie Levey
(617)253-7101
levey@mit.edu

Comings & goings

Sara Jo Elice '01 & '02 (MEng) and Corey Gerritsen '02 & '03 (MEng in Computer Science & Engineering) were married on July 13 in Sharon, MA. "We honeymooned in Puerto Morelos, Mexico, which is part of Riviera Maya and was absolutely beautiful. We now live in Maryland, where I've transferred to the Laurel office of the environmental consulting firm Metcalf & Eddy, and Corey has started work for Venca Technologies, Inc." Everyone in the photo graduated from the MEng program in 2002. Front row from left: Julie Parsons, Sara Jo Elice. Barika Poole, and Natalia Olive. Back Row: Adel Ahanin, Tommy Ka Kit Ngai, Russell Spieler. "Julie, Barika, Russell and I all have the SB '01. "Russell and I have been in the same class since the 4th grade," notes the bride.

Awards
While more than 35% of MIT faculty members are alumni, very few have volunteered much with the Alumni Association, according to Technology Review. In contrast, Rafael Bras '72, '72 (SM), '75 (ScD) has worked on phonathons, served on alumni boards, worked with class reunion committees, and traveled around to meet many alumni groups when he was CEE department head. This autumn he will begin a two-year term as chair of the MIT faculty, and he is already halfway through a term as vice president on the alumni Association Board of Directors.
        "Wonders of Planet Water: Complexity and order in Earth Systems" will be Rafael Bras's topic as he delivers the 2003 Lornz Lecture at the Fall 2003 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
        The Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Corp. Board of directors and Hall of Fame Executive Committee have elected Rafael Bras a member of the Class of 2003. The press release describes the HENAAC Hall of Fame as the Hispanic technical community's most prestigious circle, comprised of world-class engineers and scientists whose accomplishments are of monumental significance to the community, the nation, and to the progress of science and technology.
        Rafael Bras, the Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professor in civil and environmental engineering, has been named a corresponding (foreign associate) member of the Academy of Engineering of Mexico.

Two departmental awards for grad students have been announced. Brittany Coulbert has received the Goldberg-Zoino Endowment Fund, and Jason Brown will benefit from the Louis Berger Fellowship Fund.

Forest Flager '03 (MEng) has received the 2003 American Institute of Steel Construction/ Structural Steel Fabricators of New England Fellowship.

Research Associate Tomer Toledo 03 (PhD) received two awards for his doctoral thesis work. The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) gave him an honorable mention in the 2003 Transportation Science and Logistics dissertation prize competition, he received another honorable mention in the 2002 Eric Pas Dissertation Competition in Travel Behavior Research, awarded by the International Association for Travel Behavior Research (IATBR).
Toledo's thesis, "Integrated Driving Behavior Modeling" was supervised by Prof. Moshe Ben-Akiva and Prof. Haris Koutsopoulos (Northeastern Univ.). The thesis creates a fundamentally new model of driver behavior, which applies sound behavioral principles and rigorous econometric techniques to develop a framework and models that fully integrate all the dimensions of driving behavior. Among other things, the models unite decisions such as acceleration, deceleration, and lane changing. They also incorporate the goal orientation of drivers and their planning capabilities to reach their objectives. Being able to model drivers' behavior to a high degree of accuracy is vital to understand the workings of transportation systems, and it impacts results of safety studies, evaluation of facility capacity, and the development of reliable, high fidelity traffic simulation models.

Maliha Akhtar and Mesbah Haque '03 (MEng) were married on Aug. 1 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Mesbah has been admitted to the System Design and Management (SDM) program at MIT starting Jan. 2004, and is currently doing consulting work. Maliha recently completed her BS in civil engineering from Bangladesh Univ. Of Engineering and Technology, and looks forward to continuing her studies in the US.

Marina Cocconi and Petros Komodromos '95 (SM) & '01 (PhD) were married on Aug. 23 in Paphos, Cyprus. He reports, "Marina found a teaching job at the American Academy. I have to work very long hours in the CE Dept. Of the School of Engineering, Univ. Of Cyprus, but I really love it and we are both very happy. We still go to the beach on the weekends as the weather is beautiful." Splendid pictures of the wedding and reception are online at http://www.ucy.ac.cy/~petrosk/GamosSelection/our_wedding.htm

Last year, Hai Ning won a Best Paper award in Scotland. His advisor, Prof. John Williams, reports that this year Hai has won the Best Paper in the Teaching and Learning Session at the International Conference on Education and Information Systems: Technologies and Applications (EISTA´03). The title is On-line Peer Review in Teaching Design-oriented Courses.

