More Information on Sandy Damage from TransAction presentations

[jis]

At TransAction there was a session on Sandy damage and recovery. NJTransit was conspicuously absent from that session. Only Amtrak and PATH made two excellent presentations, from which I learned a lot. Here are some salient points that I had jotted down:

I. From Amtrak (Drew Galloway) presentation:

1. At Battery the storm surge was 14'6" beating the previous max by several feet.

2. NEC was affected from Baltimore to Providence.

3. CNOC and CETC in Wilmington came within 1" of getting flooded out.

4. In preparing from Sandy Amtrak spiked the interlockings at Fair, Ham, Haynes, Hunter, F & Q in NY/NJ.

5. It was fortunate that the North River tunnels absorbed the entire flood inflow thus saving Penn Station from flooding. If the station had flooded it would have taken at least six months tog et back up and running again.

6. The North River tunnels flooded due to water flowing in from the West Side Yard. The entire west end of A interlocking was flooded out with water flowing through the area like a giant river. There were some impressive pictures shown illustrating the point.

7. East River tunnels flooded through multiple entry points. Two ventilation shafts, one the existence of which was unknown until water

came in through it started the flooding but it was completed by water entering through Queens portal of tunnel 2. Tunnel 1 flooded through a connecting pumping sump tunnel from tunnel 2. Tunnels 3 and 4 did not flood.

8. A total of 13.6 million gallons of water was pumped out of the tunnels.

9. Kearny sub 41 was flooded by a 5' surge from the Passaic and Hackensack River at that point, 20 Vacuum CBs were destroyed. The main transformers did not flood. It took them almost a week to even get to the site to start working on recovery.

10. The new standpipe system installed for fire emergency in the North River tunnels were used effectively in reverse to pump water out.

11. Recovery timeline: North River South Tube Nov 1, East River Tube 2 Nov 10, East River Tube 1 Nov 11, North River North Tube Nov 12, Kearny Sub Nov 16.

12. Acela sets were used to establish Regional service between Newark and Washington on Oct 31.

13. Changes being made:

13.1 Raise or seal Vents that acted as entry points for flood water.

13.2 New higher capacity signal system being installed in the East River tunnels to allow for restoring more trains than was possible when a tunnel is lost.

13.3 More resilient power feed with redundant feeds being installed for catenary and signal power to eliminate single point of failure.

13.4 Inflatable tunnel plugs being studied. However, it is quite possible that it is better to let the tunnels flood and soak up flood

water to keep the station from flooding. The issue is being studied in great detail including modeling various flooding modes.

13.5 Significant lengths of dykes are going to be built to protect tunnel portals in Queens

14. Portal North Bridge design is complete and construction can begin as soon as any money at all becomes available from any source. Most of the work was actually done by the NJTransit team.

II. From the PATH (Wilfredo Guzman) presentation:

1. Harrison Yard was flooded upto 2.5' - 3' deep. 52 PA5s and 20+ PA-4s were damaged. Damage only to underfloor equipment.

2. Substation 7, 8, 9 and 14 were damaged and had to be substantially rebuilt.

3. Kearny Pocket track and other tracks in that are were flooded out (This also implies that M&E at Sawtooth bridge was flooded under several feet of water.

4. One of the WTC - Exchange Place tunnel was breached through WTC bathtub, which was flooded. The first tunnel filled up all the way to Exchange Place and then the water flowed from that to the second tunnel and flooded it to the crown too.

5. Harrison Station entrance had upto 4' of water.

6. Employees had to be rescued by boat from Harrison Maintenance facility and Harrison Station.

7. Warrington Plaza had 4' of water in Hoboken.

8. When the line to WTC reopened, it was operated using manual block for many weeks while Invensys reprogrammed the new computerized control equipment to enhance capacity so that it could take on function of the old relays that were flooded out and destroyed.

 

[PRR 60]

At TransAction there was a session on Sandy damage and recovery. NJTransit was conspicuously absent from that session. Only Amtrak and PATH made two excellent presentations, from which I learned a lot. Here are some salient points that I had jotted down:
I. From Amtrak (Drew Galloway) presentation:

1. At Battery the storm surge was 14'6" beating the previous max by several feet.

...

The storm tide at The Battery was 14.06' A little lower than 14'6", but not much. MHHW is about 4.0', so the Sandy tide was about 10' above normal (which, to be technically accurate, makes the "surge" 10').

The prior tidal elevation record at The Battery was 10.0' in 1960, a surge of 6.0'. The Sandy tidal surge exceeded the prior record surge by nearly 70%. The tide predicted by the NWS was 11.0' (surge 7'), so even the NWS did not accurately predict the actual tide from Sandy.

