The Water Log

Our Town downtown
November 13, 2006

A fraternity of divers is keeping the city afloat. But no one ever sees them.

New Yorkers are blasé, sure. But I would wager that not one is immune to the power of Times Square to make you feel for a few heart-thumping seconds like a kid on Christmas morning. Even squinting Wall Street brokers must be impressed by all that glass and glimmer when they step out for lunch into the infinitely reflected sun.
That individual human beings constructed these mammoth skyscrapers and television screens the size of swimming pools is astonishing – but not mysterious. Like an army of ants, construction guys are everywhere, hammering up on scaffolding, maneuvering heavy machinery on blocked-off streets, eating lunch out of brown paper bags, catcalling as you walk by.
But drive through the Holland Tunnel in the silence that reigns when the radio cuts out, and questions may begin to echo. How the hell did they build a tunnel underneath the water? And who is “they,” anyway?
“We’re kind of the unsung heroes of New York,” says Eric Van Dormolen, 28, one of those mysterious underwater-builder-guys.
Divers can not only spot a diving site a mile away by compressors, pumps, and welding machines, they can also probably recognize half the guys on the crew. “But anybody else walking by has no idea [it’s a work site] until a diver comes out of the water,” says Van Dormolen.
Even mechanics don’t know anything about the tools marine constructors use, which, for obvious reasons, aren’t electric. “There’s a machine shop next to my house, I go there all the time. They never heard of a hydraulic chain saw until I took one there to get it repaired.”
High-profile projects like the Holland Tunnel don’t happen much anymore. Now it’s the housekeeping, like installing a chain-link fence around the Holland Tunnel to keep out terrorists, that’s keeping divers busier than ever.
Usually, work slows down in winter, but not this year. “It’s funny, this year it looks like the winter’s going to be busier than the summer, simply cause there’s so much work going on,” says Richard Kennedy, in his early thirties, who’s been in the marine construction industry for 20 years. Kennedy stays at Van Dormolen’s house in Northport, Long Island when he’s working on a job in the area. “The city is starting to rebuild its infrastructure, which has been left to disintegrate over the years.”
The rebuilding includes all the West Side piers, which are part of the bike path that goes all the way up the West Side; Manhattan’s new Staten Island ferry terminal; electricity-generating turbines going into the bed of the East River; a temporary outboard for the FDR, which is soon to have a major lane shift into the river while the highway is repaired; and the Department of Environmental Protection’s rehabilitation of all of its sewage facilities.
At $51.41 an hour, these guys make a better salary than most construction workers, but it still doesn’t seem like enough to swim in shit. That’s where love of the job comes in.
“Dive schools advertise – oh you’re going to make all this money, you’ll do really well.” says Van Dormolen. “When people see the dollar signs, they don’t realize what the work is. They don’t even like diving.”
These are the ones who won’t make it. Only thirty percent of divers who graduated from the requisite five-month training course with Van Dormolen are still diving five years later. Kennedy says that number is unusually high.
“If you’re down there underneath some huge load, you’re freezing your ass off in February, and you’re saying, what the hell am I doing in this dirty, gross water? You gotta like it.”
“You gotta get a buzz out of being underwater,” Kennedy agrees.
“I’d never want to clean out a Port-O-Potty. But jump in it? Okay,” laughs Van Dormolen.
All the work on the sewage system is part of a push to clean up the water, and it’s working. That’s the other reason there’s so much work for divers right now. Certain borer worms, called Teredo and Limnoria, are now thriving in the less-polluted rivers and munching away at piers. “The worms are back,” says Van Dormolen, which is good for divers since piers comprise the bulk of their jobs.
But like little kids, what these two marine divers like best is “burning steel underwater!” Kennedy almost shouts. Why? “Cause it’s cool! Using 5000 degree fire under water, it’s pretty awesome.”
Van Dormolen is currently working on a project burning the steel jackets off the foundations of Robert Moses Bridge in Bay Shore, Long Island, to break them open so they can be replaced by fiberglass jackets that will better protect from ice damage.
No one crossing the bridge will ever know the new fiberglass jackets are there.
“That’s the hardest part about selling a job sometimes,” says Van Dormolen. “If I put in $10,000 into my house, I put in the roof, the siding, maybe paint it, and say ‘Oh wow, it looks nice.’ People put $1 million into their pier, they never see it. It’s like, ‘All right, I can take this million dollars, I can build a park, and a dog walk, and all this stuff, or I can put a million dollars into something that nobody will ever see.’
But obviously it has to be there or everything will fall down.”

