A GREAT WORK | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 31, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 13.

A GREAT WORK.

The New York Herald gives the following account of the progress of the work of constructing the new tunnel from Croton Lake to the reservoir in Central Park, a distance of thirty-one miles: Deep down under the rustling cornfields, green meadows, and peaceful woods, by the faint yellow light of innumerable smoky lamps, and the intermittent cold gleaming from white electric lights, six thousand grimy men are tunneling night and day, so that the water supply of New York may flow through miles of solid rock. It never ceases, this grinding and clanking and whirring and dull booming of powder explosions, save for two hours out of the twenty-four, when three thousand men drowsily crawl out of the dim shafts on the surface of the earth and eat their meat and bread and go to sleep, while three thousand other men take their places. For many months these cold, trickling caverns and shafts have been drilled and blasted continually. Hundreds of powerful steam drills, driven by streams of compressed air from wonderful, shining engines, eat into the hard rock like so many steel parasites, and mountains of torn gneiss and shining mica have been piled up around the shafts as the work went on. In two years a tunnel of thirty-one miles will stretch from Croton Lake to the reservoir in Central Park, through the brick and stone lining of which will gush a body of crystal water, more than enough to supply the metropolis plenteously.

For all these blessings and the proud distinction of owning the longest rock tunnel in the world, the city will have to pay at least $33,000,000, or perhaps $60,000,000. The Mount Cenis tunnel is seven miles and a half long, and cost about $15,000,000, while the St. Gothard tunnel is nine miles and a quarter long and cost very little more. Few people in the city have any idea of the marvelous rapidity with which the aqueduct tunnel is being made. Indeed, the speed which is kept up has attracted the attention of miners all over the country, for nothing even approaching to it has ever been seen before. Over eight thousand men are employed in the work, six thousand under the ground and two thousand on the surface. At the bottom of each shaft the miners work in two directions, so that while one set of men are drilling southward, there is a set of men in another shaft working northward to meet them. These shafts are about a mile apart, and yet so delicate and accurate are the plans of the engineers, that in no case, they declare, will the line of the tunnel be more than an inch out of the way, when the miners in the different tunnels meet each other under ground.