parade magazine 2/16/2014:
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Thrilling True Story from Boston: Excerpt from Trapped Under the Sea
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Journalist Neil Swidey tells the riveting, tragic true story of five divers who risked—and in some cases, lost—their lives building a 10-mile waste removal tunnel deep below Boston Harbor, in his fascinating new book, Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness. Read an excerpt below.
He was about to begin a miles-long trek into the dank, dark intestines of the earth, but DJ Gillis wouldn’t go until he’d found a piece of twine.
Two of the other divers had already packed themselves into the “man cage,” a tubular basket of yellow metal that would be lowered by crane down a 420-foot shaft. But they couldn’t go without DJ, and he wasn’t about to be hurried.
“C’mon, DJ,” one of the guys shouted. “Let’s go!”
DJ ignored the calls as he searched an equipment trailer, sifting through piles of rain gear and crates of tools. The summer sun was beginning its climb above Deer Island, a peninsula that hangs down from the north like a comma into Boston Harbor, curling in front of Logan International Airport.
DJ’s boss, a hard-charging guy by the name of Tap Taylor, was standing near the man cage and losing his patience. “Let’s go!” Tap yelled.
The two of them had a close if combustible relationship. Tap’s singular focus was building his small New Hampshire commercial diving business into something bigger, and he thought nothing of logging fourteen-hour shifts every day of the week. Still, he had a soft spot for DJ, treating the breezy twenty-nine-year-old more like a kid brother than an employee.
Over the years, they had developed a rhythm as predictable as the banter between an anchorwoman and weatherman on the eve of a big storm. DJ, a six-foot-two, solidly built charmer, would show up late to the job site, occasionally dropped off by some blonde or brunette he’d been partying with the night before. As DJ peeled off yesterday’s clothes and put on his dive gear, Tap would curse, threatening to kick him off the job. But those outbursts always ended the same way. Before long, Tap would calm down and begin pumping DJ for details from his latest adventure hopping bars and hopping beds.
“C’mon!” Tap shouted again.
“If you’re in that much of a hurry,” DJ barked, “then go without me!”
It was the morning of July 21, 1999, a Wednesday, and the tension was thick, mainly because so many problems had surfaced on the project that Monday and Tuesday. Getting down the thirty-foot-wide shaft would be the easy part. The challenge would come when the divers had to make their way to the end of a pitch-black tunnel that began at the base of the shaft and kept going and going, under the sea, for nearly ten miles.
Tap would be monitoring the divers’ progress from topside on Deer Island. He was in no mood for DJ’s usual antics. In reality, neither was DJ. The only woman he had on his mind right now was the Virgin Mary. He needed the piece of twine to tie a small religious medal to the underside of his hard hat. The oval medal had once belonged to his grandfather, a carpenter who helped build the Prudential Tower that defined Boston’s skyline.
DJ had asked his mother for it the night before, remembering the story of how his grandfather had kept the Miraculous Medal in his pocket the whole time he spent erecting that skyscraper, taking comfort in the Blessed Virgin’s protection. Seeking comfort himself, DJ had gingerly asked his mom, “Is that still around?”
Never tell your family the truth about the dangers of the job. It isn’t fair to dump that kind of worry on them.
“Yes,” she had replied cautiously. “Why?”
“I’m a little concerned about the job.”
As much as he had tried to downplay his growing uneasiness with the tunnel project, DJ hadn’t been surprised to see fear flash across his mother’s face. He had just broken one of the cardinal rules he’d learned early on in his career as a commercial diver, when he’d seen oil rigs capsize and cranes collapse: Never tell your family the truth about the dangers of the job. It isn’t fair to dump that kind of worry on them.
But this wasn’t like any job DJ had worked on before. Hell, it wasn’t like any job anyone had worked on before. And that challenge—to make history in his field, to do the seemingly undoable—was what had sold DJ on the tunnel assignment in the first place. With everything that had gone down in the last few days, though, he was feeling some buyer’s remorse.
Finally, he found the twine, fastened the Virgin Mary, and put on his hard hat as he strode over to the man cage.
Tap was still heated. “What the hell were you doing?” he snapped. “We’ve got a job to do here.”
DJ took off his hat and turned it over, so his boss could see the medal dangling from it. “I’m taking care of myself,” he said.
Tap’s steam instantly lifted. “It’s getting that bad, huh?”
