A Conspiracy of Engineering and Decay : Old Infrastructure Leads to Freak Accidents in N.Y.

If once is an accident, twice a coincidence and three times a trend, no wonder New Yorkers are scared.

Over the last seven weeks, three different underground steam pipes have exploded in Manhattan, spewing cancer-causing asbestos insulation over streets and buildings, shutting down businesses and--in the most serious instance--killing three people and forcing hundreds of families out of their apartments.

Like characters in a Stephen King novel, New Yorkers live with the fear of being claimed in a freak accident, the victim of some inanimate object that suddenly turns on them. Gothamites have been maimed by falling masonry, swallowed up by gaping potholes, crushed by crumbling expressways, seized by frenzied subway doors or flattened by flying manhole covers.

Earlier this year, for example, a Brooklyn man was killed when a 500-pound slab of concrete dislodged from FDR Drive on Manhattan’s East Side and smashed into his car as he was going to pick up his wife.

At the root of the problem is the city’s eroding infrastructure and building stock--a plight New York shares with many other Northeastern and Midwestern cities.

California may have its earthquakes, fires and mudslides, which come at the hands of nature, but New York’s disasters are a conspiracy of engineering, architecture and decay.

The latest incidents are not the first such calamities to spring from the city’s labyrinthine network of underground utility lines. But coming in such rapid succession and striking in areas previously untouched by similar disaster, they have intensified the sense of paranoia here.

“I don’t worry about getting mugged, I catch the subway late at night even when I’m drunk, I’ve gone out in the South Bronx to do stories about crack addicts with no fear,” said Elisabeth Wynhausen, an Australian newspaper correspondent who has lived in Manhattan for almost a dozen years.

“But now I’m terrified that the streets are going to give way under me, or I’m going to be blown up or steamed to death, or a big chunk of a building will fall on my head.”

Others take the risks in stride. “People are like rats. They are able to adapt to all kinds of conditions,” said Sigurd Grava, a Columbia University urban planning professor. “I certainly maintain that the advantages of being and living in New York City outweigh the difficulties. That’s the price we pay.”

Miles of Potential Terror

Underground New York--which includes 85,219 miles of electrical cables, 6,000 miles of aging water mains, 827 miles of subway tracks and 103 miles of steam pipes--is a constant source of potential terror for many of this city’s 7 million residents.

In one of the most sensational incidents, a 6-foot split in a 90-year-old, cast-iron water main below Columbus Circle last October sent more than 5 million gallons of water surging through the streets, down subway entrances and into the basements of nearby buildings.

The flood created huge traffic jams on the streets during the morning rush hour and caused delays, cancellations or reroutings in subway lines used by more than 200,000 riders.

Rates It a ‘7’

“On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d say this was about a 7,” Samuel Schwartz, deputy transportation commissioner, told a local reporter at the time of the incident. “We’ve had breaks that were more disruptive to more people, but this was bad enough.”

What is more, almost every New Yorker has a horror story about the city’s subterranean transit system. Among the most bizarre are those of riders trapped by subway doors that seem to have a will of their own.

In August, 1987, a 45-year-old Queens woman was dragged screaming to her death after her purse stuck in a subway door and she was hurled more than 100 feet along a platform into a tiled wall at a speed of 18 m.p.h. Since then, more than 160 door-dragging incidents have been recorded--with more than one-third resulting in injuries.

Subway trains often move with the crew unaware that car doors are ajar and possibly clutching an arm, a leg, a purse or, in some reported instances, a baby carriage.

Mysterious Doors

Subway doors also have been known to mysteriously open and close by themselves while trains are moving.

“I always stay away from the doors,” said Darrell DeMary, 27, a Bronx resident who works in Manhattan. “I get in quick, and no matter how many people I have to push through, I always ride in the middle of the car so I’m as far away from the doors as possible.”

According to a report last month, the city Transit Authority has been slow to improve the safety of the subway doors and has failed to implement several plans that could help prevent the dragging accidents.

In another incident involving New York’s catacombs, a fire in an underground electric cable in June set off an explosion that blew off two manhole covers and burned the leg of a woman passing by. In addition, two nearby Broadway theaters were filled with smoke, forcing the evacuation of 85 people.

