Holland Made It Safe For Cars To Drive Under The Hudson River

To the tens of thousands of drivers who jostle to enter the Holland Tunnel every day, the tubes are less a marvel than a bottleneck. Most give hardly a thought to the fact that they're about to drive between Manhattan and New Jersey 94 feet below the surface of the Hudson River, in close quarters with hundreds of exhaust-spewing engines. Early in the 20th century, however, many experts regarded such a tunnel as a risky fantasy, doubting that drivers could survive the miasma of fumes. At that time, bridges and ferries — out in the fresh air — were considered the only safe way to carry internal-combustion vehicles across rivers.

But this tunnel was born of desperation. By 1906 — three years after Ford's Model A hit the road — the Hudson River's ferries were already overloaded, as cars and trucks added to the legions of horse-drawn buggies and wagons. Spanning the river with a bridge was out; the city's low-lying topography meant a bridge high enough to clear ship traffic could not be built at a reasonable cost. After seven years of study, engineers determined in 1913 that a tunnel was the only answer. It would double the traffic load across the river and cut the time needed to cross by ferry by more than half. But how could it be done without asphyxiating its users?

Enter 36-year-old Clifford Holland, an energetic engineer who had helped build the Big Apple's subway network. The task had given him unique experience in tunnel engineering and earned him a reputation that overshadowed his relative youth. In 1919, he was chosen to construct a Hudson River tunnel.

Tunnels under the Hudson River were not new: the first trans-Hudson rail tunnel opened in 1910. However, the much larger diameter of vehicular tunnels, combined with the affect of vehicle exhaust on occupants, especially for those stuck in traffic inside the tunnel, presented new problems. To address these problems, Holland gathered a team of experts from the U.S. Bureau of Mines, Yale University and the University of Illinois. Ole Singstad, who later went on to design the Lincoln, Queens-Midtown and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels, led the design team.

Holland and his team of experts embarked on research that included testing vehicle fumes on volunteer subjects. The group estimated the lethal concentration of carbon monoxide at just half a percent. Natural air circulation — all that railway tunnels used — would not be enough to keep the tunnel safe. So Holland and his men designed the first mechanical ventilation system for a tunnel, powered by 84 fans housed at the tunnel ends. Half the fans forced in clean air through ducts at road level. The other half drew off dirty air through ducts in the ceiling. The system, called transverse flow, refreshed the tunnel's atmosphere every 90 seconds.

It was brilliant and risky, and it worked. "It was a very bold move to do this job," says Norman Nadel, a New York City engineer who helped build several of Manhattan's newer subway tunnels. "It took a lot of courage."

Building the tunnel's two tubes was no cakewalk either. Holland monitored every square inch of construction. Floods when water broke in through the soft riverbed, sickness from the high air pressure used to keep the water out, heat, fumes — all plagued the workers and Holland himself. But Holland was in love. "When [he] talks tunnels, his listener is in danger of being convinced that tunnels are the only refuge for mankind," wrote a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1920. "[B]y the time he has finished his hearer sees in a tunnel all the allurement which a mole finds in a nicely constructed burrow."

When completed in 1927, after seven years of construction, the four-lane, 1.6-mile tunnel was the world's first ventilated automobile tunnel, and it remains the model for modern passages. The tunnel when it opens is the longest underwater tunnel in the world, with its north tube 8,558 feet long and its south tube 8,371 feet long. On its first day of operation, 51,694 vehicles pass through.

The total cost of the tunnel is $48 million. Today, it would cost approximately $1.4 billion. About 30 million vehicles now rumble through every year; 1.3 billion have used it since it opened. It was named a national historic landmark in 1993.

But Holland, a father of four girls, never saw that first vehicle (a Bloomingdale's truck) pay the 50-cent toll (now $6) and drive the eight minutes from state to state. He died of exhaustion at age 41, just two days before his diggers from the New York and New Jersey sides were scheduled to "hole through" deep under the Hudson to complete the tunnel. Two weeks later it was named for him.

Think twice, you only live once: This was an expression used by the "sandhogs," as the tunnel construction workers were called, that summed up the danger of working in the tunnel. Teams of "sandhogs" followed two enormous, 240-ton hydraulically powered shields under the riverbed. The cast-iron shields weighed 400 tons, measured 30 feet in diameter, were 16 feet long, and had a forward thrust of 6,000 tons. As they moved on, the "sandhogs" removed mud, blasted through rock, and bolted together a series of iron rings that would form the lining of the tunnel. They used a total of 115,000 tons of cast-iron steel and 130,000 cubic yards of concrete to line the tunnel. On a good day, the "sandhogs" moved about 40 feet. On bad days, they did not move at all.

After seven years of construction, during which only thirteen "sandhogs" died. The greatest danger facing the workers is the bends. Construction is carried out under air pressure, which has to balance river pressure. Workers have to pass through decompression chambers, much as divers do coming up from deep water. None of the worker fatalities are from the bends, however.

Sandhog is the slang term given to urban miners, construction workers who work underground on a variety of excavation projects.[1] Generally these projects involve tunneling, caisson excavation, road building, or some other type of underground construction or mining projects. The miners work with a variety of equipment from TBM (tunnel boring machines) to blasting a path for the project they are building. The term is a US-American colloquialism.

Starting with their first job in 1872, the Brooklyn Bridge, the "hogs" have built a large part of the City of New York -- the subways and sewers, Water Tunnels #1 & #2 as well as the currently under construction Water Tunnel #3, the Lincoln, Holland, Queens-Midtown, and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels to name a few, as well as the foundations for most of the bridges and many of the skyscrapers in the city. Since their work is mostly done below street level, in an unseen world of rock, sand, and earth, recognition of their achievements has been limited. Many of these workers are Irish or Irish American and West Indian.

Sandhogs are diverse in backgrounds, interests, and personalities, but are generally united in their work. Sandhogging is somewhat of a tradition and is passed down through generations of families; since mining projects span decades, it is not uncommon to find multi-generations of families working together on the same job.

The impetus for the Port Authority's formation can be traced back more than 300 years. First, there was the accident of political history that divided a common port area between what ultimately became the states of New York and New Jersey. In time, the division of the harbor - a vital source of commerce and growth - led to controversy in the region.

Throughout the 19th century, New York and New Jersey waged many disputes over their valuable, shared harbor and waterways. A dispute over the boundary line through the harbor and the Hudson River - settled by the Treaty of 1834 - once led state police to exchange shots in the middle of the river. The impasse eased when the two states agreed that the port area was, in effect, one community and that conflict squandered the port's potential. The states sought a governmental body to oversee port affairs and found a model in the Port of London, administered by what was then the only public authority in the world.

On April 30, 1921, The Port of New York Authority was established to administer the common harbor interests of New York and New Jersey. The first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere, the organization was created under a clause of the Constitution permitting Compacts between states, with Congressional consent. An area of jurisdiction called the "Port District," a bistate region of about 1,500 square miles centered on the Statue of Liberty, was established. In 1930, the two states gave the Port Authority control of the recently opened Holland Tunnel as a financial cornerstone.

Samantha Levine. Tunnel visionary. . June 30, 2003.

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