Aki Jakupovic was pulling an all-nighter in his auto detailing shop in Queens when he spotted the three men in waders walking toward a nearby manhole cover around 2 a.m.
“We glanced at each other. Then they acted like I wasn’t even there,” recalled Jakupovic, owner of Aki Auto Care in the Astoria neighborhood.
Surveillance video from his shop shows one of the men prying open the heavy steel manhole cover, as a car that seems to be accompanying them sits nearby with its headlights pointed their direction. The trio soon slipped out of sight, into the bowels of the city.
“These guys looked like the Ninja Turtles,” said Jakupovic, who closed his garage doors out of caution while an employee alerted police. “Very strange, man. Very strange.”
That May 5 encounter marked the first in at least three recent incidents in which groups of people have been captured on camera climbing into — and out of — parts of the city’s sprawling sewer system.
Late last Thursday, according to New York City police, a group of people slid into a manhole near McDonald Avenue and Colin Place in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. Several hours later, a video captured a group of seven men climbing out of a manhole and lingering unhurriedly on a nearby sidewalk.
Around 1 a.m. that same Friday, police said, “multiple unidentified individuals” were seen entering a manhole near Heyward Street and Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. Later, security video showed a group of more than a half-dozen men emerging from underground. Several appeared to be wearing headlamps and carrying small shovels, and police said they soon fled “in an unknown vehicle to parts unknown.”
So far, according to the New York Police Department, no arrests have been made and no injuries reported. “There is no threat to public safety at this time,” the department said in a statement, adding that an investigation is ongoing.
But the string of subterranean episodes has baffled New Yorkers, become the stuff of group text threads and spurred speculation online. Are the sewer explorers searching for jewelry and other valuable lost down drains? Are they digging underground to try to tunnel into a bank or other businesses?
Whatever the motivation, city officials have been adamant that it’s a bad idea for ordinary residents to venture into New York’s elaborate network of sewers, which consists of more than 7,400 miles of pipes, 152,000 catch basins and 95 wastewater pumping stations.
“Entering the sewer system is both illegal and extremely dangerous,” Rob Wolejsza, spokesman for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, said in an email.
Wolejsza said the agency has inspected the sewers at the two Brooklyn locations where people most recently entered manholes and determined that “our infrastructure is safe.”
The hazards that lie below are numerous, he added. Potentially deadly gases. Unstable surfaces. Flooding risks. Confined spaces. “For these reasons,” Wolejsza said, stating what millions of New Yorkers already inherently know, “members of the public should never enter a pipe, drain, catch basin, manhole, or outfall.”
Last month, a 56-year-old woman died in Manhattan after she exited her parked vehicle and fell into an open manhole near the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 52nd Street.
The recent, mysterious forays captured on video are hardly the first time that people have set out to explore the depths of the city’s sewer system, despite the obvious risks.
In 2015, police arrested three would-be treasure hunters on trespassing charges after the trio was caught resurfacing from a manhole in East Flatbush. The group apparently had gone in search of valuables they believed lay below.
“God knows what they were looking for,” William J. Bratton, then-police commissioner, told reporters at the time. “I know damn sure I wouldn’t be crawling through the sewers of New York.”
Last April, police also arrested three men in the Bensonhurst neighborhood in Brooklyn for climbing down into the sewer system after witnesses reported seeing the trio descending into a manhole near 17th Avenue and 82nd Street.
As for Jakupovic, he has witnessed a bit of everything in the five years he has owned his auto shop along a busy street in Astoria. But the bizarre late-night encounter with the sewer explorers still has him bewildered.
“Something I’ve never seen before,” he said. “I’m there every day. … But that’s not something you expect.”
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