a digger i dig a hole put in a dynamite turn the next day it s all clear i ve been in the holes just forty centimeters wide that you would but the work dried up and i haven t been underground sent so little by two thousand and four spain was in an economic crisis that tunnel work froze up and in two thousand and two my wife got sick with cancer i went bankrupt. i sold my flats and when that brought a tough and orcas eat us that was that you had to sell them all at the leisure to survive i watched my wife my life and everything i still have in the car to.
the streets of new york city carving tunnels through dirt and bedrock. all he does is tunnel work. you take a look at the scope of the job, the sheer size of it, you try and make sure some of that changes before you go home at the end of the day. reporter: he wore a helmet camera to give us his sand hog view without natural light and air pumped in from above for sewers, water and trains. it s dam, cold, muddy and extremely loud. dynamite is used daily. what we are doing is moving a lot of rock and drilling and blasting. you know, you try your best to make it as safe as possible. so far it s been relatively
know it was there unless you went looking for it. sand hogs are chiseling out the future of transportation in the city that just never sleeps. rick leventhal is working 9 to 5 in new york today, and there he is. hey, rick. reporter: jenna, sand hogs dug the footings for the brooklyn bridge 140 years ago, and they ve dug the footings for almost every other bridge in new york since then, and every single tunnel beneath our feet and believe me, there are a lot of them including the east side access project that s going to connect the long island railroad to the grand central station. it s a $7 billion project that would be impossible without the sand hogs. almost every working day for the past 31 years mike warfield has gone deep underground. often 15 stories or more below the streets of new york city, carving tunnels through dirt and bedrock. warfield is a third generation sand hog, an urban miner. all he does is tunnel work. knock it off a chunk at a