Gramercy Park Incident

No part of the city is immune from an attack from below. Gramercy Park, an exclusive Manhattan neighborhood of tree-shaded streets and high-priced co-ops, was the site of one of the three recent incidents involving broken steam mains.

On Saturday, Aug. 19, at about 6:30 p.m., a steam pipe exploded as a Consolidated Edison crew was restoring the line to service. It had been shut off hours earlier as a precaution after a nearby water main burst.

With an earsplitting roar, the explosion sent a geyser of white-hot steam 18 stories tall into the air, blowing out windows, showering buildings with asbestos-laced mud and pelting automobiles with flying debris.

Two Con Ed workers were killed in the blast, as was a 28-year-old Gramercy Park woman who lived in a third-floor apartment in a building that took the brunt of the disaster.

Resembled a Quake

“It was scary,” recalled Leslie Grossman, 27, an employee at a stylish lingerie shop near the blast site. “The whole building was shaking. We thought the building was collapsing. It was like an earthquake. We ran out and left the doors unlocked and everything on--the lights, the air conditioning.”

Hundreds were evacuated during the disaster, and about 150 families are still living in temporary quarters in local hotels, according to Con Ed spokesman Martin Gitten.

Terror also can come raining from the sky. An 86-year-old woman who was sitting on the stoop of her Brooklyn brownstone one afternoon last year had both her legs broken by a falling cornice, an ornamental stone, which was on the front of the century-old building.

Late one night two years ago, a 25th-floor cornice of the city’s 75-year-old Municipal Building shed two big hunks of granite onto the streets below. Fortunately, no one was reported injured in that incident. But had it occurred at another hour, the falling stone might have crashed down on rush-hour commuters pouring off the nearby Brooklyn Bridge.

Erect Giant Nylon Net

Traffic was snarled for three days as streets around the building were closed while workmen erected a giant nylon mesh net to keep more granite ornaments from toppling. Now, the ornate old building is almost obscured in 38 miles of scaffolding.

“You have to be very aware when you are walking here,” said Liz Smith, a 34-year-old marketing assistant. “The city is old, you know; it’s falling apart.”

After a Columbia University student was killed a decade ago by a piece of masonry that fell from her apartment building, the city passed a law requiring owners of buildings more than six stories high to hire an architect or engineer to inspect the edifices at least once every five years.

In the first round of inspections, in 1982, the facades of fully 1,000 of the 8,000 buildings under the law were found to be hazardous. By 1987, the latest year for which figures are available, that number had been cut in half to 500.

Obstacle Course

But as building owners have scrambled to fix their structures, they also are creating a new urban hazard: a jumble of scaffolding and planking that has made an obstacle course of virtually every block in the heart of Manhattan.

New Yorkers may grumble as they weave their way through these dusty “sidewalk sheds,” but Buildings Department spokesman Vahe Tiryakian looks on the bright side: “They’re living with the inconvenience,” he said, “not dying with the alternatives.”

However, last Wednesday even that palliative failed for a Supreme Court officer who was killed by a 56-pound weight that fell 17 floors from a scaffolding. The weight missed a protective structure over the sidewalk. It was the second death caused by objects falling from the same Brooklyn Heights office building. In 1982, a lawyer was felled by a chunk of decorative terra cotta that fell 16 stories.

East Side, West Side, all around the town, the crumbling, jagged sidewalks of New York also take their toll. In fact, sidewalk accidents--broken legs, sprained ankles and such--accounted for roughly one-fourth of the 4,200 personal injury claims that the city disposed of in the last fiscal year.

Seen as Acceptable Risks

“You have to live with risks everywhere,” said a 36-year-old television executive who broke his ankle on a Manhattan sidewalk three years ago but did not sue the city.

About half of all personal injury claims of every kind against the city are dismissed in court, said Leonard Olarsch, chief of the municipal Tort Division. Of those in which the city is found at fault, the average award is about $27,000.

A deluge of lawsuits by those injured on New York streets and sidewalks led to a 1980 law barring victims from filing claims against the city unless officials had been formally notified of the particular problem at least 15 days before the accident.

