WTFNYC #1

* New and Improved Post! Now, With Questions Inside! *

Click to enlarge the pictures.

This post is dedicated to furthering the literacy of Diesel, who should read "The Bone Collector" by Jeffery Deaver. Its suspenseful, fast-paced, and a little gory - and the mystery unfolds in downtown New York. This post's topic, steam, is germaine to the book's plot.

A week ago, after defining the word "rookie" as a guest poster on Doug's blog, Waking Ambrose, my friend Joel added a comment asking me to fetch him a bucket of steam. My brain being the pinball machine that it is, I thought steam might be a fun thing to blog about here.

If you've ever visited New York, you may have come across one or two of these things sticking up out of the street. If you've never been here, then maybe you've seen movies with the likes of Mel Gibson dodging these things while hurtling through traffic in pursuit of, or fleeing from, somebody like Rutger Hauer.

Here's the scoop.

To heat the buildings in a densely packed urban setting, you could install a separate boiler in each one. If you did that, however, every building in town would be belching dirty combustion by-products into the air, and the city's narrow streets would be clogged with wagons delivering the wood and coal needed to keep them all fired up.

Even the ancient Romans understood that it made more sense to heat water at a few centralized boiler plants on the outskirts of town, then pipe the steam they generated to the places in the city that needed it, like laundries, greenhouses, and public baths. This age-old idea of distributing centrally produced steam through underground pipes within cities is called District Heating.

In the U.S., the first large-scale district heating system was built in 1877 by an engineer named Birdsill Holly in Lockport, New York. A few years later, in 1880, the newly formed New York Steam Corporation licensed Holly's techniques to heat buildings in Lower Manhattan. The company began distributing steam to its first Downtown customers in 1882. (And, yes, Joel, that's exactly how old your steam joke is.)

Eventually, the system was expanded to serve businesses and residents in Manhattan all the way up to 96th Street.

Steam and electric power distribution in New York were combined in the 1930's under the Consolidated Edison Company, or Con Ed. The companies' separate steam production facilities were subsequently merged into a few co-generation plants that, today, produce steam both for district heating and to drive electrical generators.

New York's district heating system is the largest in the world, and, also, one of the few that remain in operation today, which is why you don't see those tall steam vents planted in the streets of most other cities.

In New York, steam travels through pipes that are buried between 5 and 30 feet underground. To maintain the system, the steam pipes are accessible via manholes through which Con Ed employees can manually open and close valves that direct steam service to local customers through one of several alternate paths in every neighborhood.

When an underground fitting springs a leak, steam service is directed around it by opening and closing adjacent valves. The escaping steam is vented into the air through a vent column until repairs can be made. The columns prevent the steam from accumulating as dangerously dense fog at street level, and they provide a highly visible warning to keep drivers and pedestrians away from the open manhole above the broken fitting.

How do the Con Ed workers know which manhole to open to find a particular steam fitting? Well, that's a whole 'nother post some day, maybe. Long story short, they carry maps and diagrams, and the manholes themselves tell a tale, too.

Speaking of manholes, there's usually at least a hint of steam venting through some of them, especially during the peak-demand winter months.

Apart from inspiring exploitation by ad designers on Madison Avenue, subterranean steam -- which, FYI, is superheated to as high as 400 degrees F -- can make a manhole cover at street level stovetop hot. To minimize the risk of injury to the public, steam manholes are often coated with a translucent gray insulating resin.

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Q&A

• What else do you think you might find under a manhole in Lower Manhattan?


• Are you offended that we aren't calling them personholes yet?


• In what motion picture, starring Denzel Washington, was an underground steam fitting in Downtown Manhattan used as a murder weapon by the film's "bad guy?"