What it's like to go inside New York City's dank, dangerous, bug-filled sewers
Former urban explorer Steve Duncan reflects on his experiences in New York City's sewer system, highlighting the presence of cockroaches as the most unpleasant aspect. Recent surveillance footage has shown groups entering the sewers, prompting police investigations, although no public threat is believed to exist. Duncan emphasizes the historical significance of these tunnels and the potential dangers they pose to explorers.
- ▪Steve Duncan recalls cockroaches as the worst part of exploring New York City's sewers.
- ▪Police are investigating recent incidents of people entering the sewer system but do not believe there is a public threat.
- ▪Duncan notes that the sewer tunnels are historically significant, tracing paths of natural waterways that were converted into sewers.
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| Original publisher | Korea Times |
| Canonical URL | https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/world/20260605/what-its-like-to-go-inside-new-york-citys-dank-dangerous-bug-filled-sewers?utm_source=rss |
| Publication time | Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:17:03 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-05T03:21:10.232Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-05T03:21:10.232Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 0bfOd8R9D8BM · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This undated photo provided by Steve Duncan, shows the Canal Street sewer in New York. Steve Duncan via AP-YonhapNEW YORK — It wasn’t the rats. Or the smells. Or the germs.No, the most unpleasant part of descending into New York City's vast sewer system, according to former urban explorer Steve Duncan, were the cockroaches.“They’re all over the place, crawling on walls, dropping down on you,” Duncan recalled this week. “They were the worst.”Duncan, 48, who now lives in Maryland, reflected on his years documenting the muck-filled tunnels running under New York after surveillance videos captured small groups of people mysteriously entering and exiting the sewer system in Brooklyn and Queens in recent days.Police say they’re still investigating the three incidents but don’t believe there’s…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Korea Times.
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