As president-elect of INFORMS (Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences), Prof. Dick Larson will spend one year in that position, followed by a subsequent year as president and then another year as immediate past-president. He hopes "that this professional engagement will be synergistic with initiatives and priorities of CEE and ESD (Engineering Systems Division)."

Richard Camilli received the 2003 New England division of SNAME (Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers) Best Graduate Student Paper award for his work with Kemonaut, an underwater vehicle designed as a platform for the NEREUS mass spectrometer.

In November, Prof. Charles Harvey lectured in Seattle at a special section of the American Geological Society in honor of Henry Darcy's 200th birthday. (Henry Darcy discovered Darcy's law, which is the foundation for the study of flow in porous media, and hence groundwater hydrology.) "My talk, 'Solute Transport and Reaction in Groundwater,' described recent laboratory experiments we have conducted that enable the visualization of chemical reactions during flow through porous media, as well as computer simulations and field experiments." The session was called Henry Darcy's 200th Birthday: Fundamental Advancements Through Observation and Analysis.
The French National Academy of Science in Paris invited Harvey to give a talk in September at the "Colloque sur l'Eau" about his arsenic research in Bangladesh. He lectured on "The Arsenic Crisis on the Ganges Delta: Hydrology, Biogeochemistry, Human Perturbations, and Human Suffering on a Large Scale."

Seminars/CEE Website
For information about seminar series or single lectures, check out the CEE website at http://web.mit.edu/civenv/. This frequently updated site includes a calendar listing seminars and other departmental events, news about people in the department, a file of CEE newsletters with pictures in color, recently delivered speeches, and other relevant information.

Ursula and Christian Cabral '99 (MEng) were married on Oct. 10, 2003 at the Chateau de Sassetot-le-Mauconduit in Normandy, France. Christian adds, "We are both Brazilians, and Ursula is finishing her psychology studies here at the Sorbonne in Paris. I am presently living and working in Paris as a process engineer in the technical department of Vivendi Water Systems/OTV France. For the wedding, MEng colleagues arrived from Ireland, Lebanon, Massachusetts, California and Florida, which shows once again how strong are the bonds we develop at MIT." From left to right, members of the MEng Class of '99 and spouses: Frédéric Chagnon, Javen Figueroa, Christian Cabral, Ursula Cabral, Manal Hatem-Moussallem, Domagoj Gotovac, Benjamin Gaffney, Geraldine Gaffney. (Photo:Frédéric Chagnon)

Publications
The complete text of The Towers Lost and Beyond, a collection of essays on the World Trade Center collapse by researchers at MIT and edited by Prof. Eduardo Kausel, is available online, downloadable in PDF, at http://web.mit.edu/civenv/wtc/
The downloadable full report contains eight articles that deal with the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster and its consequences. Most of these articles were prepared between September 2001 and February 2002, and many were largely written in their present form in the days following the catastrophe.
The book begins with a brief history of the Twin Towers by Prof. John Fernandez (Architecture). Eduardo Kausel contributed the chapters, "Inferno at the World Trade Center" and "Speed of aircraft." Prof. Tomasz Wierzbicki (Ocean Engineering/Applied Mechanics), Liang Xue, and Meg Hendry-Brogan wrote "Aircraft Impact Damage," and Prof. Ahmed F. Ghoniem (Mechanical Engineering) supplied the chapter about the fires. CEE Profs. Oral Buyukozturk and Franz-Josef Ulm discussed "Materials and Structures." Fernandez speculated on ways to make safer skyscrapers in "Escaping with Your Life." Disruption in many phases of business were considered by Prof. Yossi Sheffi in "Supply chains and terrorism."

Chapter 22, "Atmospheric Electricity and Lightning" of the new Handbook of Weather, Climate and Water (edited by T.D. Potter and B.R. Colman, Wiley-Interscience, 2003) was written by Prof. Earle Williams and W. A. Lyons.

