NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Even before Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on the New York City area 10 years ago this week, planners knew they were on borrowed time with each of Manhattan's train tunnels.
Then those tunnels were slammed with 13 million gallons of saltwater.
"You don't have to be an engineer to know you don't want a leaking tunnel underwater, so there's a lot of work that was done to patch those repairs," said Robert Freudenberg, a vice president with the Regional Planning Association.
But for Freudenberg, those Band-Aid repairs can only do so much.
"We're going to need to shut those tunnels down in the next few years to be able to make the long-term repairs to that tunnel," he added.
The Gateway Project, two new train tunnels, was announced a year before Sandy — expected to be done in 2021. Ten years later, it still has yet to break ground.
"It really becomes a sense of this being an urgent project, not just one that we should do, but one that we need to do," Freudenberg said.
The Trump Administration refused to move forward on the project, but the gears have recently started turning again with New York and New Jersey coming to terms with how they would split the price.
But there's another set of tunnels in Manhattan that still need help.
MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said the agency is still "waiting for Amtrak to complete its work in the East River Tunnels."
He said those tunnels bring Amtrak and Long Island Railroad service into Penn Station, and Amtrak is finally expected to get to work on them once the LIRR service starts up at Grand Central in the next couple of months.
"When they take a tunnel out cause they are fixing it from Sandy damage, it does constrain the level of service, but we're going to support it so we can get to the other side," Lieber added.
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