 

[jis]

Thanks for the correction and details PRR. These are from notes hastily jotted down while slides were flying by, So the mistake might very well be mine and not Drew's

Incidentally, I was very surprised with how forthright Drew was about how critical the situation was after the surge came in. It was higher than expected by anyone. The scariest two according to him were the prospect of losing CNOC, which according to him was a touch and go for a while - the phrase used was "came within an inch of losing", and the prospect of flooding out Penn Station, which he said would have taken many many months to recover from. The latter of course was not something that was imminent. There was enough additional capacity left in unflooded tunnels to absorb another surge perhaps without flooding the station. The second tunnel under the river had relatively minimal flooding. That is where the idea of sacrificng the tunnels to save the station as a strategy came up. Now that we know it takes a week or so to clean up the tunnels.

 

[WhoozOn1st]

Pretty good for hastily jotted notes. It's difficult to look over that list without sort of mentally itemizing west coast rail infrastructure damage that might result from a natural calamity of similar scale, though different type, e.g. earthquake. And a tsunami that might follow an offshore temblor could well cause Sandy-like catastrophic flooding in low-lying coastal cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, and San Diego, though they don't have nearly the underground component of the greater NYC metro area.

 

[Anderson]

Just a thought, but is there a way to design a plug (or develop a sandbagging plan) to protect Penn Station? I know it's a lot wider (much more than just the two tracks of the North River tunnels), but it might be worthwhile planning for something like that...even if it's just Jersey barriers and sandbags, it's something.

Edit: I'm also wondering, though it would be a pain to do, how much of a hastily-erected barrier could be put together around the West Side Yard. Assuming that you could block 11th Avenue with sandbags, would it be possible to basically stuff a dike together around the yard to "buy" a foot or two of storm surge?

 

[AlanB]

Anderson,

Actually the LIRR did block off the tunnel between the yard and NYP. They setup an inflatable barrier somewhere between 10th & 11th Ave's where the yard narrows down to just 4 tracks for entering NYP. Unfortunately that barrier was over-topped and the barrier eventually was dislodged, which is what led to the flooding of the North River tunnels. That barrier had held in the past, but alas not this time.

While perhaps there might be some way to better protect the yard in general; I think that the first priority for the LIRR along with some help from Amtrak perhaps, is to find a better way to tightly seal off that 4 track section with some sort of impenetrable barrier that stands much higher than the 3 or 4 feet that this inflatable barrier stood.

 

[Nathanael]

Good information. The plans for protection in Queens look good.

However, I wonder about the lack of planned protection for the West Side Yard. It seems that that is now the critical weakness, given that the North River Tunnels didn't flood from the New Jersey side. A dike around the West Side Yard could prevent a great deal of trouble, if it could simultaneously protect Penn Station. I suppose the question of soils comes up: it should be possible to prevent overtopping without much trouble, but if water would come up from underneath through waterlogged soils, it may be infeasible to do anything. (A WTC-style "bathtub" construction would probably be impossible to retrofit.)

Also it appears that CNOC and CETC were poorly located. Has thought been given to raising them? Or even relocating to a different building?

The Kearney substation ought to be moved but the whole area is floodplain, so there may be nowhere to move it.

 

[Anderson]

Pretty good for hastily jotted notes. It's difficult to look over that list without sort of mentally itemizing west coast rail infrastructure damage that might result from a natural calamity of similar scale, though different type, e.g. earthquake. And a tsunami that might follow an offshore temblor could well cause Sandy-like catastrophic flooding in low-lying coastal cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, and San Diego, though they don't have nearly the underground component of the greater NYC metro area.

One of the things that strikes me about New York, with the rather substantial subway stations and so forth, is that it really feels like it stumbled in out of a science fiction novel to someone from...well, elsewhere (and indeed, I think it inspired Asimov in some regards...elements of The Caves of Steel come to mind). The fact that I can get most of the way across Manhattan on foot while remaining underground is really something.

But it definitely creates issues in cases like this, given how close to sea level much of the area is.

 

[afigg]

5. It was fortunate that the North River tunnels absorbed the entire flood inflow thus saving Penn Station from flooding. If the station had flooded it would have taken at least six months tog et back up and running again....

7. East River tunnels flooded through multiple entry points. Two ventilation shafts, one the existence of which was unknown until water

came in through it started the flooding but it was completed by water entering through Queens portal of tunnel 2. Tunnel 1 flooded through a connecting pumping sump tunnel from tunnel 2. Tunnels 3 and 4 did not flood.

...

14. Portal North Bridge design is complete and construction can begin as soon as any money at all becomes available from any source. Most of the work was actually done by the NJTransit team.

