There’s a massive tropical storm headed to New York, one that may flood the subway. What most people don’t know is that we depend on just 700 fragile water pumps to keep the tunnels dry—some a century old.
In fact, if someone powered down all these pumps tomorrow, the entire subway network would be inundated in just a few hours. To give you an idea of how complex and massive this system is, it pulls 13 million gallons of water out of the subway on any sunny day. No rain. Not even a single drop of water from the sky.
[…]
Back in the 1990s, a water main broke open, completely flooding the station at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. They had to send scuba divers to fix it, and use a diesel-powered train car to take the water out. It took an entire week to drain the station, extracting 2,700 gallons per minute. That’s more than 27 million gallons.
Holy crap.