Marriages
Megan Lachausse and grad student Blake Landry were married on June 21 in Abbeville, Louisiana. A host of Parsons Lab people showed up, including fellow Course 1 grad students William Bennett, Meng-Yi Chen, Aaron Chow (the Best Man), Marco Ghisalberti, Matthew Hancock, Peter Israelsson, and Yoshimitsu Tajima, plus Chris Guerra from Aero/Astro.

Maliha Akhtar and Mesbah Haque '03 (MEng) were married on Aug. 1 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Mesbah has been admitted to the System Design and Management (SDM) at MIT starting January 2004, and is currently doing consulting work. Maliha recently completed her BS in Civil Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), and looks forward to continuing her studies in the US.

Kira Charlotte Voelker, daughter of Prof. Tina and Martin Voelker, was born on Aug. 14, 2003. "It was the day of the great East Coast/Midwest blackout, although we had no idea until the next day," says Tina. "She is a very alert baby and, like her parents, loves to be outdoors in any kind of weather."

Marina Cocconi and Petros Komodromos '95 (SM) & '01 (PhD) were married on Aug. 23 in Paphos, Cyprus. He reports, "Marina found a teaching job at the American Academy. I have to work very long hours in the CEE Dept. of the School of Engineering, Univ. of Cyprus, but I really love it and we are both very happy. We still go to the beach on the weekends as the weather is beautiful." Splendid pictures of the wedding and reception are online at http://www.ucy.ac.cy/~petrosk/GamosSelection/our_wedding.htm

Catalina Marulanda Rey '01 (PhD) and Gregory Da Re '00 (PhD) were married on Sept. 27 in Washington, DC.

Ursula and Christian Cabral '99 (MEng) were married on October 10, 2003 at the Chateau de Sassetot-le-Mauconduit in Normandie, France. Christian adds, "We are both Brazilians, and Ursela is finishing her psychology studies here at the Sorbonne in Paris. I am presently living and working in Paris as a process engineer in the technical department of Vivendi Water Systems/OTV France. For the wedding, MEng colleagues arrived from Ireland, Lebanon, Massachusetts, California and Florida, which shows once again how strong are the bonds we develop at MIT."

Births
Kira Charlotte Voelker, daughter of Prof. Tina and Martin Voelker, was born August 14, 2003. "It was the day of the great Blackout, although we had no idea until the next day," says Tina. "She is a very alert baby and, like her parents, loves to be outdoors in any kind of weather."

Heeok Jung and PhD candidate Sangyoon Min announce the birth of Henry Kyoungwon Min on Sept. 2, 2003.

Deaths
Technology Review reported numerous deaths of Course 1 alumni, sometimes with little or no additional information:
        Karl-Erik Werner Hellsen '32 (SM) died on Oct. 28, 2000, in Belleair Bluffs, FL. He had worked in supervisory positions on several engineering projects throughout the country, and retired from Raytheon. He is survived by his wife, June, and six cousins from Sweden.
        Jorge Echarte '40 of Coral Gables, FL, died on Dec. 3, 2001.
        Joseph Wileg Saylor '50 died on Jan. 9, 2002. He was survived by his wife.
        T. Curtiss Torrance '38 of Matthews, NC, died on Nov. 13, 2002. His jobs in construction took him to Hartford, CT as city engineer, followed by a position with Stone and Webster's Construction Division in Virginia. During World War II he helped design the atomic plant at Oak Ridge, TN. After the war, he was employed for many years by Charles T. Main, where he was a consultant for the engineering and design of utility and manufacturing plants until he retired in 1982.
        Lt. Col. John Allgair '48 (SM) died on Dec. 8, 2002. During World War II he commanded a battalion of combat engineers in Germany. Later he moved frequently with his family, working on construction projects in different countries. He is survived by his wife, their son, and two grandchildren. Also surviving are his first wife, their son and daughter, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
        Enver Muradoglu (Muratzade) '38 died on Jan. 3, 2003 in Kusadasi, Turkey.
        Ralph "Buck" Stedman Jr. '65 (SM) died on January 6, 2003. He served in the Naval Civil Engineer Corps for 20 years, and then worked as a civil engineer at Dartmouth College for 12 years. Survivors include his wife, Beatrice, four children, and four grandchildren.
        John Winthrop Read '40 died on Feb. 3, 2003 in Greenville, PA. After receiving his SB, he served as a major in command of a virtually all-black battalion in the then-segregated military. He later joined Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad, retiring 36 years later as general manager.
        Salvatore "Tory" Martinelli '65 (SM) died on Feb. 22, 2003, in Alexandra, VA. He was a retired US Navy Civil Engineer Corps captain who served in Morocco, Italy and Spain, as well as around the US. After leaving the Navy, he worked as a civil and environmental engineer. He is survived by his wife Jill, a son, a daughter, and a sister.
        Gustav Kabeschat '55, old Course 17 (Building Construction and Engineering), died on April 24, 2003 in Pennsylvania. He had been working for Kabeschat Construction of Wilkes Barre.

