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Month: September 2017

Cassini the Saturn Spacecraft’s Fond Farewell

Posted on by jholbreich

A billion-dollar spacecraft named Cassini burned up as it plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn today.

That’s the plan, exquisitely crafted. Cassini, the only spacecraft ever to orbit Saturn, spent the past five months exploring the uncharted territory between the gaseous planet and its dazzling rings. But now, it’s useful life is up.

Dreamed up when Ronald Reagan was president, and launched during the tenure of Bill Clinton, Cassini arrived at Saturn in the first term of George W. Bush. So it’s old, as space hardware goes.

It has fulfilled its mission goals and then some. It has sent back stunning images and troves of scientific data. It has discovered moons, and geysers spewing from the weird Saturn satellite Enceladus. It landed a probe on the moon Titan. It would have kept transmitting data to Earth to the very end, squeezing out the last drips of science as a valediction for one of NASA’s greatest missions.

It was also running out of gas, basically, though precisely how much fuel was left is unknown. Program manager Earl Maize says, “One of our lessons learned, and it’s a lesson learned by many missions, is to attach a gas gauge.”

Cassini’s final orbits have taken it, amazingly, inside the rings of Saturn, where the spacecraft practically skims the tops of the planet’s clouds. These orbits can plausibly be compared to Luke Skywalker flying into that narrow trench on the Death Star.

“We’re kind of going through the mourning cycle,” said Julie Webster, head of spacecraft operations.

Here’s a look at Cassini — a NASA mainstay for two decades that’s about to meet its demise.

History

Cassini closes out an era in NASA space science. This is hardly the end of solar system exploration, but it’s essentially the end of the first, heroic phase – the initial reconnaissance of the planets.

The colossal scale of Cassini is a legacy of the go-big mentality of the early days of space exploration. The United States put men on the moon with a jumbo rocket, and NASA for a long time skewed toward muscle-bound spacecraft even when humans weren’t along for the ride.

No single event changed everything, but what happened to a spacecraft called Mars Observer in 1993 certainly had an impact. It was large and fully adorned with instruments. And then, one day shortly before it was to go into Mars orbit, it simply went silent and was never heard from again. It probably blew up, Webster said.

Space is hard. Space will break your heart. “It’s like a loss of a family member,” Webster said.

By that point, Cassini had already been conceived, the instruments already coming online, and so it was essentially grandfathered in to the old-fashioned go-big protocol. NASA Administrator Dan Goldin wasn’t a fan. He had a name for Cassini: “Battlestar Galactica.”

Actually, it wasn’t simply the “Cassini” mission. It was the “Cassini-Huygens” mission. The Europeans designed the Huygens probe, a separate vehicle that detached from Cassini when it passed close to Titan.

Arrival and discovery

After Cassini, launched in 1997, arrived at Saturn in 2004, Huygens disengaged from the main spacecraft and dropped through Titan’s thick clouds. It sent back details of an alien world that possesses a stew of complex organic molecules, including liquid methane. Hydrocarbons rain from the sky. There are lakes and rivers.

It’s the only place in the solar system other than Earth known to have rain and open bodies of liquid on the surface.

Cassini also discovered something amazing about Saturn’s moon Enceladus: It has geysers spewing from its south pole. Almost certainly it has an interior ocean, sealed beneath ice, that contains great volumes of water and possibly hydrothermal vents.

Someday NASA or some other space agency is likely to send a probe to Enceladus to sample those geysers and test them for indications of life.

“The legacy for which Cassini will be remembered will be Enceladus,” said project scientist Linda J. Spilker.

The day the Earth smiled

For a moment four years ago, the Cassini watched Earth from 900 million miles away. The probe had ducked behind Saturn. There, shielded from the sun’s rays, the robot turned its delicate lenses toward home. On July 19, 2013, Earthlings in the know waved and smiled for the paparazzo in the sky. Everyone else went about their day. Cassini, a gracious photographer, caught the entire Earth on camera anyway.

Perhaps no other Cassini photograph carries the emotional heft of “The Day the Earth Smiled.”

Astronomer Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Cassini imaging team, and her colleagues organized a campaign to smile into the void at 21:27 Coordinated Universal Time (accounting, of course, for light’s 15-minute dash from Earth to Saturn). It would be only the third time that Earth had been photographed from such a distance, after an earlier Cassini image and the Voyager portrait. It also marked the first time that Earth inhabitants knew they were being photographed from the outer solar system, beyond the asteroid belt.

