A contractor operating a drill as part of the MTA’s East Side Access project mistakenly penetrated a Queens subway tunnel on Thursday, and the massive bit scraped the top and side of an occupied F train, transit officials said.
Some 800 passengers were aboard the Jamaica-bound train at the time, about 11:45 a.m. Nobody was hurt in the terrifying blunder, but it was far too close for comfort.
“That’s a near miss,” an MTA supervisor said, wondering what would have happened if the bit had made a direct hit and punctured a subway car’s passenger compartment. “Oh my God! If it had hit the train, you could forget about it! Of course we are concerned.”
As a regular straphanger on the F line put it: “I would have died of a panic if I was on that train,” said Angela Bradley, 35, who rides the F to visit her husband at Riker’s Island twice a week. “They would have had to bring me to Bellevue.”
A contractor working on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s East Side Access project, which will connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal, was operating the drill above ground, roughly at the intersection of 23rd St. and 41st Ave. in Long Island City.
The contractor, Griffin Dewatering New England, Inc., was using the drill to expand a well, said MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz.
An MTA source familiar with the work said the contractor was at fault. “Some people don’t follow instructions; they drilled deeper than they were supposed to.”
Two blocks east of the drill site is the F train’s 21st St. Station. The train had just left the station when the mishap occurred.
The steel bit, measuring 10 inches in diameter, bored through the tunnel’s roof and skimmed the passing train, triggering the emerency brakes to deploy, officials said. A second train was brought in, and passengers on the halted F train passed through it and into the 21st St. Station, a distance of about 700 feet, officials said.
The MTA sent a crew of investigators to the scene, and a cap and inflatable device were used to plug the hole to prevent water from seeping into it, transit sources said.
When asked about the possibility of punitive action, Ortiz, the MTA spokesman, said: “Obviously this is under investigation, and we’ll take it from there.”
Transportation safety expert Carl Berkowitz, who was not involved in the project or investigation, was flabbergasted by the mistake. “Whoa! … that is unbelievable. How could that possibly happen? I see God was on their side,” he said of the passengers. It was a “very strange” mistake, given that contractors are provided detailed blueprints for guidance, he said. “Somebody’s not doing their job, that’s for sure,” Berkowitz concluded.
A message left at the New Jersey office of Griffin Dewatering New England, Inc., was not returned.
The East Side Access project, projected to conclude in 2022 at a cost of $10.1 billion, has been cited for several work-safety violations since work started in 2004. In October 2011, after a runaway rail car injured two workers, the U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration found numerous violations at the site during an inspection. A month later, a worker died inside the tunnel when a huge slab of concrete collapsed.
The worker, Michael O’Brien, 28, was hit in the head. OSHA later gave the MTA’s tunnel contractor, Dragados/Judlau Joint Venture, 13 work-safety violations and $53,000 in fines. The firms settled with a $19,000 payment.
With Seth Bookey and Greg B. Smith
pdonohue@nydailynews.com
