The New York Police Department is investigating a Tuesday around 4 a.m. video that shows three people climbing out of a manhole near Penn Station in Manhattan and running away with headlamps on. It is the latest unusual sewer-system episode to draw police attention in New York City.
Video from the scene shows the group wearing overalls and pulling themselves up from underground before taking off. The incident was reported last week, and the sewer systems were inspected afterward.
The timing matters because the Manhattan sighting did not come out of nowhere. Earlier this summer, surveillance footage caught multiple groups of people leaving or entering manholes in the middle of the night, including two incidents in Brooklyn. In one of those Brooklyn cases, police were called after individuals were seen going into the manholes, and one group came out about three hours later. In the other, people were seen crawling out and leaving in a vehicle more than two and a half hours later.
Police said there was no threat to the public at the time, but that reassurance has not answered the bigger question that keeps coming back with each new video: why were these people going in and out of the sewer systems at all? The repeated nighttime entries and exits have remained unexplained even as investigators have reviewed the underground tunnels after hours-long stays by unknown individuals.
The Department of Environmental Protection says entering sewer systems in New York City is illegal and extremely dangerous, and warns that members of the public should never enter a pipe, drain, catch basin, manhole or outfall. New York City's sewer network spans more than 7,400 miles, a reminder that what looks like a quick climb in one video is part of a vast system built for water, not people.
For now, the Manhattan case adds another unresolved episode to a pattern that police have been tracking for months. The NYPD is still investigating, and the central mystery is unchanged: who the people are, where they have been going underground and whether the latest video is part of the same pattern seen in Brooklyn or something different altogether.
