“I wonder what it can be?” queried Will, excitedly.
“A new subway, maybe,” I responded. “They have been talking about one lately.” But a man who was leaning over the rail beside us broke in with the information that it was the new aqueduct.
“Oh, yes,” I chimed in, “Mr. Price told us we must surely see it, Don't you remember, Will?”
“It ’s a whale of a job, too,” said the stranger. “The biggest thing of the kind ever undertaken. There never was anything to compare with it.”
“How about the Roman aqueducts?” I put in.
“A mere trickle of water,” he said contemptuously. “Why, this aqueduct is going to be fourteen feet in diameter. Yes, seventeen feet in some places; and when it is entirely completed and worked to its fullest capacity, it can furnish us every day with five hundred million gallons of water, brought here all the way from the Catskill Mountains. It is one hundred and twenty-seven miles from the proposed upper lake down to the reservoir in Staten Island. That ’s quite a river, now, is n’t it? While with the five hundred million gallons that we get now from the present systems, there will be enough to supply every man, woman, and child in Greater New York with two hundred gallons per day.”
“How much is two hundred gallons?” I inquired.
“About three bath-tubfuls, all good, clear, clean water.”
“But what in the world do they expect to do with all that water?”
“At present, they are not going to complete much more than half the work in the mountains. They are merely making provision for the future. I suppose, in fifty years’ time, New York will be so large that even this supply of water will not be enough, and then people will have to tap Lake Champlain, or Niagara, or something, You young fellows ought to go up to Ashokan, and see the work they are doing there, They are building a dam a mile long and two hundred and twenty feet high, and then there will be dikes, and embankments, and weirs, making, altogether, about five and one half miles of masonry and earthworks that will turn a whole valley into a lake. Why, they have had to move seven villages and thirty-five cemeteries to make room for that lake. On the other side of the mountain, they have planned for another large lake, and the two lakes are to he connected by a tunnel. From the Ashokan reservoir, they are going to convey the water by means of pipelines and tunnels down to the Hudson River at Breakneck Mountain, and there, to my mind, is the most wonderful thing of the whole system. They are going to dip under the Hudson River with a tunnel eleven hundred feet below the surface.”
THE AQUEDUCT TUNNEL UNDER THE HUDSON 1100 FEET BELOW THE SURFACE. IN SEARCH FOR GOOD ROCK, INCLINED TEST-BORINGS WERE MADE FROM EACH SIDE OF THE RIVER, MEETING AT A DEPTH OF 950 AND 1500 FEET.
I had been suspecting that the man was exaggerating a good deal, and now I was sure of it. “Come off,” I interrupted, rather impertinently. “You can’t ‘put that over’ on us, We know something about tunneling and excavating in this neighborhood, and we know that the deepest hole ever dug in New York did n’t go one hundred and ten feet below water-level; and then the air-pressure in the caisson was so heavy that the men could only put in two hours of work a day.”
“But,” explained the man, “this is not caisson work. The ‘siphon’ under the river is being put through solid rock, where they do not have to bother with pneumatic pressure. Why, it is just because they wanted solid rock that they had to go so deep. This tunnel is being built to last forever, Nothing short of an earthquake can hurt it, and the chances of an earthquake in New York are pretty slim, according to what geologists tell us.”
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