Angel Volquez was already on edge. For weeks, the New York City bus driver had watched as the city’s grim new reality played out in front of him through the large glass windshield like a dystopian movie.
Streets had turned eerily empty of traffic and were now filled mostly with screeching ambulances racing to the hospital. At bus stops, exhausted nurses replaced his usual riders.
Then he learned that a cleaner at the bus depot, Kenneth Wright, had died from the coronavirus. Next he received a text that a recently retired bus operator, Sanni Adamu, had died. A week later, when he heard that the virus had killed an older driver beloved for his boundless kindness, Erlin Galarza, the new perils of his job finally sank in.
“He was a very humble man, he was very well loved,” Mr. Volquez said. “We hear what’s going on, but when I heard he died, it finally hit home, that any of this can happen to anyone.”
Mr. Volquez is one of the 800 transit workers at Gun Hill in the Bronx, one of the largest depots operated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s subway and buses. Since the coronavirus pandemic swallowed New York City, the virus has plagued the transit work force, with nearly 100 workers dead and thousands more falling sick.
At Gun Hill, two current workers have died and 63 have been confirmed positive with the coronavirus, making it one of the harder-hit workplaces in the city during the pandemic, outside of health care facilities.
Transit leaders have commended the sacrifice of fallen colleagues, lauding their work force as heroes in the face of the pandemic. The narrative reflects a unique facet of this crisis: the redefining of “emergency worker” to include bus drivers, train conductors, grocery store clerks and trash collectors.
Unlike police officers or firefighters, most transit workers, though essential to the city’s functioning, never expected to confront life-threatening danger on the job. Now, like reluctant soldiers whose draft numbers were called, many feel as if they have been thrust onto the front lines of a deadly war they were not prepared for and do not want to fight.
“It’s a nerve-racking thing to go to work every day and not know what’s going to happen,” said Keith Medina, a bus operator who opted to burn through 20 of his personal days in March and April rather than risk exposure to the virus. “We didn’t sign up for that.”
Like many of his colleagues, Mr. Medina, 32, had grown up in a working-class neighborhood and applied for work at New York City Transit because it offered a stable income, decent benefits and a pension — everything he needed to take care of his parents as they got older and eventually, he thought, to raise a family of his own.
At the time, he had also taken entry exams for the city’s sanitation and police departments, but he settled on transit at the urging of his father, who thought it was the safest bet: Law enforcement work could be dangerous, and sanitation work might strain his son’s asthma. When he joined the transit agency seven years ago, he did not think much of the job, he said, but over time he came to love the work.
“I’m outside, I don’t see the same things every day, I’m constantly in motion,” said Mr. Medina, who worked for five years at Kingsbridge bus depot in the Inwood neighborhood in Manhattan before transferring to Gun Hill in 2018. “I’m here for the benefits, that’s why I went this route, but I really do love what I do.”
Situated in the Baychester neighborhood of the East Bronx, Gun Hill is one of 28 M.T.A. bus depots that span the city’s five boroughs. Flanked to the east by the Hutchinson River, two highways and a large shopping complex, the depot is home to a fleet of 238 buses parked in neat rows outside a drab administrative building.
Each day buses from the depot set off for the largely working-class neighborhoods of Norwood and Eastchester, Pelham Bay and City Island, carrying mostly immigrants from Latin America past two-family homes and brown-brick apartment buildings.
Before the pandemic, the depot itself was usually bustling: Colleagues played dominoes and shot pool in the crew room before their shifts or during lunch breaks, the sounds of rushing traffic from the nearby highways buzzing outside. When they were not clocked in, bus operators attended each others’ weddings and shared cake at their children’s birthdays.
But when the coronavirus pandemic took hold of New York in March, the liveliness dissipated. Long conversations with colleagues in the crew room were exchanged for frantic text messages with news of co-workers who had fallen sick and questions about when operators would be issued personal protective equipment.
It was not clear if the workers had contracted their illness on the job, and Mr. Adamu had retired before the pandemic hit. But soon the drivers began moving in and out of the depot as quickly as possible, beelining from the crew dispatcher’s office, where they checked in at the start of their shift, directly to the bus lot to reduce possible exposure from other co-workers.