Thanks for the detailed report.
Hard to imagine what would have happen to the NEC and especially NYC if NYP had been flooded and was out of service for 6 months. Either Amtrak or the NYC government should ask an economist to estimate the economic loss and disruption to the city, the surrounding metro region and the US if NYP had to shut down for 6 months with no service from Amtrak, LIRR, and NJT with PATH out of action for several weeks as well. Should result in scary financial loss numbers that would emphasize the importance of NYP, protecting the current infrastructure and the Gateway project to provide redundancy. Might help in getting votes for funding in Congress.

7. There was a ventilation shaft they did not know about? What, it went unnoticed and unserviced for many decades? That is not reassuring.

14. Portal Bridge - Noticed that the bridge was a prominent part of Boardman's viewgraphs in the Senate hearing on the NEC last week. The funding for the new bridge is going to have to be assembled from multiple sources: NJT, Amtrak annual capital grants, maybe the Port Authority, any funding sources the FRA and/or the FTA can scrounge up. Or FY14 funding, if the Administration can get some of the HrSR rail appropriations they are asking for. If the Portal Bridge replacement project can get started in the next year, then perhaps the new bridge can go into service not long after the track upgrades for 160 mph speeds are completed in central NJ to show real improvement progress on the busiest section of the NEC.

 

[Texan Eagle]

5. It was fortunate that the North River tunnels absorbed the entire flood inflow thus saving Penn Station from flooding. If the station had flooded it would have taken at least six months tog et back up and running again.

In a hypothetical scenario if NY Penn gets flooded and is thrown out of service for six months, what would happen to all the different services that operate out of it?

From my very limited understanding of the geography of that part of the country, I guess something like this-

1) NJ Transit moves operations across the Hudson to Hoboken. All trains starting fron NYP going into interior NJ start and end at Hoboken, while NEC services start/terminate from Secaucus/Newark Penn?

2) LIRR would operate from a station east of East River (Woodside? Long Island City? Jamaica?)

3) The big question- what would happen to Amtrak's NEC? Is there any alternate route that would allow Regionals to travel from points south of NY to points north of NY towards Boston, bypassing NY completely? I guess there isn't any electrified line lying around, so regionals would have to run on diesel, and Acelas would not be able to use the diversion, right? Depending on where the Acela sets are stuck, would they end up running only between Newark-Washington and Stamford/New Haven-Boston?

 

[Anderson]

The Acela sets could, at least in theory, get towed around the shutdown if needed.

 

[jis]

While perhaps there might be some way to better protect the yard in general; I think that the first priority for the LIRR along with some help from Amtrak perhaps, is to find a better way to tightly seal off that 4 track section with some sort of impenetrable barrier that stands much higher than the 3 or 4 feet that this inflatable barrier stood.

The plan is to build a - what is called FEMA + 1 (FEMA new projections + 1 foot high) barrier concrete wall around the West Side Yard. They do not want water to enter the West Side Yard making a barrier at the throoat into Penn Station moot.
Similar plans to protect CNOC by building barriers around it. The Kearny substation is going to be raised 10 feet at the current location.

 

[AlanB]

The Kearny substation is going to be raised 10 feet at the current location.

But then it wouldn't be a "sub" anything. :lol: :lol:

 

[Nathanael]

While perhaps there might be some way to better protect the yard in general; I think that the first priority for the LIRR along with some help from Amtrak perhaps, is to find a better way to tightly seal off that 4 track section with some sort of impenetrable barrier that stands much higher than the 3 or 4 feet that this inflatable barrier stood.

The plan is to build a - what is called FEMA + 1 (FEMA new projections + 1 foot high) barrier concrete wall around the West Side Yard. They do not want water to enter the West Side Yard making a barrier at the throoat into Penn Station moot.
Similar plans to protect CNOC by building barriers around it. The Kearny substation is going to be raised 10 feet at the current location.

OK, excellent news.

To answer someone else's question: iIf NY Penn was shut, nearly all Amtrak service from the south would terminate in either Newark or Hoboken. It's possible that someone might wangle the use of the West Shore Line to provide some Albany-Newark service, but that's the only possible option.. There is a dangerous lack of redundancy in rail infrastructure crossing the Hudson River, since the destruction by fire of the Poughkeepsie Bridge (now the "Pathway Across the Hudson"). And since various other routes were ripped out, there's also a lack of redundancy in infrastructure running north-south on the west side of the Hudson, with the West Shore line being the only remaining option.

 

[jis]

I bet Albany - New York Service will be redirected to Grand Central in case Penn Station is out of service. That will be true of many Boston trains too, as many as availability of dual mode engines allow.

Incidentally, PATH is going for FEMA + 2.5. I suppose PATH will become an extra busy line should NYP be out of service and PATH itself is not knocked out in the process.

Of course Hoboken will be even deeper in water than Penn Station should all this happen and it will take a few months to get Hoboken back too.