The man cage spun slowly as it moved down the shaft, like a gentle whirlpool of water circling around a drain. DJ was a talker, but now he felt no urge to speak. He stared across the cage at the other two divers, guys he’d known for only a couple of weeks. He had an especially tough time getting a bead on the shorter of the two, Dave Riggs. While divers tended to be a rowdy bunch, pounding beers and swapping stories after their shift, Riggs didn’t drink and kept to himself. During one of their first days working together, DJ had been doing what he always did—telling lots of tales, peppered with colorful words—when Riggs turned to him and said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use foul language within my earshot.” DJ narrowed his eyes as he stared back at Riggs in disbelief. Then he said the first thing that came into his head: “Are you fucking kidding me?” He’d been a diver for seven years, and he’d never once come across anyone who confused a job site with a church pew.
He had a better connection with the other guy in the cage, Donald Hosford, known as Hoss to everyone except his mother. Hoss had a ropy, six-foot-five build and the rugged looks of someone who might appear in a magazine ad for the Copenhagen chew he always kept wadded under his lip. He was only twenty-four years old, but he worked with the confidence and sure movements of a seasoned veteran. To DJ, Hoss embodied the cowboy spirit of the experienced divers he’d always looked up to: take-charge guys who could be rough and even crude on the job, but who always addressed a lady as “ma’am” and reflexively pulled out a chair for her. Still, DJ thought to himself, the guy seemed so steely that, if need be, he could put a bullet in another man’s forehead and then go right back to eating his supper.
As the man cage neared the bottom, DJ fixed his eyes on a fat ventilation duct that transported air from Deer Island, down the shaft, and into the tunnel. For years, a “bag line” had run all nine and a half miles of the tunnel, providing plenty of ambient air to the subterranean workers known as sandhogs, who were responsible for burrowing down under. Now the duct ended right where the shaft did, at the very start of the tunnel.
DJ had heard that the sandhogs had spent nearly a decade mining the tunnel—twice as long as planned—and that the contractor was tens of millions of dollars in the red. The fact that he and the other divers were being called in during the final hour was itself evidence that something had gone seriously wrong. After all, the divers were being asked to finish the job even though the ventilation, electricity, and transportation systems—the infrastructure that had kept the sandhogs alive—had already been removed from the tunnel.
DJ couldn’t tell if the project’s bosses viewed his crew as their cavalry or as the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. The few sandhogs still hanging around on Deer Island certainly seemed to resent the divers’ arrival, as though it signified a failing on their part. When the divers suffered a delay after one of their equipment trailers was damaged, a veteran sandhog had reacted with exasperation, asking, “How long is it going to take to fix it?” Hoss hadn’t missed a beat in putting the guy in his place. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he had said, smiling with a wad of chew bulging under his lip. “It ain’t gonna take nine years.”
At the base of the shaft, it was cold—about fifty degrees—and misty. There was a decent amount of light and air there, but when DJ let his eyes wander east into the tunnel, they quickly got lost in the dark. To him, it looked like the very center of a black hole.
Excerpted from TRAPPED UNDER THE SEA by Neil Swidey. Copyright © 2014 by Neil Swidey. Excerpted by permission of Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
BOOKSHELF
Book Review: 'Trapped Under the Sea' by Neil Swidey
In 1999, five deep-sea welders had to traverse a tunnel beneath Boston Harbor with no breathable air, no light and no chance for rescue should things go horribly wrong.
March 14, 2014 5:16 p.m. ET
On July 21, 1999, five deep-sea welders descended one mile down into Boston Harbor and then traversed almost 10 miles beneath the seafloor in a dry sewage tunnel with no breathable air, no light and no chance for rescue should things go horribly wrong, which they did.
This is the story Neil Swidey tells in "Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness," a harrowing account of one of the largest engineering projects in U.S. history and of the hubris and ignorance that led to tragedy. As Mr. Swidey, a writer for the Boston Globe magazine, makes clear, the decision to send men into the "oxygen-starved, toxic tube" was born not of necessity but of "brinksmanship between the contractor building the tunnel and the government agency that owned it."
