The scary lives of sandhogs: NY’s original underground ‘rock’ stars
ON A winter day 100 years ago, sandhog Marshall Mabey was digging a subway tunnel under the East River when it was rocked by an explosion.
He was blasted through 12 feet of muck, through the river, and then four stories high into the sky on a geyser of compressed air.
The father-of-four survived, but that wasn’t the most amazing part.
Mabey, 28, went right back to work.
Whereas most New Yorkers would think he was insane, modern-day sandhogs totally get it.
“It takes a different kind of person to work underground every day. I wouldn’t do any other job,” said Pete Breslin, 42, a 20-year veteran now working on the East Side Access project, which will connect the Long Island Rail Road with Grand Central Terminal.
Andrew Slegona, a third-generation tunnel borer in New York City, said, “It’s like a big, giant family.”
There are 972 current sandhogs putting their lives at risk every time they go underground.
“It is a very dangerous job, so everybody has to stick together and you have to be able to put a lot of trust in them,” explains Slegona, who now works with his 25year-old son. “Plus, we get to play with dynamite.”
JUST like 100 years ago, the city’s sandhogs remain deep underfoot, digging dark, dank tunnels and risking the same kind of calamity that sent poor Mabey skyward in 1916.
They still holler, “Fire in the hole!” when the dynamite fuses are lit, blasting through 400 million-year-old bedrock. And the work is still dangerous. In the 46 years that sandhogs have been digging a third water tunnel below Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn — a tunnel as deep as the Chrysler Building is tall — 24 have lost their lives.
“We lost a man for each mile,” said Charlie Cannon, 68, who has spent 44 years digging tunnels. So why do they do it? Well, at a hefty $45 an hour, sandhogging is among the best paid construction jobs in the country.
“It was very high pay,” retired sandhog Eddie Mallon shrugs, explaining why he returned to work after getting sucked into a pocket of mud during a dig.
“It was like soup,” he remembers of the muck that entombed him.
Mallon was quickly dug out by his co-workers. And that describes the other huge draw of sandhogging, and why they call each other “brother” — the comradery can’t be beat.
“Everybody has to watch the next guy’s back,” said Breslin.
“It’s a dangerous job, and you don’t want to work with someone you don’t trust.”
THEIR work is invisible to most New Yorkers, but their back-breaking toil contributes to building the city every day.
Ride the subway, thank a sandhog. Turn on your faucet, and, as some of the 1 billion gallons of water used in New York City each day pour out, thank a sandhog.
Flush your toilet, turn up your radiator — you get the idea.
Starting with the deadly, underwater excavations for the foundation of the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1870s, sandhogs have dug thou- sands of miles of subway tunnels, and water, sewage and steam pipes below the city.
They have spent more than a century building the basic infrastructure, some of it two football fields deep below the surface, that keeps us alive.
“If it were not for us, there would be no water, there would be no sewers, and there would be no subways,” Cannon explains. “New York owes a lot to the sandhogs.”
THERE are currently 220 sandhogs working on the East Side Access project. On a recent afternoon, the workers labored 160 feet below the surface — a depth of more than 10 stories — waterproofing a newly bored section of tunnel.
Working in crews of four to 12
men, they line the inside of the tunnels with yellow plastic, fortify it with rebar — steel reinforcing bars — and then spray concrete over it using massive hoses.
The sludge-spattered sandhogs constantly have to watch their step on an uneven floor that’s thick with slippery mud.
The air is hot and thick with floating mist and dust. Water of varying cleanliness drips from several points overhead. Co-workers fly by on cherry-pickers carrying pointy stacks of rebar.
Machines and tools make a cacophonous racket that rarely stops. It is not for the faint of heart.
“Men have been killed in accidents, crushed by machinery, falling down shafts, run over by trains and equipment. There have been cave-ins,” said Cannon.
“I saw a guy get buried alive right in front of me, once. Luckily, we were able to get him out.”
LIKE many union jobs, sandhogs don’t always get steady work. The conditions are so harrowing that scores of would-be sandhogs have showed up on job sites over the years and quickly realized that they weren’t cut out for the work.
“You can’t be claustrophobic. You’re going 900 feet underground and five miles in, and there’s only one way out,” said Cannon. “They get claustrophobic and say they want to leave. They say, ‘This ain’t for me.’ ”
There are massive environmental hazards. The boring machines, when they were introduced in the 1980s, made the job physically easier, but they kicked up outrageous amounts of dust that invaded workers’ lungs.
“A lot of people have long-term health problems,” said Cannon, who now has chronic breathing problems and must regularly see a doctor to check his lungs. “They didn’t have the filtration in the air or the dust under control.”
Contractors tried to combat the flying dust by spraying water, but it just created rivers of thick and sticky mud.
In later years, they got the dust slightly under control with misters and damp foam, said Cannon, which is why the air is so saturated where they work underground these days.
BEING a sandhog tends to run in the family.
Cannon’s dad was a sandhog, but still, when the younger man considered making it his career, his father was strongly against it.
“He was a sandhog for 50 years, and he told me how dangerous it was and how hard it was and that I’d have health issues and so on,” recalled Cannon, who clearly didn’t listen to his dad and worked for a sandhog for 44 years before retiring in 2015.
Sandhog Richard Fitzsimmons said, “It hasn’t changed all that much in 100 years. When you’re down there, you still have the feeling of being underground.”
Fitzsimmons added, “We used to have five or seven people get injured at a time because a runaway rail car or an agitator car would plow into some people.
“Most accidents today are from falls into a shaft or from a ladder, or a crushing between a hard object and a moving piece of equipment.
“There are a lot of fractures and breaks. The footing down there isn’t the best. It’s not like on the streets of New York City. You’re always having to navigate your next step, and it catches up to you.” Still, there’ s that $45 an hour. “No bulls--t about it, the money persuades people,” said Fitzsimmons. “If they save their money alone, they can leave here with something and open a small business. Or they pay off their mortgage and get rid of that burden.”
The money might be great, but what really keeps the sandhogs on the job — and inviting friends and family to work with them — is the tight-knit community they have formed.
Breslin, who currently works as a shop steward for Local 147, the sandhogs union, summed it up this way:
“It’s like a family, and everybody knows everybody.”