The York Avenue Sewer Replacement project was only supposed to take two or three years. That is, until crews opened the street and found a spaghetti-like jumble of pipes and utilities underground.
Without a centralized, comprehensive map to help navigate the underground labyrinth, unexpected findings have cost the city millions of dollars and years of delays, said Thomas Wynne, deputy commissioner of infrastructure for the city’s Design and Construction Department.
“We originally slated that to be a two- to three-year project, and we’re now in year nine,” Wynne said. “It was all because there were so many unknowns that we kept encountering. The biggest driver for why that job has taken so long is the fact that there were a lot of unknown utilities that we didn’t expect to find.”…