After 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, reconstruction efforts continue in the New York City area, and Monday saw the reopening of an East River tunnel damaged during the storm.
News 4 boarded one of the inaugural trains on Monday as Amtrak showed off 15 months of work that was “urgently needed.”
“Two of these tunnels needed more than routine maintenance,” Byl Herrmann, interim president of Amtrak, said. “They needed to be completely rebuilt.”
Amtrak has been refurbishing one of the four tubes that go underneath the East River. Using $1.3 billion in federal funds to repair a tunnel built in 1910 — then damaged in Superstorm Sandy. Despite the damage, it’s still accommodating 450 trains per day.
Now that Amtrak completed the work on the second tube, the plan is to work on the first tube a little to the south.
And that’s where the territorial fight re-enters the picture. While Amtrak executives celebrated the phase one completion on Monday, MTA chairman Janno Lieber, who controls the primary tenant at Penn Station Long Island Rail Road, looked on and hopped in to point out the MTA completed 11 tunnels after Sandy.
Lieber also maintains Amtrak could have done the work on nights and weekends.
“We are pushing Amtrak to learn from this project, which had some bad episodes — to make sure that kind of stuff doesn’t happen again,” Lieber said.
Amtrak’s vice president of infrastructure delivery defended the company’s course of action.
“We are confident the plan we put forward — in order to be completely taken down to the core and rebuild all the systems up was the right investment to make,” Warren LeBeau said.
Commuters told News 4 they did not notice a disruption with one of the four tunnels over the past 15 months.
“Yeah, I haven’t seen any issues; it’s been fine,” commuter Peter Palumbo said.
