After 2012\u2019s Superstorm Sandy, reconstruction efforts continue in the New York City area, and Monday saw the reopening of an East River tunnel damaged during the storm.\u00a0<\/p>\n
News 4 boarded one of the inaugural trains on Monday as Amtrak showed off 15 months of work that was \u201curgently needed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo of these tunnels needed more than routine maintenance,\u201d Byl Herrmann, interim president of Amtrak, said. \u201cThey needed to be completely rebuilt.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Amtrak has been refurbishing one of the four tubes that go underneath the East River. Using $1.3 billion in federal funds to repair a tunnel built in 1910 \u2014 then damaged in Superstorm Sandy. Despite the damage, it\u2019s still accommodating 450 trains per day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now that Amtrak completed the work on the second tube, the plan is to work on the first tube a little to the south.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s where the territorial fight re-enters the picture. While Amtrak executives celebrated the phase one completion on Monday, MTA chairman Janno Lieber, who controls the primary tenant at Penn Station Long Island Rail Road, looked on and hopped in to point out the MTA completed 11 tunnels after Sandy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lieber also maintains Amtrak could have done the work on nights and weekends.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are pushing Amtrak to learn from this project, which had some bad episodes \u2014 to make sure that kind of stuff doesn\u2019t happen again,\u201d Lieber said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Amtrak\u2019s vice president of infrastructure delivery defended the company\u2019s course of action.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are confident the plan we put forward \u2014 in order to be completely taken down to the core and rebuild all the systems up was the right investment to make,\u201d Warren LeBeau said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Commuters told News 4 they did not notice a disruption with one of the four tunnels over the past 15 months.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I haven\u2019t seen any issues; it\u2019s been fine,\u201d commuter Peter Palumbo said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After 2012\u2019s Superstorm Sandy, reconstruction efforts continue in the New York City area, and Monday saw the reopening…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323771,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,24,11,10],"class_list":["post-323770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}