“This could be a day, I thought, when all the inhabitants of Earth, in unison, could issue a full-throated, cosmic shout-out and smile a big one for the cameras from far, far away,” Porco wrote in June 2013.

The picture of Earth wasn’t the only image taken that day. The Cassini team ultimately stitched together 141 photos into a sweeping view of Saturn, a mosaic 404,880 miles across. Shot from the back, Saturn is a black ball suspended in ink, enclosed in the coffee-colored circles of its rings.

“On the one hand, it is a beautiful image that will serve as a reminder of all the great data Cassini obtained,” said Matthew Hedman, a physicist at the University of Idaho who was involved with the project. “And on the other, it contains a lot of information about the properties of the rings that we will be trying to understand for many years to come.”

Winding down

Cassini slowed down slightly in its final few orbits as it passed through the outermost layers of Saturn’s atmosphere. The drag on the spacecraft hastened the final plunge slightly.

At about 4:37 a.m. Eastern Standard Time today, the spacecraft was expected to roll into position to enable one of its instruments to sample Saturn’s atmosphere as it gets closer and closer to the planet. It would stream data back to the Deep Space Network.

In the final minute of its life, Cassini will have fired its thrusters in an attempt to keep its high-gain antenna pointing to Earth. But that is a battle Cassini was destined to lose.

Around 8 a.m. Friday, the final images taken by Cassini were streaming back to scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

But Cassini is already gone. It will have been destroyed 83 minutes earlier. That’s how long it takes at the speed of light for news to travel from Saturn to Pasadena.

Cassini did’t exactly “crash” into Saturn, because it’s a gaseous planet and there’s no surface to hit. In the last moments, the spacecraft will have gone into a tumble and lost contact with Earth. Then it burned up as it plunged through Saturn’s atmosphere and disintegrated.

And then nothing was left.

Long Island income, poverty and health insurance

Posted on by Timothy Healy

Estimates of the median household income on Long Island rose in 2016, to $105,870 in Nassau and $92,933 in Suffolk, while the percentage of Long Islanders who did not have health insurance fell and the percentage of Long Islanders living below the poverty line remained essentially flat. Those were all according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey released on Sept. 14, 2017. The charts below illustrate the three measures. The income figure is the point at which half the households have higher income and half have lower, and the figures going back to 2012 are adjusted for inflation. The national median is $59,059.

Javascript charts via amCharts

How Suffolk voted in sheriff’s primary

Posted on by Timothy Healy

Larry Zacarese scored an upset victory over Phil Boyle in the Republican primary for Suffolk County sheriff Tuesday, according to unofficial results provided by the Suffolk County Board of Elections. Zacarese had 12,323 votes to Boyle’s 9,586 in a count that did not include absentee ballots. This map shows the results by election district. Click on any shape for details. Any you can read more about the sheriff’s race here.

Primary results

  • Zacarese
  • Zacarese by 15%+
  • Boyle
  • Boyle by 15%+
  • Tie

How Smithtown voted in the primary

Posted on by Timothy Healy

Separated by a handful of votes, with a few hundred absentee ballots not yet counted, Smithtown GOP candidates Edward Wehrheim and incumbent Patrick Vecchio are locked in a battle for their party’s nomination for town supervisor. Here are the unofficial votes broken down by election district in the town.

Primary results

  • Wehrheim
  • Wehrheim by 15%+
  • Vecchio
  • Vecchio by 15%+
  • Tie

A 9/11 symbol grows up: The journey of Long Island’s Patricia Smith

Posted on by jholbreich

For Patricia Smith, daughter of the only female NYPD officer killed on 9/11, the local news has served as a kind of family photo album.

Since age 2, Smith’s image has been splashed across newspaper front pages and on TV, as annual ceremonies have honored her mother, Moira Smith. The East Hampton resident, now 18, grew up a symbol of 9/11’s devastation.

But Smith doesn’t mind. It’s become an act of love to share her mother’s story and an exercise in memory to hold onto the photos and news clippings.

“I look back at those photos with my dad and aunts and uncles, and they share the stories with me so I feel like I have those memories,” she said.