Posted by Tucker at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown
December 4, 2006

Docking super container ships is a job for an expert

In your daydreams you may have imagined that the man at the helm of the massive container ship hulking up the Hudson was a salty mariner from Alaska, hell, Siberia, with a long white beard and a permanent squint from the sun reflecting off the sea. And you wouldn’t be completely wrong: the ship’s captain is standing on the ship’s deck, but he’s no longer the one giving orders. The man now in charge is a specialist, a harbor pilot, who climbed aboard the ship just north of the Verrazano Bridge, and will direct it through the channel to its final destination in about an hour.
It takes a certain personality type to be able to take control of a ship away from its captain. “You have to have a little ego,” says Bob Flannery, a 27-year veteran of the industry whose family has been in the shipping business for “four or five generations, depending on who you speak to.”
“You’re taking charge of a man’s ship; the captain is always in charge of his ship. You’re coming in, making the decisions… The inflection of your voice, the way you present yourself [are very important].”
“Either one of us could be technically responsible for between 500 million and a billion dollars’ worth of stuff in a given week,” says Rich Wieners, a veteran pilot relaxing in a reclining chair between jobs.
Do they ever get nervous?
“We don’t have time!” Flannery asserts, in captain mode.
“Pick me?” Wieners chimes in from across the room. “Yes! Yes I do.”
“But you can’t show it,” Flannery laughs, acknowledging that even he is not immune to the jitters. “You try not to show it because if you show you’re nervous, the captain might override a decision you make, and that’s when things happen. You might have to go change your underwear after the shift, but as long as you don’t see it, it’s okay.”
When the captain’s really starting to sweat, Flannery resorts to a tactic not just anyone could pull off in a situation that could literally be life or death: humor. “This is the first time I’ve done this, Captain,” he might say, looking stricken with fear, “and it’s pretty windy today, so I’m going to take my time if you don’t mind.” That always lightens the mood, Flannery chuckles.
“But you know what?” he adds. “The guy that doesn’t get nervous is the guy that should retire.”
“He’s the guy that’s ripe for an accident,” Wieners nods.
And in this business, which involves orchestrating up to four tugboats to push and pull a 960-foot super cargo ship around a 130 degree curve, there is no room for error.
“These days, you get a little oil in the water and you’re out of a job,” says Flannery.
To make matters trickier, the channel is undergoing a decades-long dredging project that makes it accessible to ever-larger ships, while causing the current to get stronger and stronger. As Flannery puts it: “You’re letting all this extra water in, it’s got to go back out again.”
Flannery was elected president of Metro Pilots, a company of 15 harbor pilots, because he keeps abreast of what’s going on and he’s “got a pretty decent personality to talk to people,” he acknowledges. But the additional responsibility, which includes meetings with the coastguard, is a labor of love. “That and two dollars gets me on a bus,” Flannery laughs.
Still, Flannery’s not complaining. He and his fellow pilots, who work exclusively for Moran Shipyard, make good money, he says. (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that ship captains, mates, and marine pilots in New York State earned an average salary of $62,330 in 2005. The Bureau also ranked support activities for water transportation, which includes harbor piloting, among the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the country.)
That these guys love their job is obvious just from the maritime trivia Wieners likes to throw at Flannery. They talk about which dock is the oldest in Brooklyn like some men talk about poker hands or baseball stats.
If they didn’t, they’d never have made it through more than two decades on a schedule as harrowing as a fireman’s or an emergency room doctor’s. It’s 48 hours on, 48 off. When they’re on duty, the pilots sleep in snatches in a trailer at the shipyard in Staten Island, away from their homes and families.
Wieners, for instance, had gone on duty at 2 a.m. the night before I spoke to him. “I’m off duty now, I’ll go back on duty at midnight. So I could drive back to Connecticut, fight traffic back and forth, or I can go in there [a room in the trailer] and lay down for a few hours and be bright eyed and bushy tailed at midnight again.”
All 15 partners in the company are equal, which means seniority status does not result in more palatable shifts. If your shift falls on December 25, you’re working Christmas. The one day they’ve all had off, ever, was September 12, 2001.
Ironically, because they work all hours, these guys can give off the appearance that they’ve got nothing to do but watch “Law & Order” in the middle of the afternoon.
“My kids will sometimes say, ‘Dad, don’t you ever work?’” Flannery laughs. “I could have done two jobs before they got up to go to school and then been back home again!”