Marty Murphy '51 died on July 6, 2003. According to Technology Review, he had resolved by eighth grade to attend MIT and immediately applied for admission, although he wasn't enrolled until after graduating from high school. One of his professors was Harl Aldrich '47 (SB) & '51 (ScD), who founded the geotech firm of Haley & Aldrich. Mr. Murphy joined as the 13th employee, and remained with the company for 35 years of designing foundations for roads and bridges, reviewing plans, and surveying job sites for over 1500 projects.
Mr. Murphy is survived by his wife Mary, a son, four daughters, and 11 grandchildren. As the former Class of '51 president, he is greatly missed by his fellow graduates.

Charles Terrell '51 died on July 19, 2003 after a long illness. He was 86. Technology Review ran an extensive biography, noting how Mr. Terrell joined the Navy in 1935 and reenlisted after Pearl Harbor. After the war, he enrolled at MIT at age 30. Working as a night superintendent for Perini Construction on a large dam project in Georgia on the Chattahoochee River, he started to buy small farms, improving the land by planting trees, and reselling to buy more land and plant more trees. In 40 years, he planted millions of pine seedlings in southern Georgia. He sent photos to the Newsletter showing bucolic landscapes with trees reflected in clear ponds on his property, and for many years he mailed Christmas packages to this office packed with delicious fresh pecans harvested from his land.
        At his 50th reunion in 2000, the CEE newsletter reported that Mr. Terrell "plans to plant long-leaf yellow pine trees on 100 acres. He has also been building kennels for pets for battered women who are forced to flee to shelters which don't allow animals, and arranging for discounts for them to keep their pets in kennels."
        Over many years of correspondence with the CEE newsletter editor, Mr. Terrell wrote passionately about his land, the trees, and the various wildlife attracted by the surroundings. His other favorite subject of discussion was opera, particularly great performances he had heard over a long time span at the New York Metropolitan Opera.
        Mr. Terrell is survived by his wife Jane, a stepson, three step grandchildren, a brother, and several nieces and nephews.

Maj. Gen. Charles Noble '48 (SM) died on Aug. 16, 2003 at age 87 in McLean, VA. A graduate of West Point, he commanded the 1271st Engineer Battalion in Europe during World War II, and the 288th Engineering Battalion with the Occupational Forces. After earning his SM at MIT, he was involved in planning the defense for Western Europe for some years. In 1954 he returned to the US and held engineering positions in New York, Ft. Benning, GA, and Louisville, KY. As he rose through the ranks, he served as engineer around the world. In 1971 he was appointed president of the Mississippi River Commission.
Retiring from active duty in 1974, Maj. Gen. Noble joined the Charles T. Main Engineering co. In Boston, and retired 10 years later as the company president and CEO. During his career he received the Wheeler Medal from the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME) for outstanding contributions to military engineering in design, construction, administration, research, or development. He received three awards of the Distinguished Service Medal and three awards of the Legion of Merit in the Army, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1981.
He is survived by four children, nine grandchildren, and three great grandchildren.

Eugene Eisenberg '43 (old Course 17, Building Construction and Engineering) died in Boston on Oct. 13, 2003. An extensive obituary in the Boston Globe noted that he was 81 and had played his last game of tennis three days earlier.
        Graduating early under the accelerated wartime schedule, Mr. Eisenberg served in the Naval Construction Battalions, the SeaBees, during World War II and built airfields and docks in the Pacific. During an interview for the CEE newsletter in 1991, he proudly showed several pictures of his wartime days in tropical jungles, posing with the local residents.
        After teaching briefly in the MIT CE Department, Mr. Eisenberg entered the construction business and built schools and hospitals throughout New England. He joined Linenthal & Becker, an architectural engineering firm, which eventually became LEA when he was chairman and CEO. The company designed and engineered more than half the buildings on the campus of Brandeis University, near Boston. As a license examiner for the Town of Brookline (adjacent to Boston) and a member of the Brookline Building Commission, he oversaw the renovations all over the city. In his CEE newsletter interview, he proudly pointed out that he had directed the renovations for the elementary school where the editor's children were currently enrolled, and which his wife had attended decades earlier.
        Mr. Eisenberg is survived by his wife, Shirley (Helman), two sons, a daughter, a brother, and four grandchildren.

