History Made Every Day™

Sandhogging Hazards

View of Water Tunnel #3

In New York City, the saying goes, "if it's deeper than a grave, the sandhogs dug it." Sandhogs burrowed underground to build the city's subways, sewers, water tunnels, railroad tracks and commuter tunnels, and they dug the foundations that allow the city's most iconic structures to stand tall and strong. Their job is essential, but it's also amazingly dangerous.

Cautionary Tales

– On May 8, 1872, 200 Sandhogs went on strike. They were protesting the unsafe, unhealthy working conditions that they faced every day as they built the Brooklyn Bridge. (They worked underwater in pneumatic wooden boxes called caissons, and as a result many had developed an incredibly painful, sometimes fatal disease called "the bends.") The strikers won a 50-cents-per-week raise, but their jobs didn't get much safer.

– In 1890, 68 Sandhogs were killed as they worked on a gas tunnel underneath Roosevelt Island. In just five months in 1906, 50 Sandhogs died as they dug tunnels for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and 13 more were killed in the Holland Tunnel between 1921 and 1924.

– It seems that every Sandhog knows the story of Marshall Mabey, who was helping to dig a subway tunnel under the East River in 1916. His section of the tunnel, filled with compressed air, collapsed, and the force of the leak sucked Mabey through 12 feet of muck at the bottom of the river, dragged him to the water's surface and shot him into the air atop a four-story geyser. (Mabey survived, but two of his fellow Sandhogs didn't.)

– In 1982, two train cars packed full of concrete blocks broke loose, gathering speed as they rolled down into the tunnel. They pinned one Sandhog so tightly against the tunnel's wall that he had to be freed with a blowtorch; another had to cut off his foot with his pocketknife to get out from underneath the wreckage.

Contemporary Dangers

Even with today's more sophisticated equipment, sandhogging is still a risky job. Workers can fall from machines or down shafts; be crushed by falling rocks the size of refrigerators and great blocks and shanks of ice; be trapped in a flooded tunnel; or be stuck on the wrong side of an errant explosive. Even those Sandhogs who manage to avoid catastrophic accidents can suffer from the unhealthy underground conditions: Tiny particles of pulverized rock called silica frequently do grave damage to workers' lungs. But despite the dangers, New York's Sandhogs are dedicated to their jobs—and they know that the city couldn't survive without them.