Posted by Tucker at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town Downtown
December 11, 2006

A century-old tradition is still keeping seafarers warm

Adeline Tegnazian’s scarf-in-progress looks different than June Beckett’s, and not just because Tegnazian’s multicolored yarn has produced a Christmasy explosion of red, green and white with shiny flecks that resemble tinsel, while Beckett’s stripes in orange, maroon and three shades of green remind one of gummy worms lined up side by side. It’s the shape: Tegnazian’s is rectangular, as scarves usually are, while Beckett’s is significantly thinner in the middle than at its ends, giving it the unusual shape of a kayak paddle.
Why? Because Tegnazian is working on a mariner’s scarf while Beckett is knitting a seafarer’s scarf, both of which will be distributed by chaplains at the Port of New York and New Jersey in time for Christmas. If you think of “seafarer” and “mariner” as synonyms, well, so did I. Seafarers, it turns out, are the ones making ocean crossings, and often they hail from tropical or temperate countries, while river mariners work inland, and spend less time at sea.
I’m still not sure why the seafarers require modified scarves. The question is dismissed by Tegnazian. “That’s how it’s always been done,” she says proudly. “Tradition.”
Indeed, with a few exceptions (the yarn is acrylic now, not wool, so it can be laundered), the hustle and bustle filling a second floor room of the Seaman’s Church Institute could almost have taken place a century ago, as horses and buggies rolled by on Water Street. Granted, the gift packages did not contain disposable digital cameras when Christmas-at-Sea began in the 1890’s, but the conversation – green tea with honey, lemon and cloves is a good remedy for arthritis – has not changed all that much.
The ranks of 3500 volunteers across the country include men, kids, prison inmates and even Wall Streeters who come into the Seaman’s Church Institute on lunch break to help sort and package. Still, the large majority are seniors (“older adults!” someone yells reproachfully from across the room), and female. Some have or had husbands or fathers who went to sea, and one volunteer at the Seaman’s Church had been to sea herself, but most have no connection to the seamen who will be wearing their scarves, hats, socks, vests, and face masks. They trek here once a week from places like Bay Ridge, Washington Heights and even Connecticut, because they heard about it from a friend of a friend, came down to see how they could help – and twenty years later are part of a happy clique that exchanges recipes and goes out for lunch in Chinatown.
“Tuesday is the best group,” Tegnazian states as incontrovertible fact. With a regular attendance of between twelve and fifteen volunteers, it’s the largest group (about eight volunteers usually show up Monday, Wednesday and Thursday), but since most volunteers stick to their one day of the week, it seems it would be impossible to make an accurate comparison. Still, they’re vehement: the Tuesday ladies “are from way back,” says one volunteer; “there’s just a good feeling on Tuesdays,” says another.
Last year, the program handed out 16,169 items, and this year, director Barbara Clauson is hoping to deliver 18,000 Christmas gifts to mariners in ports from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Clauson’s mother directed the program for 26 years, and for the past decade Clauson has been single-handedly coordinating thousands of volunteer knitters from every state in the country, each one of whom receives a note from her when they send in a knitted item. The packing, which began in earnest in October, must be finished by Christmas, and the long tables are covered with boxes of and neat piles of the odds and ends that will go into each package. They will continue accepting knitted goods until Christmas day; anything they receive after that gets stored for next year.
“It’s extremely hectic,” says Clauson, clutching red and green spools of yarn to her chest. “The days are long, the weeks are long.” Still, she wants to do more: she’s hoping a knitting group might make the Seaman’s Church Institute its headquarters, and she wants to see more community participation.
Many of the volunteers pre-date Clauson, but all seem to love her. “She’s the best we’ve had,” says Sylvia Meyers, who lives across the street and has been staying late to help with packaging. Stuffing plastic bags with one knitted item, a comb, a nail clipper, a magnifying glass (in case eyeglasses break), a sewing kit, a pair of shoe laces, a keychain, a homemade greeting card, and sometimes a disposable digital camera (so the seamen can take pictures on Christmas day) can be tiresomely repetitive work, but it also provides a tactile satisfaction.
“You get to use your hands,” says Nora Agatstein, extending long fingers adorned with rings. Many of the women do crafts anyway, says Agatstein, who not only crochets for Christmas-at-Sea, but also does origami and beading.
Meyers does not knit, which makes it all the more rewarding “to feel all the wonderful knitted items,” she says. As she shows off the colorful hats waiting to be packaged, she presses down on the soft piles that have come from around the country and wound up here, in her hands.

Posted by Tucker at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments