At Least They Had The Sense Not To Try To Replicate “The Mystery Of Al Capone’s Vault”

I wonder if this will be the last time the new regime at DEP tries to impress a jaded press corps with new technology:

Mr. Holloway stood near an open sewer manhole off Kent Avenue in Brooklyn beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. The hose from one of the trucks was lowered inside the manhole and soon began sucking. The smell from the open manhole was vaguely, almost sweetly, foul; no one odor was detectable, but the odor was there nonetheless.

The agency has placed machines equipped with sonar technology and video cameras into the darkened sewer system to help identify the clogged areas. About 40 percent of the interceptor lines have been tracked so far.

. . .

On two tables near the trucks was a sampling of sewer detritus, all of it pulled recently from a sewer interceptor in South Ozone Park in Queens. There were bricks, pieces of wood, chunks of concrete, metal spikes, a rusty spoon, a 20-ounce plastic bottle of Pepsi, a deflated football and a can of Zazz Seltzer.

No evidence of alligators could be found among the items on the tables.

It was at another open manhole, about nine miles away on East 123rd Street in Manhattan, that teenagers shoveling snow one February day in 1935 did, in fact, see one in a city sewer, or said they saw one. They pulled up a sickly, 125-pound, 8-foot alligator with some clothesline they borrowed from a nearby stove shop, only to kill it with their shovels after it snapped at one of the boys.