Way Down in the Hole - Chronogram
A few yellow hardhats bob amid the gray sheen of the shale that has yet to be coated in concrete. It took two years of methodical blasting to delve this far. The big, gaping hole in the ground, some 34 feet in diameter, is called Shaft 6. It's 675 feet deep, 600 of those feet below sea level, just north of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, on the eastern bank of the Hudson River in the Town of Wappinger. This will be the end point of the new Rondout-West Branch Tunnel, where a bypass is being built to circumvent a section of the Delaware Aqueduct that has been leaking for over 25 years. This massive pipeline carries 1.1 billion gallons of water daily from the Cannonsville, Pepacton, Neversink, and Rondout Reservoirs to the Croton Watershed and into New York City. At 85 miles, it.