The Specter of a Wet Suit
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.”
