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\n The aftermath of Donike Gocaj\u2019s fall on Monday night.
\n Photo: Dakota Santiago\/The New York Times\/Redux\n <\/p>\n
Inarguably, it was a horrible way to die. On May 18, Donike Gocaj opened the door of her SUV around 11:20 p.m., took a step, and, a witness told the dailies<\/a>, fell about ten feet down a Con Edison manhole that had lost its cover. This, mind you, was not a construction site or some industrial zone full of obvious dangers; it was at 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue, right by Cartier. Twenty minutes later, emergency service workers pulled Gocaj out. By then, she was unconscious, and she never woke up.<\/p>\n The 20 minutes Gocaj spent down in that hole were agonizing. A witness heard her shout, \u201cI\u2019m dying!\u201d Then she quieted. She was 56 and in town that night from Briarcliff Manor for her job<\/a> with a cleaning service. The coroner\u2019s report is chilling, listing multiple factors besides cardiac arrest that figured in her death. One is blunt-force trauma: injuries from the fall itself. The other is scalding paired with \u201csteam inhalation,\u201d which sounds much gentler than it is. The industrial steam that Con Ed supplies is incompatible with human tissue. If a person breathes it in, it will very quickly scorch the throat and trachea. The burns cause swelling, the airways close, and the victim can asphyxiate. It\u2019s the early cause of death<\/a> in many fire injuries.<\/p>\n When confronted with a terrible turn of events, most people tend to do some mental reckoning around probabilities. We work out the odds, judge whether we might have avoided the same fate by being more alert or making different choices. In this case, though, the manhole cover had apparently been knocked loose by a passing truck just 12 minutes earlier. Unless you somehow convince yourself that a moment\u2019s distraction (Did she not look down?) was a deep personal failing, there was little that Gocaj, or anyone, could have done.<\/p>\n Because although having the ground give way beneath one\u2019s feet doesn\u2019t happen often, it does happen. Earlier this week, La Guardia Airport had to deal with a sinkhole<\/a>, and so did a school bus in the Bronx<\/a>. You may also recall the terrifying story from 2020<\/a> about a Bronx man who had a sidewalk collapse under him, dropping him into a basement full of rats. He lay there for about half an hour until firefighters got him out, later saying that he couldn\u2019t shout for assistance because he didn\u2019t want a rat to crawl into his mouth. Even without added vermin, though, the thought of being swallowed up by a dark steaming pit is primally upsetting, especially if you\u2019ve ever peered down into a manhole and wondered what lies beneath the streets. It is a portal to something necessary but unpleasant, mawlike, dank, dark, sometimes stinky, sometimes brutally hot. It is literally hellish.<\/p>\n The particular manhole where Donike Gocaj died is an access point for Con Edison\u2019s steam system, which has supplied energy to Manhattan since the days of Thomas Edison. A hundred miles of big pipes carry steam to office towers like the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, where it not only heats but also, counterintuitively, powers the air-conditioning. It leaves the plants at 1,000 degrees and is delivered at about 358. Smaller customers \u2014 dry cleaners, hospitals \u2014 also buy steam for particular tasks. (New buildings rarely use it, but in the places where it\u2019s already inbuilt, it\u2019s effective and fairly fuel efficient, so it\u2019s not going away anytime soon.) The manholes serve as repair and maintenance access points for valves and condensation traps. When you see hot vapor coming up from a vent in the street, Taxi Driver style<\/a>, chances are that its source is one of two things: a leak that needs fixing or groundwater that has reached a pipe and come to a boil. There are about 3,000 of those steam manholes in Manhattan, most in midtown and downtown. Under the hatch \u2014 typically 32 inches across \u2014 most of them widen out somewhat, and they extend downward about ten to 15 feet. They allow workers to get to the pipes themselves, which are often wrapped in insulation and concrete, and gain access to valves and steam traps that may require maintenance. Some manholes have built-in ladders, but this one, evidently, did not.