Somewhere under Brooklyn and Queens, New York has a mystery. Over the past few weeks, surveillance cameras have repeatedly caught small groups of people prying open manhole covers in the dead of night and disappearing into the sewer system, and so far the city’s only firm answer is that they should not be down there.
The footage is genuinely strange. At least seven men descended a manhole near McDonald Avenue in Flatbush late on May 29 and climbed back out just after 2 a.m., and a similar group was recorded in Williamsburg. Weeks earlier, in Astoria, three people in hip waders pried open a cover around 2 a.m. and went under.
What nobody has established is who they are or what they are after. The most quotable theory came from an Astoria auto-shop owner, Aki Jakupovic, who watched the Queens crew and compared them to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which is roughly where the public understanding sits: hip waders, midnight, a manhole, and a shrug.
The city’s posture is less whimsical. The Department of Environmental Protection warns that entering the sewer system is illegal and dangerous, a place of toxic gases and sudden flooding, and the NYPD is investigating the incidents. After inspecting the Flatbush site, police said the area was safe and the DEP reported no damage to the system.
So this is not, as far as anyone can tell, a crisis. It is an unsolved oddity, one that makes the city feel a little more like the comic-book version of itself. But the official line underneath the weirdness is real: those manhole crews are not city workers, and the tunnels they are slipping into can kill a person who does not know what they are doing.
If you see someone lifting a manhole cover who is not obviously on the job, the move is to report it to 311 or the NYPD rather than follow them, because the DEP is clear that the sewer is off limits and hazardous. Until someone down there explains themselves, the Ninja Turtles theory is, officially, as good as any.
Featured image: Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