Mr. Jiro Adachi '53 (SM, CE) of Eagan, MN, formerly of Cambridge and Sudbury, MA died on October 19, 2003. During World War II, he served with the US Army Military Intelligence Service, and immediately following the war was a civilian engineer with the Army in Japan. In 1986, after a 30-year career in structural mechanics with the Army Materials and Mechanics Research Center in Watertown, MA, he joined the MIT Industrial Liaison Program as an Officer, remaining until he retired in 1996. A lifelong sports and fitness enthusiast, he was a volunteer referee and coaching assistant with the MIT Women's Ice Hockey program throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. He leaves his wife Eldora, a daughter and a son, and his wife's children and grandchildren.

While the domes, water and venerable trees strongly suggest MIT's Killian Court, this group celebrated the wedding of Nikki and Jeffrey Sriver '95 (MST) in Jackson Park, Chicago, by the Museum of Science and Industry. Standing from left to right: Sonya Wilson, Jim Grube '01, John Wilson '95, Jinhua Zhao (MST student), Hilit Kravitz, Jeff Lim '78 (physics), Tilly Chang '95, Alex Cohen '03), Jeffrey Sriver '95, Nikki Sriver, Ajay Martin (MST student), Jason Lee '01, Angela Moore '02, Maria Wilson, Nigel Wilson '67 & '70, Adam Rahbee '01, Roderick Diaz '95), Fiona Diaz, Jessica Vargas Astaiza '01, Elsa Gutierrez '96. Missing from the picture but present at the reception were Alex Kavanagh '01 and Mikael Sheikh '97.

MIT tuition hike
With the latest 4.9% hike, MIT's tuition and fees for the 2003-2004 academic year will total $29,600. Since MIT is committed to its principles of need-blind admissions, financial assistance for undergraduates next year will total nearly $70 million, with almost $59 million in the form of grant and scholarship assistance. Almost 80 percent of undergraduates receive some form of financial aid, and about 53 percent will receive an estimated average MIT scholarship of $21,000.
Students receiving financial aid share in meeting the costs of their education through self-help, or student loan and term-time work expectation. "Our self-help level of $5,500 ensures that undergraduates can participate fully in the academic, extracurricular and social life at MIT without carrying an undue burden of term-time work or debt after graduation," said Elizabeth Hicks, executive director of Student Financial Services.

Statistics for the Class of 2007, as printed in the Aug. 27 Tech Talk, show that 40% of the 559 men and 461 women were high school valedictorians and 91% were in the top 5% of their class. They come from 49 states, DC and three territories, plus 46 other countries.

Publicity
The MIT News Office reports that a group from MIT was among three international scientific teams which announced the genetic blueprints for four closely related forms of tiny photosynthesizing organisms, which numerically dominate the phytoplankton of the oceans. The work is described in the August 13 online issues of Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
        A better understanding of phytoplankton, which play a critical role in the regulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide as well as forming the base of the food web, will aid studies on global climate change. Further, the metabolic machinery of these single-celled organisms could serve as a model for sustainable energy production, as they can turn sunlight into chemical energy.
        "It behooves us to understand exactly how, with roughly 2,000 genes, this tiny cell (Prochlorococcus) converts solar energy into living biomass," said Sallie (Penny) Chisholm, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies in CEE and the Dept. of Biology. "These cells are not just some esoteric little creatures. There are some 100 million Prochlorococcus cells per liter of seawater, for example." Chisholm was part of the team that first described Prochlorococcus in 1988.
        Raymond Orbach, director of the Dept. of Energy's Office of Science, which funded part of the research, said, "While many questions remain, it's clear that Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus play an immensely significant role in photosynthetic ocean carbon sequestration." In addition, Synechococcus, a co-inhabitant of ocean waters with Prochlorococcus, has a unique form of motility.