<\/p>\n After Gocaj\u2019s death, news outlets noted that the number of manhole-cover-related 311 requests has risen lately. (The overall number of calls is up as well, so this trend is not entirely manhole-specific.) The Post also floated<\/a> the idea that lightweight manhole covers \u2014 plastic or fiberglass \u2014 that have in some places replaced cast-iron ones and require a latch to stay in place are more prone to being dislodged, and that this perhaps was to blame. A Con Ed representative firmly disputed that point: This one, he told me, was 240 pounds of iron with a plastic cap on top.<\/p>\n Historically, most of the high drama involving the city\u2019s network of manholes <\/strong>has involved not falls but explosions. The steam arrives at high pressure \u2014 165 pounds per square inch \u2014 and the condition known as \u201cwater hammer,\u201d which you likely know as the banging sound in older buildings\u2019 pipes, can occasionally cause a far higher spike in pressure. In 2007, a big steam main by the Chanin Building, across from Grand Central, blew up right as a truck passed over, injuring dozens.\u00a0Another one blew up near Gramercy Park in 1989, killing at least two people<\/a>, including one woman who was scalded to death in her sleep, and leaving a number of apartments covered in asbestos-laced mud. More frequently than that, a cover will just spontaneously be blasted into the air<\/a>. Usually that happens when the insulation of an underground electrical cable, corroded by road salt, starts to smolder, emitting toxic gases, and then a spark sets them off, sending the cover sky-high<\/a>. There\u2019s a whole YouTube universe of unsettling manhole-as-projectile<\/a> videos.<\/p>\n But Judy Melinek, a former New York City medical examiner, wrote<\/a> in her memoir, Working Stiff, that the very worst death she\u2019d ever seen<\/a>, the one that gave her nightmares, occurred under similar circumstances to Gocaj\u2019s. Around 4 a.m. one night in 2002, two men, Keith Masters and Kyle McGarity, got into an argument over a girlfriend near the corner of Pearl and Fulton Streets. It got physical, and either McGarity stumbled into a manhole or, one witness said, Masters threw him in. (Charges were later brought against him, then dropped.) There was a pool of hot water at the bottom, and McGarity spent four hours down there. By the time his body was retrieved, his breathing passages had filled with foam \u2014 bodily fluids whipped into a froth as his breath grew labored owing to that thermal damage. Melinek observed that his liver and other viscera had firmed up, his arteries and veins had solidified like blood sausage, and his body temperature was somewhere north of 125 degrees.<\/p>\n Or consider the case of Liz Wallenberg<\/a>. She\u2019s the young Williamsburg woman who on an August day in 2004 fell on a manhole cover while skateboarding. It was hot enough to sear its waffled imprint into her flesh; you could read the O-N of CON EDISON on her lower back, imprinted like a cattle brand or an undesirable tattoo. As much as that might appear to have been a freak event, it wasn\u2019t unique. Wallenberg told the Times she\u2019d received several\u00a0calls from people who\u2019d been similarly burned, and she sued<\/a>. You can still see the repercussions from that suit as you walk around the city: A layer of rubbery yellowish silicone or gray plastic on top of our iron manhole covers, laid down to insulate hot metal from skin, is her odd but widespread legacy.<\/p>\n Now back to that mental reckoning: Could Donike Gocaj\u2019s death have been prevented? Is there some corrective action to be taken? <\/strong>Theoretically, we could put a sensor on every single manhole in New York City and deploy a rapid-response cover-resetting squad \u2014 never mind that you\u2019d receive false alerts every time a bus rumbled by, and getting the lid back on immediately would be a tall order in even the most tidily run city, which ours is not. A retired Con Edison official noted to me this week, by way of comparison, that the utility has \u201ca huge department and program\u201d for dealing with the well-established risk of gas emergencies. But some events are true outliers, so strange as to be almost irreproducible. \u201cDo we need to create a whole new something to deal with this?\u201d he asked, rhetorically. \u201cOr can we treat this as a one-off?\u201d<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter<\/p>\n A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n