All we lack is a mere $30-$55 billion, a dose of political spine and some truly bad-ass engineers and
sandhogs. The latter two would forge a state-of-the-art underwater tunnel to Bridgeport or New Haven in Connecticut or Rye, N.Y.
In chapter nine, 'The
Sandhogs', the reader gets a glimpse of a social history and learns the stories of the workers who risked their lives and suffered occupational diseases working in these compressed-air chambers.
Keane is at her best when she is making a foreign world visible, whether it is the Irish coast or the subterranean world of the
sandhogs, underground miners (Michael Ward is one) creating New York's water tunnels.
Piligian, whose Pilgrim Films and TV shingle is also behind "Dirty Jobs" and the upcoming "
Sandhogs," says he's looking to profile dangerous jobs and situations--which naturally attract unusual, mostly male personalities who make for good television.
But unlike blasting rock to build foundations for tall skyscrapers, this time
sandhogs will work with rock that's 140 feet beneath the corner of Second Avenue and 63rd Street in Manhattan.
This work is being conducted by gangs of labourers known as
sandhogs. While Fairstein might leave the facts there, her fiction has more than a ring of truth to it.
Executive vice president of NYC's Economic Development Corporation, Kate Ascher, describes the technologies that keep the city functioning, as well as the people who support them--the pilots that bring the ships in over the Narrows sandbar, the
sandhogs who are currently digging the third water tunnel under Manhattan, the television engineer who scales the Empire State Building's antenna for routine maintenance, and the electrical wizards who maintain the century-old system that delivers power to subways.
A year later the Vancouver Sun reported, "City '
sandhogs' [technically workers who labour "beneath unforgiving waters to forge subterranean arteries"] are burrowing into a bush-covered Point Grey swamp to drain it of stagnant water--and any polio germs that might be lurking there." (37) Using prefabricated cribbing frames, they cut through "mucky black earth" twelve metres below the surface, with "pumps working around the clock to keep seepage out," in order to run a "snaking sewer line" beneath the bog to link two hundred homes to the nearest trunk sewer.