 

[Anderson]

I bet Albany - New York Service will be redirected to Grand Central in case Penn Station is out of service. That will be true of many Boston trains too, as many as availability of dual mode engines allow.
Incidentally, PATH is going for FEMA + 2.5. I suppose PATH will become an extra busy line should NYP be out of service and PATH itself is not knocked out in the process.

Of course Hoboken will be even deeper in water than Penn Station should all this happen and it will take a few months to get Hoboken back too.

Now that you mention it, I'm actually surprised that nothing was redirected into NYG. Through tickets were toast anyways, so that eliminates the transfer need, and with the tunnels jammed it might have been easier to slip everything but peak-hour Amtrak service into NYG.

(Of course, I'm guessing that Acelas couldn't get in there because of the electric situation...though I'd put that trip under "rare equipment" not unlike the VIA Adirondack)

 

[PRR 60]

I bet Albany - New York Service will be redirected to Grand Central in case Penn Station is out of service. That will be true of many Boston trains too, as many as availability of dual mode engines allow.
Incidentally, PATH is going for FEMA + 2.5. I suppose PATH will become an extra busy line should NYP be out of service and PATH itself is not knocked out in the process.

Of course Hoboken will be even deeper in water than Penn Station should all this happen and it will take a few months to get Hoboken back too.

Now that you mention it, I'm actually surprised that nothing was redirected into NYG. Through tickets were toast anyways, so that eliminates the transfer need, and with the tunnels jammed it might have been easier to slip everything but peak-hour Amtrak service into NYG.

(Of course, I'm guessing that Acelas couldn't get in there because of the electric situation...though I'd put that trip under "rare equipment" not unlike the VIA Adirondack)

I believe Amtrak was operating between NYP and Albany pretty much as soon as Metro North opened the Hudson Line. There was never a need for Amtrak to use Grand Central, plus the Amtrak dual mode locomotive cannot get into NYG due to third rail incompatibility and the lack of an emergency exit door required for the Park Avenue tunnel.

The constraint in and out of NYP was the inability of the West Side line trains to directly access the two open East River tunnels due to the track and crossover arrangement. Empire trains could not get to Sunnyside without an out and back move west of NYP. That required longer trains like the Lake Shore, which were too long to make that move, to terminate at ALB with shuttle service to NYP.

 

[Anderson]

Just wondering, but what's the difference between the Park Avenue third rail, the one on the Hudson line, and/or the one in Penn?

 

[jis]

Now that you mention it, I'm actually surprised that nothing was redirected into NYG. Through tickets were toast anyways, so that eliminates the transfer need, and with the tunnels jammed it might have been easier to slip everything but peak-hour Amtrak service into NYG.

(Of course, I'm guessing that Acelas couldn't get in there because of the electric situation...though I'd put that trip under "rare equipment" not unlike the VIA Adirondack)

There was no reason to, because there was no problem accessing Penn Station when MNRR Hudson Line finally opened through to Poughkeepsie. The only problem was trains could not get from Penn Station to Sunnyside, which of course they would not be able to from GCT either. So Empire Service ran with engines at both ends for that period allowing them to be turned in Penn Station. LSL could not be operated that way so it was terminated in Albany for that period. Running it into GCT would have entailed a level of headache about turning the train at Mott Have etc. that neither Metro north nor Amtrak was willing to deal with while they had other more important things to worry about. And then there was the issue of the lack of safety exit doors in the Amtrak P32s that MNRR ones have.

Just wondering, but what's the difference between the Park Avenue third rail, the one on the Hudson line, and/or the one in Penn?

No difference between Park Avenue tunnels and Hudson Line. Both are NYC under running third rail. Penn Station is LIRR over running third rail. There now exists a third rail shoe design that can work on both, but eventually they will be fitted only on a select set of ConnDOT M8s to enable them to access Penn Station from the New Haven Line via the Hell Gate Line.

 

[CHamilton]

Amtrak Made a Smart Call to Let Tunnels Flood During Sandy

In a conference call about disaster planning, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan described a meeting he had with transit executives where they discussed putting floodgates on transit tunnels. (Excerpt audio available above).


"The executive from Amtrak said, well we had a barrier that could have closed off our Hudson River tunnel, but if we closed it, Penn Station would have flooded instead," Donovan summarized the Amtrak exec as saying.

Amtrak confirms this is accurate, though a spokesperson didn't know which meeting Donovan was referring to.

A former employee said the barriers were designed in the middle of the century to protect Penn. Station from flooding in the event of something like an explosion in the tunnel or World War II sabotage. Because the water that flooded the tunnel entered through the mouth of the tunnel, closing that off could have created a lake right at the entrance to the underground Penn Station, which would have backed up into the tracks and maybe more.

 

[The Davy Crockett]

Hmmm... Could this be why NJ Transit wasn't there?

From NorthJersey.com:

NJ senators call for hearings to question why NJ Transit didn't follow its own storm plan