Smith began the next chapter of her life this August as a freshman at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Ahead of her first 9/11 anniversary there, she reflected on her life in photos.

September 2001A mom and a hero

Smith is counted among 3,000 children who lost a parent when the Twin Towers were struck in 2001. She was in diapers at the time and as she grew older, she faced a challenge: How could she get to know a mother she couldn’t remember?

Moira Smith was born and raised in Brooklyn. She joined the NYPD in 1988 and quickly became a decorated officer, rescuing people from a 1991 subway crash that earned her a Distinguished Duty Medal.

She was outgoing and she liked taking road trips. She loved being a mother to Patricia, who was born in 1999.

“Thanksgiving is huge and St. Patrick’s Day is huge in my family,” Patricia said. “We’d be sitting at the table and people would be telling stories and my mom was always in them. She was always at the center, she was the life of the party.”

Then comes the part that’s taken Patricia years to accept. NYPD Officer Moira Smith gathered a group of her fellow officers and raced to the Twin Towers. She was last seen pulling victims from the towers before they collapsed. She was 38.

“When I was younger, it was always this happened to me and happened to my family. Why?” Patricia said. “But this didn’t just happen, that’s who my mom was. She wasn’t going to turn a blind eye.”

December 2001Early memories

It was Patricia’s red velvet dress that captured the attention. On Dec. 4, 2001, she accompanied her father to Carnegie Hall for an NYPD medal ceremony, where Mayor Rudy Giuliani presented her with her mother’s gold medal.

The photo was one of the first published of Patricia and one of her favorites.

She has fuzzy memories of getting ready, of having her hair curled and done up with a big red bow to match her dress. She and her father were supposed to walk out in front of the crowd. It was a serious event, but one she didn’t understand at the time.

“We were waiting at the stage entrance and I ripped the bow out of my hair, my nice hair, and handed it to my dad,” she said.

James didn’t have anywhere to put it. Seconds before the ceremony began, he wrapped it around his fingers as he held Patricia’s hand. The photo now hangs on the wall in her father’s home.

February 2002'They had our back'

The Smith family held a memorial service for Moira Smith at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in February 2002, the month before her body was recovered.

It was on Valentine’s Day, Moira’s favorite holiday and birthday, and the turnout was enormous. The size of the church also dwarfed little Patricia.

She remembers being struck by the enormity of the crowd, the hundreds of police officers dressed in blue.

“It was shocking. I didn’t understand at that point why they were all there,” she said.

As an adult, the memory means more to her now, she said. “I came to realize that was her family, and it’s our family too,” she said. “They had our back the whole time.”

September 2002A family portrait

For Patricia, losing a parent at a young age has meant that family photos mean more.

Nearly a year after the attacks, Patricia and her father attended a memorial service for officers killed in the line of duty. On Sept. 9, 2002, officials added the names of the 23 NYPD officers who died to a memorial wall.

“It’s weird, this one kind of makes me happy because I don’t have too many full family photos of me, my mom and my dad,” Patricia said.

James Smith let a 3-year-old Patricia hold onto a replica of her mother’s badge in a wooden box during the ceremony.

“Holding the badge, that was her, she was there with us,” Patricia said.

“It might not be a full family photo, but it has that feel. It’s definitely a picture that’s pretty special.”

September 2006'There were lots of tears'

As Patricia grew to be a young child, she started to recognize that other families didn’t look like hers. Losing her mother stung in a way it hadn’t before. The attention and crowds had become an overwhelming reminder of Moira Smith’s absence.

Patricia clung to her father’s side when she needed comfort. But that wasn’t an option on Sept. 11, 2006, when he spoke at a five-year memorial service at Ground Zero, she said.

Patricia, then 7, remembers worrying about having to sit alone when he got up to speak. She was allowed to follow James on stage, but couldn’t hold his hand during the speech.

“He was my security blanket,” she said. “I was too afraid to look out, so that’s why I’m looking down and holding the flower.”

The somber photo of Patricia standing alone graced front pages, transforming her once again into a symbol of 9/11’s losses. But the image is significant to Patricia for an additional reason: “This was the first picture I remember being sad.”

Patricia said her childhood was marked by being part of a family in mourning, even five years after her mother’s death.

“Everything was really raw and people were still trying to come to terms with it. There was a lot of tears,” she said.