Who is this muscular surveyor in an undated, unlabeled photo from Camp Tech? Can anyone explain to today's students what he is doing? (Photo: MIT Museum)

        The work of all three teams "will allow us to better understand what differentiates the ecology of these closely related organisms through comparative genomics," said Chisholm. "We still don't know the functions of nearly half of these organisms' genes. We're excited about unveiling those functions‹particularly for those genes that are unique to the different strains‹because they'll alert us to key factors important in regulating marine productivity (photosynthesis) and plankton diversity. The idea is to let the organisms tell us what dimensions of their environment are important in determining their distribution and abundance. And this will become easier and easier as the genomes of additional strains are sequenced, and the functions of the genes are understood."
        This research was sponsored by the Dept. of Energy, with additional support from the Seaver Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Israel-U.S. Binational Science Foundation and FP5-Margenes. The work is part of the MIT Earth Systems Initiative, of which Chisholm is a co-director. Data from ESI will ultimately help monitor the planet's vital signs, predict the effects of future human activities and otherwise contribute to responsible stewardship of the planet.
        In addition to Chisholm, MIT authors from CEE on the Rocap et. al. Nature paper are graduate student Maureen Coleman, postdoctoral associates Zachary Johnson and Debbie Lindell, and postdoctoral fellow Erik Zinser.

The Urban Transportation Monitor for May 2, 2003, reports that the US Dept. of Transportation's Volpe National Transportation Center will award MIT a contract for technical support to implement the DynaMIT model at the Los Angeles Dept. of Transportation. The pilot project will test the application and viability of automatic nonrecurring congestion detection and traffic management of the integrated system.
        DynaMIT will determine the baseline normal traffic condition. Once the normal condition has been set, other systems will be used to determine the occurrence of an incident. After the incident is detected, DynaMIT will assess the impact and provide predictive traffic information and guidance for implementing proactive traffic management strategies to mitigate the congestion.
        The key to DynaMIT is its detailed network representation, coupled with models of traveler behavior. Through an effective integration of historical information databases with real-time inputs from field installations, DynaMIT efficiently estimates network conditions, predicts network conditions in response to various traffic control measures and information dissemination strategies, and generates traveler information to guide drivers toward optimal decisions. The system incorporates unbiasedness and consistency into its core operations to guarantee that the information provided to travelers is based on the best available knowledge of current and anticipated network conditions. Consistency ensures that DynaMIT predictions of expected network conditions match what drivers would experience on the network.
        For more information about DynaMIT, contact Prof. Moshe Ben-Akiva at mba@MIT.edu or 617-253-5324.

Chad Lieberman perfects the blades for his power-generating windmill in the DCEE program right before freshman orientation in August. More details and pictures of the group's activities will be in the next issue. (Photo: Raquel Rae Escatel)

Further reading
Even as the August 2003 blackout drained New York City of electricity and subsequent subway transportation, refrigeration, and computer power, the city never lost its water supply. Two main tunnels provide the city with most of the 1.3 billion gallons of pure water it consumes each day, 90% streaming downhill through aqueducts built more than a century ago. To ensure that critical supply, a third tunnel has been under development since 1969 but is not expected to be complete until 2020. Politics, contract disputes, municipal patronage and corruption, and "Not In My Backyard" opposition have added years to construction.
The New Yorker magazine describes the fascinating history and progress of the job in "City of Water" in the Sept. 1, 2003 issue. Besides talking to many of the sandhogs (tunnel diggers) who are currently blasting the tunnel in lower Manhattan, author David Grann accompanies a third-generation worker underground and graphically describes the atmosphere and attitudes of the men involved.
Before the first water tunnel brought reliable clean water to the city in 1842, Manhattan suffered from uncontrollable fires and waterborne diseases, including cholera. Under appalling conditions in the 1800s and continuing to 1917, the most desperate workers willing to undertake such risks constructed the elaborate water system which serves the city today. Repairing deteriorating parts of the tunnels is often impossible, leading to fears that an accident or terrorist attack could suddenly dry out the city before the third tunnel can be finished. The author deftly deals with all aspects of a major city's water supply, from political combat in government to the men blasting tunnels almost 600 ft (183 m) below the traffic.