alt Hacker News62 years in the making: NYC's newest water tunnel nears the finish line
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Wild to think this is the same project featured in the third Die Hard, which turned 30 this year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....
https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/water/drinking-...
https://old.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/in5lm7/cross_section_s...
Potentially related:
Discussing Waterworks, Stanley Greenberg's Photos of NY's Hidden Water System [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416871 - December 2025
(Tunnel 3 will deliver 1B gallons/day and has a 200-300 year expected service life)
They finally got Water Tunnel #3 close to completion? Work was stopped a decade or so ago, but apparently it was restarted.
So many questions ... which probably have been asked on prior HN threads ...
I wonder why 800 feet underground: Is that necessary to pass beneath all other infrastructure (to prevent flooding it?)? Remain beneath waterline to create negative pressure and reduce leaking? ?
Also, what is the general mathematical relationship between depth, rock pressure / weight, and energy required to drill? That is, what is the proportion of energy required to drill beneath 800 feet of material compared to drilling beneath 400 feet?
...
Is that the same project shown in Die Hard 3? Where the truck driver enumerates the progress etc?
I recommend reading David Grann's excellent piece from 2003 on the New Yorkers building this tunnel: https://archive.ph/k45QP
My immediate thought is at what point does desalination tech + clean energy reach the crossover where building a 60 mile tunnel over 60 years not make sense?
It feels like very soon, and coastal cities can stop relying on hinterland reservoirs for water.
If you ever want to put the cost of something into context, remember that Mark Zuckerberg spent $77 billion on the Metaverse.
I went looking for an article I read a decade ago about the challenges of supplying water to NYC and maintaining the aging infrastructure. Part of the "race" to build new capacity is so they can actually turn off some of this supply for extended periods to repair it. Millions of gallons of water leaks or is just unaccounted for every day.
I didn't find it but this [1] kind of goes into it.
And since you can't turn the water off (generally), you need to do repairs in fairly extreme environments and use materials that don't corrode over very long periods of time. IIRC some pump or valve infrastructure was made out of manganese bronze for this purpose.
[1]: https://nysfocus.com/2024/11/27/new-york-water-leaks-drought
It's amusing to me watching devs talk about the breakneck pace of AI and LLMS, AGI all that sorts of stuff, what that wild future will give us - when there are far, far more difficult problems that lie directly in front of us, mainly getting public infrastructure projects done in normal spans of time, or hell, getting them done at all.