After each memorial event, Patricia and her family would all head to a restaurant for a big meal, a way to celebrate Moira and end the day on a happier note.

September 2011A turning point

As a young preteen, Patricia retreated from the spotlight for some time. The ceremonies year after year blended together.

“I went through a period where I didn’t want to talk to anybody, not newspapers or shows or anything like that,” she said. “I was just tired of repeating the story and having to rehash the emotions that came with it.”

Something changed after she turned 12, she said. She was offered the chance to speak at a 10th anniversary memorial service in 2011, and she agreed. It proved to be a turning point.

“I don’t know if it was a specific point that things changed, but this moment I think I fully realized it,” she said. “I was standing there and I was looking at a huge crowd of people and I was proud to be there.”

She doesn’t remember what she said, but she felt a sense of peace after her speech ended.

“I remember coming off the stage and I took a deep breath,” she said. “I knew we were representing my mom and the sacrifice she made. I felt we were standing up for something she would have wanted.”

September 2012Remembering her mom

Patricia and her father were the subject of a Newsday article in 2012.

It’s not easy to see photos of herself during her more awkward preteen years, Patricia said. She was 13 when a photographer snapped a photo of her in her East Hampton bedroom.

The shining star of the photo is her mother, she said. When the Smiths think of Moira, they picture her like this: smiling and in pearls. The photo of Moira is a universal favorite among their family members, Patricia said.

The Newsday story was the first time Patricia was given the opportunity to talk just about her mother. Not Moira the police officer or Moira the victim, just Moira the mom, who loved to laugh and doted on her daughter.

“This was more about talking about my mom as a person and not just a police officer. She is that but she’s much more than that too,” she said. “The smile captures who she was.”

May 2017Seeking justice

Once she felt a sense of duty to share her mother’s story, Patricia knew it was important to share her family’s fight for justice for 9/11 victims, too.

In May 2017, she and her father flew to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for the start of pretrial hearings of five detainees U.S. officials said were involved in planning 9/11.

She’d been offered the chance to go once before, but was on a service trip in Cambodia at the time. When the opportunity arrived again in 2017, Patricia said yes.

“At that point, going to Guantánamo, that was more for me and my family,” she said.

She rehearsed how she’d respond to seeing the five men. She tried to shake her jitters.

“I was handing my passport over to security going on the plane and I was shaking,” she said.

She was only there to observe the proceedings but it was a powerful moment, she said.

“I didn’t cry, I didn’t have a reaction because I didn’t want to give them a reaction,” she said.

September 2017A new journey

In August, Patricia moved to Alabama to start college, and she’s settled into her dorm.

Among cheerful pillows and elephant tapestries, she brought memories of Moira with her: photos of her mother holding Patricia as a baby, a necklace with Moira’s name.

Each Sept. 11 is a solemn one, but Monday’s will be different, a new marker on Patricia’s personal timeline. She’s had some experience reflecting alone on the anniversary of the attacks, but this time, she won’t be in New York.

“I’ve never been in a different state by myself on Sept. 11,” she said. Alabama is different from New York, she said. People don’t talk about 9/11 the same way they do on Long Island.

“I haven’t heard anything about it yet here,” she said. “I know New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, we have strong connections to 9/11. I just figured people would be more reactive here.”

She will share her mother’s legacy through a few media interviews that day, and she plans to spend the evening with her new friends.

“My dad and family are big believers in celebrating my mom’s life,” she said. “We always ended the day on a positive note.”

Citi Bike expansion plans

Posted on by Timothy Healy

Citi Bike plans to expand in three boroughs starting Sept. 12, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. The plans call for adding 2,000 bikes and 140 new stations in neighborhoods including Harlem, Long Island City, Astoria, Crown Heights and Prospect Heights by the end of the year. This map shows current stations in green and expansion stations in pink. Zoom in and click on any dot for details; capacities for the expansion stations haven’t been announced, so those are listed as “0” for now. Read more about the Citi Bike expansion. This map was posted on Sept. 8, 2017.

Citi Bike stations

  • Existing
  • Planned

Cashless tolling: How it works and where you’ll find it

Posted on by jholbreich

Toll plazas – and the traffic that tends to come with them — are now a thing of the past for drivers going to and from Long Island via MTA crossings.

