It’s all academic.
The engineering team behind Gov. Cuomo’s miracle L-train cure has little experience working on transit projects — and spent a grand total of an hour evaluating the damage firsthand in the subway line’s tunnel, The Post has learned.
But, in a stunning piece of spin, the governor’s office defended that lack of expertise as innovative thinking.
“We’re breaking the box by using the expertise of engineers who don’t usually work on subways in order to improve it,” Cuomo spokesman Patrick Muncie told The Post.
Engineers from Cornell and Columbia universities spent just a few weeks examining the MTA’s years-in-the-making plan to shut down the Hurricane Sandy-ravaged L-train tunnel for repairs — before recommending an 11th-hour alternative to keep it open and just contain the damage with new walls built on nights and weekends.
Mary Boyce, dean of Columbia’s engineering school, told The Post that the team had no experience working on a subway system like New York’s, but claimed the crew had enough combined infrastructure experience to know the plan would work.
“The outcome will be better than the original plan,” she said. “This is a great outcome for New Yorkers, not just in reduced inconvenience but for the long-term outcome of the end result.”
Cuomo’s office confirmed that only one of the eggheads on the Ivy League panel, which the governor touted as “the best experts we could find,” has limited experience working on subways.
And that one person, Cornell professor Thomas O’Rourke, struggled to name a comparable subway tunnel-rehab project he had been involved with.
“Rehabilitation for subway tunnels? Mostly new construction for subway tunnels,” O’Rourke said.
Instead, he argued that his other expertise — in making tunnels earthquake-safe and working with other major non-subway refit infrastructure projects — compensated.
He spoke of one project — the seismic examination of the underwater subway tube in the San Francisco Bay Area — but admitted there weren’t structural changes to the tunnel.
Meanwhile, the team never bothered speaking with subways boss Andy Byford and made just one trip, on Dec. 14, to the crumbling Canarsie Tunnel to see the problem for themselves, Boyce admitted.
Cuomo emerged from that tour believing the long-planned 15-month shutdown would be necessary.
But on Thursday, he held a surprise press conference with Boyce and O’Rourke by his side and declared the dreaded shutdown wasn’t needed after all because the scholars had come up with a better idea to instead bury its damaged walls behind new fiberglass barriers.
The new plan has already come under criticism from MTA insiders and experts, who have blasted the governor for tearing up longstanding plans of the MTA, whose own engineers believe a complete rebuild is needed.
“You’re gonna cover it up, and pretend that it went away,” one MTA official said of Cuomo’s plan.
One former high-ranking MTA official noted that the agency’s original plan was modeled on proven repairs to the R-train’s Montague Tunnel
“It was done ahead of schedule and worked beautifully,” the ex-official said.
Michael Horodniceanu, former president of MTA Capital Construction, said the final project will not have the same lifespan as the previous plan, which was expected to last 100 years.
“It’s going to last for a while, for sure it isn’t going to to be a hundred years,” said Horodniceanu. “It might last 15 years and need to be fixed again.”