“The mood turned very somber,” said Mr. Volquez, who drives the local BX22 route from Castle Hill to Bedford Park in the Bronx. “Morale got very, very low.”
To protect drivers, transit officials implemented rear-door boarding on buses to keep them at a safe distance from riders. At the dispatcher's office, officials added orange cones and plexiglass barriers to ensure a six-foot distance between dispatchers and drivers. Workers armed with thermometers took employees’ temperatures as they arrived at the depot.
The M.T.A. said it had worked with the unions to try to ensure the safety of its workers, going beyond Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice.
“The M.T.A. has been a global leader in protecting the health and safety of our employees, including issuing masks to our entire work force before the C.D.C. reversed course and changed its own guidance,” the agency said in a statement. “There is no higher or more critical priority than the safety of our customers and employees and we have shown that through action.”
Despite the safety measures, once mundane drives along many routes in the Bronx became hourslong anxiety-ridden journeys. Even as state officials urged people to stay home, Mr. Volquez said his bus was often crowded with shoppers and with teenagers who seemed to be joyriding.
In early April, he decided to take a few days off — the worry had become exhausting. By then Mr. Volquez was getting new messages on group chats every few hours informing him of colleagues who had tested positive.
He was also receiving an updated list of co-workers who had succumbed to the virus every few days, their names and accompanying prayer and dove emojis flashing across his phone screen like memento mori.
With each new message, he thought of his immuno-compromised 2-year old daughter, who he feared might not survive if he brought the coronavirus home.
“Anytime she gets a regular cold from us, it hits her 10 times harder, she has to be in the I.C.U. for like 10 days,” he said. “Everybody knows she won’t make it through that right now. Her system is so sensitive, if I catch the virus then I just know it’s coming home.”
As the weeks passed, that possibility felt more and more likely. Increasingly, his colleagues were calling out sick, making it hard to put enough buses out to meet even the reduced pandemic schedule that drivers at Gun Hill began following.
Sergio Lola, who has worked as a bus operator for three years, began feeling unwell while he was driving at the end of March. Concerned, he ordered a face mask online during his lunch break, but by the next day, he felt worse and drove to an urgent care facility.
There a doctor told him that while the facility did not have coronavirus test kits, they suspected that he had contracted the virus.
He spent the next two weeks isolated on the top floor of his family’s two-story house, communicating through FaceTime with his wife, 6-year-old daughter and 62-year-old mother-in-law.
By the second week of quarantine, each cough felt like a punch to his chest, he said, but 18 days later he was cleared to return to work. Still, the thought of going back plunged him into a depressive haze.
“All I was thinking was I have to go back out there, but what if I get sick again and what if it’s worse this time or what if I bring something home to my family,” he said. “I signed up for this because I just wanted to take care of my family. If I wanted to be a hero, I would have joined the N.Y.P.D.”
By the time he returned to work, the coronavirus had already taken a fatal toll at the depot: Driver Erlin Galarza had died. For many workers, his loss brought the pandemic’s unforgiving grasp home.
Mr. Galarza, a 66-year-old immigrant from Ecuador, had been a popular figure in the Gun Hill depot: a kind and endlessly positive man whose colleagues nicknamed him “Flintstone,” a reflection of both his cartoonish resemblance to a character on the cartoon series and his exceedingly slow driving.
Mr. Galarza had worked for the transit agency for 16 years. He planned to retire when he turned 67, which was just months away.
“He was always telling guys to take it easy out there, to slow down,’’ Mr. Medina said. “He was always so slow on the road.”
A few days after news of Mr. Galarza’s death reached the depot, Mr. Medina reluctantly returned to work following his 20-day mental health hiatus.
Back on his usual route, he thought about the life he had imagined when he joined the transit agency: a world where he could support his family and keep it safe, where change would happen in bite-sized portions. He had never questioned that he would live to reach old age.
Then he looked around at the new world around him, one where there were no guarantees that anything was permanent, or that anyone would be around for long.
“I’m mentally drained,” he said. “I’m just so, so drained.”
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