“Open road cashless tolling” is in place at all of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s nine crossings. The last of the toll booths — at the Bronx-Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges connecting the Bronx and Queens — switched to cashless tolling on Sept. 30, the agency says.

Here’s what that looks like

Manhattan-bound Queens Midtown Tunnel

before

after

Jan. 27, 2015; Photo credit: AP / Sept. 20, 2017; Photo credit: Jeff Bachner

There’s no need to stop or slow down. You just drive right through. Preliminary data indicates that has improved peak period travel times by between 4 percent and 20 percent, according to MTA Bridge and Tunnel spokesman Christopher McKniff.

Here’s how it works

Driving under the structure at normal speed, sensors determine whether your car has E-ZPass.

If you DO have E-ZPass, the toll is automatically deducted from your account.

If you DON’T have E-ZPass, a camera takes a picture of your license plate, and a bill is mailed to you.

Renderings courtesy MTA

And here’s where you’ll find them

What about the toll collectors?

“There’s still a need for us,” said Wayne Joseph, president of the Bridge and Tunnel Officers Benevolent Association, the union that represents them. Former toll collectors will be reassigned as MTA toll enforcement officers, who will help drivers adapt to the new system and understand what they owe.

No officers will lose their jobs due to cashless tolling.

Why Has This Been Such An Active Hurricane Season?

Posted on by jholbreich

They just keep coming – Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia and now Maria. A bumper crop of hurricanes so far this year, with four of them at this point deemed major.

Harvey devastated Texas; Irma — deemed one of the most powerful storms ever in the Atlantic — left a path of destruction through much of the Caribbean and Florida; and Maria was roaring along in the northeastern Caribbean as a Category 5, weakened to a Category 4 just as it made landfall on Puerto Rico Wednesday.

With more than two months of the Atlantic hurricane season still ahead, already 13 named storms, seven of them hurricanes – have developed as of Sept. 20. Compare that to the average for an entire season, from June 1 through November 30, which is 12 named storms with six of them developing into hurricanes.

These numbers are proving forecasters’ earlier calls to be on track. Back in May, their outlook was for above-average activity for the 2017 season, and that call was strengthened in early August, indicating that above-average was likely with “the potential to be extremely active.”

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, here’s what was predicted, what’s average and what’s happened so far:

Named storms

were predicted in this year’s forecast

is the average expected each year

is how many we’ve seen as of Sept. 20

Classified hurricanes

were predicted in this year’s forecast

is the average expected each year

is how many we’ve seen as of Sept. 20

Major storms

were predicted in this year’s forecast

is the average expected each year

is how many we’ve seen as of Sept. 20

A major storm is one which is Category 3 or higher, based on maximum sustained wind speed.

Harvey and Irma will be going into the hurricane history books, described as “catastrophic,” “life threatening” — and in Irma’s case, one of the most powerful storms ever in the Atlantic. As for Maria, the second Category 5 storm of the year, it’s too early to tell its ultimate level of damage, but it is being described as “potentially catastrophic.”

Here’s how experts explain it

Some key conditions are easing the way for tropical systems to form and intensify, forecasters say.

First, a lack of vertical wind shear

Vertical wind shear, which involves rapid shifts in speed and/or direction, can interfere with the formation of tropical systems and weaken or destroy those that have already developed, NOAA says.

Wind shear is a factor associated with El Nino, a climate pattern that starts in the tropical Pacific, which forecasters had earlier thought could develop this year. 

By early August, those chances “dropped significantly,” the NOAA hurricane outlook said. At that point computer models were indicating a thumbs-down for the formation of a hurricane-supressing El Nino – and a thumbs-up for above-average activity.

Warm water = fuel

Hurricanes need water that’s at least 79 degrees. That’s why peak hurricane season doesn’t begin until mid-August.

Early last month researchers at Colorado State University said that “the tropical Atlantic has been much warmer than normal for the past several months, and is likely to remain so, therefore providing more fuel for developing tropical cyclones.”

Other atmospheric factors

Weaker trade winds, a strong upper-level ridge, the disposition of high-level winds coming off Africa and a stronger West African monsoon all play a part.

Along with that weak wind shear, these conditions allow “for stronger African easterly [atmospheric] waves, from which tropical storms and hurricanes can more easily develop,” NOAA says.

