Rat swimming in nyc flood2/28/2024 ![]() In the end Fitzgerald said, “Joe, I got nothin’ wrong wich you, but just tell me, do you really wanta work for Transit?” The subway’s reputation then was lower even than today. Fitzgerald asked Leader what he knew about trains, and Leader said, “Well, I was born in the Bronx.” Fitzgerald asked, “Why’d you go into engineering?,” and Leader explained that in high school he had enjoyed a certain electricity class. ![]() In 1986, when he was about to graduate with a four-year degree in electrical engineering, he went to a campus job fair where a subway man named Fitzgerald was conducting interviews. For college he chose Manhattan College, in the Bronx, like nearly everyone else who matters. He played the accordion at Irish dance competitions, sang Irish songs at Irish sing-alongs in Irish bars, and, more recently, played bagpipes for the former New York City Transit Police Irish Warpipe Band. He was raised Irish Catholic and educated at Irish Catholic schools. He is 49 years old and has been working for the subway system for more than half that time. When I first met him there he seemed almost embarrassed by the grandeur of the view. He has a luxurious L-shaped corner office on the 29th floor of a building at the tip of Manhattan, overlooking the entrances to the ruined South Ferry terminal, Battery Park, and the harbor beyond. He directs a force of 26,000 workers, most of them union members with rules. His annual operating budget is $3.4 billion. In the year since Sandy he has become the senior vice president of New York City Transit and chief of the city’s subway operations. He was born in the Bronx and speaks with the accent of a native son. Leader is an engineer by training but a trainman by trade. ![]() Only with the World Trade Center attack of 2001, he later said, had he felt such a dawning sense of disaster before. His worry was the worst of New York subway worries-the flooding of the system’s East River tunnels-and indeed this came to pass. Defenses had been mapped and erected, and somehow somewhere they had failed-but he knew that the greater problem now was that New York subway lines are interlinked by design, that water seeks its own level, and that underground flooding in one place will spread to others. Retreating in confusion from the rising waters, Leader could not understand what had gone wrong. The South Ferry terminal was the pride of the system, opened three years earlier after four years of construction, at a cost of $530 million, and now it was being destroyed. When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, on the night of Monday, October 29, 2012, the first man to realize that the underground was flooding-and calamitously so-was an unassuming subway manager named Joseph Leader, who, having ridden in a National Guard truck from the subway’s Midtown control center to the lower tip of Manhattan, climbed down into the darkened South Ferry station expecting to find it dry but instead finding it inundated by ocean waters that had risen from the track level, had submerged the platform, and were inexorably climbing the steps at his feet.
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