Digging starts for Second Avenue subway

In a massive cavern seven stories below street level, MTA officials Friday launched the first tunnel-boring machine in the long-planned project to build a new subway line along Second Avenue.

With raindrops coming through an opening in the construction site high above, MTA chairman Jay Walder sounded a horn that signaled workers to ceremonially start the 485-ton machine. It is named "Adi" after the 2 1/2-year-old granddaughter of MTA Capital Construction president Michael Horodniceanu.

Probably sometime next week, the machine will begin digging one of two tunnels, both of which ultimately will stretch from 92nd Street south to 63rd Street. Moving about 50 feet a day, the machine is expected to finish boring the first tunnel by November and be ready to begin the second one around January, officials said.

The $4.5-billion project, which will accommodate the Q line and create subway stations at 63rd, 86th and 72nd streets, is scheduled to be completed by 2016. Officials say it will serve more than 200,000 people a day.

Although its need has been voiced for decades by commuters traveling on the MTA's crowded Lexington Avenue line, the agency only began work on the project in 2007. About $1.3 billion of the funding is from the federal government.

"Many years ago people made a mistake. They left the East Side of New York with one subway line. It's taken us decades, multiple generations to do what we're doing now," Walder said. "The results of this project will have an immediate benefit for New Yorkers. It will relieve our most overcrowded line. It will involve new connections in a way that we never could have imagined before."

Horodniceanu said work crews have finished the most difficult part of the job - excavating and building the 800-foot-by-67 foot "launch box" under Second Avenue near 92nd Street. It is there that the tunnel-boring machines will begin their work. Creating the space required digging out some 120,000 cubic yards of rock and relocating electrical and phone lines, water and gas mains and even sewers.

The ambitious project comes as the MTA plans to cut service on several subway lines to plug a huge deficit. However, MTA officials maintain infrastructure projects like the Second Avenue subway and the East Side Access plan to connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal are critical.

"If the city is to prosper, to grow, to continue to be the capital of the world, you better have the infrastructure to support it. And I think the subway system is probably the most vital piece of that infrastructure," Horodniceanu said. "So I don't think you should ever skimp on that."