For example, Irma — a classic Cape Verde storm, that began near the islands off the west coast of Africa — gained strength because high-altitude winds, which can fight or even decapitate storms, were not strong.

Are back-to-back storms normal?

Major storms can and do form back-to-back and did so last year with Matthew and Nicole, but having more than one hit the United States in a season is strange. If Irma hits Florida as a Category 4 or 5 storm, it will be the first time in historical record that the United States was hit by two Category 4 or 5 storms in one year, said Colorado State University meteorology professor Phil Klotzbach.

To what degree is climate change in the picture?

As the earth and atmosphere warm, oceans also absorb heat.

Still, those warmer waters in the tropical Atlantic are primarily associated with natural temperature variability, Klotzbach said.

And while there “may be a slight human component,” it’s hard to tie climate change to tropical systems, as there’s such variability from year to year in their numbers and intensity, he said.

As for making a case for a particular storm, Jason Samenow, weather editor and chief meteorologist for the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang, says he takes the middle ground when it comes to Hurricane Harvey.

“Climate change probably made Harvey worse, but I wouldn’t say profoundly worse. This is a storm that, irrespective of climate change, was going to be terrible.”

Finally – hurricane season lasts how much longer???

Close to three months remain in the season that officially runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.

For Long Island, the peak month for activity has historically been September, said Jay Engle, National Weather Service meteorologist in Upton.

With The Associated Press

Here’s what Amtrak did at Penn Station during the ‘Summer of Hell’

Posted on by jholbreich

As roughly 300,000 daily LIRR commuters navigated new and different routes during the 53 days of what became known as the “Summer of Hell,” 360 Amtrak workers were working around the clock on a $30 million project to rebuild the infrastructure of one of Penn Station’s most troubled areas.

With construction having ended on Thursday, and with LIRR schedules back to normal this week, here’s a look at what took place during that time at Penn Station’s A-interlocking and on Track 10 — the epicenters of the construction projects that necessitated the summer service changes.

The project

A-interlocking is the area of tracks and switches that helps route trains arriving at Penn Station from the Hudson River Tunnels and LIRR’s West Side Yard.

Once they pass through A-interlocking, the trains are routed to the various platforms within Penn Station itself, including Tracks 13 through 21, where LIRR commuters typically arrive and depart.

Newsday graphic by Rod Eyer

Officials say aging infrastructure, along with the sheer volume of people using the hub, led to the recent spate of service disruptions at Penn Station. Rather than continue to patch problematic infrastructure, the decision was made to move forward with the summer plans to replace the equipment at A-interlocking completely, and at the same time to rebuild Penn’s Track 10.

In early July, as LIRR commuters left for work extra early for Day 1 of the “Summer of Hell,” Amtrak crews got to work.

A-interlocking

The first stage of the project required complete demolition and removal of old track and switches. Workers began by dismantling old equipment.

Heavy-duty cranes (that can lift up to 125 tons) were brought in to remove the old tracks and switches.

Many of the new pieces of track were built off-site and transported from outside locations in New York and New Jersey. Here, a new 69B switching package is loaded in Elizabeth, New Jersey …

… and brought into Penn Station.

The crane would then put the new equipment into place.

With the big pieces in position, workers used equipment such as abrasive rail cutting saws to make sure the new setup met design specifications.

Once the new tracks and switches were placed, teams wired in new air-controlled switch machines.

The final step of the work at A-interlocking was the installation of new connection rails …

… and the new setup was ready to go.

Track 10

Though not used by the LIRR, the other main component of the “Summer of Hell” was a full replacement of Track 10. Work began with the full demolition of all rails, cables and signals, plus 100 yards of concrete roadbed.

After an elaborate removal process, new timber was placed, leveled and installed.

Once the formwork and new track ties were ready, concrete was brought in by the truckload by way of Penn’s “Empire Tunnel” on 10th Avenue.

The concrete was then poured …

… and workers leveled it for the new track. By the fifth week of the “Summer of Hell,” 1,100 feet of concrete had been installed at Penn Station.

By Aug. 24 – a week before the construction deadline – the new Track 10 was ready to go. Click here for more on what’s next for the LIRR and Penn Station, and what it means for commuters.

WITH REPORTING FROM ALFONSO A. CASTILLO