The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said yesterday that its dewatering task force removed more than an Olympic-size swimming pool's worth of water per minute from New York's flooded mass transit tunnels. The press release (via Boing Boing) said the team was overseeing pumps at six sites that each could get rid of 116,000 gallons per minute. Combined, that's 696,000 gallons of water, well over the 660,000 gallons it takes to float Ryan Lochte. The release explains that when they began pumping on Thursday there were about 600 million gallons in the tunnels. You can see video of the mission at work on the Battery Underpass and the South Ferry Subway Station here: 

Though the Army describes their mission as "dewatering" the Atlantic Wire's John Hudson explained the difference between "dewatering" and "unwatering"— what is technically going on here since "unwatering is removing water from a place where it's never supposed to be."

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Esther Zuckerman