Not to be tripped up by this new law, a group of personal injury lawyers formed the Big Apple Pothole and Sidewalk Protection Committee. Days after the law was put in place, the committee presented the city with a vanload of maps showing the locations of thousands of potential accident sites.

Injury Reports Pour In

Since then, Big Apple has been contacted by at least 15,000 injured persons, said Abraham Fuchsberg, a veteran personal injury lawyer who is the organization’s president and one of its founders. In three-quarters of the cases, he added, the complaints were about sites that Big Apple had already mapped and reported to the city.

But Fuchsberg, whose clients include a woman who fractured her leg tripping on a crack in the steps of City Hall, contends that the condition of New York’s streets and sidewalks is “exactly the way it was before.”

Although Big Apple reports more than 100,000 defects a year to the city, “they don’t send anybody out to fix them up,” Fuchsberg maintained.

Last year, City Councilman Herbert Berman of Brooklyn attempted to push through an amendment that would have exempted 225 miles of roads and bridges from the requirement for the 15-day prior notice.

“By the time a person driving 50 miles an hour on a highway hits a pothole, gets a blowout and brings their car to a stop, it’s veritably an impossibility to give an accurate location,” he said. “All you can say is something like: ‘It happened on the Belt Parkway between Bay Parkway and Cropsey Avenue.’ ”

Berman said that he introduced the measure after he himself suffered a flat tire on FDR Drive and realized the difficulty of pinpointing the pothole that caused the damage. But, he added, the proposal was shelved and effectively killed after heavy opposition from City Hall.

On Sept. 20, another bizarre tale was added to the annals of New York’s treacherous thoroughfares. A 23-year-old elevator mechanic, who had just parked his car in Queens and headed off to his job, watched the vehicle slowly drop, head first and at a right angle, into the asphalt.

“I heard a crash sound and saw the car (being) swallowed by the street,” the mechanic, Walter Butscher of Glendale, told a Daily News reporter. “They’ve been doing road repair work there. They repaved the road up to a point about 2 1/2 feet from the curb.”

Lost Day’s Work

But, he added, the stretch of the road still to be repaved gave way under the weight of his car, causing the vehicle to sink about 2 feet. Butscher said that he had to get a tow truck to pull the car out and lost a day’s work.

“There were no barricades and no signs telling you it was dangerous to park there,” said Butscher, who says he plans to sue the city for damages because his car now is out of alignment.

In 1973, in an incident that became a symbol of New York’s decaying infrastructure, a car fell about 30 feet through a hole on the West Side Highway. The elevated expressway, which once ran along the Hudson River, is now in the final stages of being dismantled. Only a 15-block stretch between 57th and 72nd streets will remain in use, according to Department of Transportation spokesman Victor Ross.

In 1981, on the other side of Manhattan, a Wall Street stockbroker’s Mercedes nearly plummeted through a gigantic hole that had opened in an elevated stretch of FDR Drive between 42nd and 50th streets. One foot or more farther to the left, he later recounted, and his car would have been in that hole.

“You have to be a fatalist . . . about life in New York,” he said in an interview on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes.”

Many Bridges ‘Deficient’

Almost half of the city’s 2,024 bridges have been classified as “structurally deficient.” Earlier this year, traffic had to be rerouted on both the Triborough and Manhattan bridges across the East River after chunks of concrete fell from the one and rusted support beams were found in the other.

The closure of the unsound Williamsburg Bridge became an issue in the 1988 presidential campaign. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, trailing the media and his supporters, staged a march across it to underscore his contention that the city was failing to take care of its most pressing needs.

Grava, the Columbia University urban planning professor, said that New York’s infrastructure problems are rooted in the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s when the city’s capital-improvement budget was “cut to nothing.” Now, the city is struggling to catch up. But putting all the streets, roads, bridges, sewers and the like in good working order is something no New Yorker expects to see. The cost alone is estimated at upwards of $50 billion.

Meanwhile, for all their fears, New Yorkers maintain a philosophic attitude toward the perils of life here.

“It’s part of the challenge,” said Councilman Berman, expressing a widespread sentiment. “It keeps your blood pressure going. It extends your life. As the saying goes, ‘if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.’ ”

Intern Silke Fett contributed to this story.