Trapped Under the Sea
By Neil Swidey
Crown, 418 pages, $26
Crown, 418 pages, $26
The opening of the 10-mile-long Deer Island sewage tunnel. MWRA
Boston Harbor's filth is legendary. It was mock-celebrated in the 1966 song "Dirty Water." The city's water-treatment plants were hopelessly inadequate, and barely treated sewage had been pouring into the harbor for decades. The low point was probably Christmas Day 1980, when 50 million gallons of raw waste was accidentally released into the harbor. "Fatigued locals turned to gallows humor to distract themselves from their disgust," writes Mr. Swidey. "They rebranded the tampon applicators floating out of the sewer pipes into the water as 'beach whistles' and the spent condoms as 'Charles River whitefish.' "
The Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant was supposed to solve these problems. Begun in 1990, the $3.8 billion facility would process human and industrial waste on a small island in Boston Harbor and then send it through a 9.5-mile tunnel into the deep waters of the Atlantic. Fifty-five vertical pipes called risers spurred off the tunnel's final section to further diffuse waste before releasing it into the sea. Temporary safety plugs, likened to giant salad bowls, had been placed near the bottom of each riser to keep water from seeping in before construction was complete.
These plugs were a source of conflict between the tunnel's owner, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), and the company they hired to build it, Kiewit, "the Omaha-based construction giant" that, Mr. Swidey notes, "had built more miles of the U.S. highway system than any other contractor." The director of MWRA, Doug MacDonald, had left a job as a partner in a Boston law firm to take over the authority, a behemoth of 1,700 employees and, at the peak of harbor cleanup, an additional 3,000 construction workers. Mr. MacDonald's job included mollifying various parties who disagreed about how the Deer Island project would reach completion: Kiewit; the tunnel's designers, mostly out of the picture by 1998; ICF Kaiser Engineers, hired by MWRA to protect its interests and act as Mr. MacDonald's eyes and ears; the union "sandhogs" who bored out 2.4 million tons of rock to create the tunnel; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, ostensibly looking out for worker safety but seeming more interested in handing out fines; and, though federal funds for harbor cleanup had long since dried up, "a bow-tied federal judge who served as the cleanup project's robed referee, threatening stiff fines or worse if the deadlines he imposed were not met."
The removal of the safety plugs would require a worker to shimmy on his belly inside each 30-inch-wide riser; remove the bolts, O-rings and gaskets; and then drag the 65-pound plug out backward: difficult work that each party involved in the tunnel construction denied was its responsibility.
The problem weighed most heavily on Kiewit. The firm was contractually obligated to deliver on time, subject to late-fee penalties of $30,000 a day, and to cover cost overruns. More, Kiewit had fronted the construction costs and would only be paid by selling the tunnel, piece by piece, to MWRA. The contract further obligated Kiewit to provide "lighting and ventilation (or breathing apparatus) for the personnel" that pulled the plugs but, in what seemed a senseless conflict, mandated that the plugs "could be removed only after the tunnel was completed," writes Mr. Swidey, "meaning after the sandhogs had cleared out, taking their extensive ventilation, transportation, and electrical systems with them."
Kiewit protested that clearing the tunnel of its life-sustaining infrastructure would make "the risk of catastrophe [to the workers pulling the plugs] . . . exponentially higher !" They offered several sound alternatives. In response, ICF Kaiser accused them of just wanting their payday. After a "year-long memo war," Kiewit capitulated, cleared the tunnel and hired a commercial dive team to go into a pitch-black airless tube.
"[They] were simply continuing a tradition where blue-collar workers are the ones expected to transform the dazzling dreams of engineers and the promises of politicians into concrete reality," Mr. Swidey writes.
The hard hats—DJ, Tim, Hoss, Riggs and Billy—were full-time commercial divers, men who among them had decades of experience in tunnels, on bridges, offshore oil-rigs and salvage missions. If several partied a little too much, they were nevertheless tough and reliable all, the kind of men you'd want at your back when trouble started. Except that rule No. 1 is that you can't save your fellow man in a confined space with the air running out. Training to descend into the tunnel, the men were told that even one or two breaths of the toxic air would be fatal. "The message to the divers was clear," writes Mr. Swidey. "You must not add to the body count."
The training took place in the backyard of a small New Hampshire commercial dive operation owned by Tap Taylor. Kiewit decided to have him work under a Washington state company called Norwesco. Crucial to Norwesco winning oversight on the job was its pitch to use "a cutting-edge system" conceived by Canadian engineer Harald Grob. Based on a Danish device called the MAP Mix 9000, the system would blend liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen into a breathable gas. Though it had never been put into service, Mr. Grob made assurances that his approach would provide as much breathable gas as a far heavier conventional supply. "So the liquid option," writes Mr. Swidey, "would spare the divers a whole lot of lugging."
And yet, as the men readied the Humvees they would lower into the tunnel, and as they snaked thousands of feet of 3/8 -inch hose that would tether them to the MAP Mix, they still had not seen the new breathing system. Mr. Grob ignored their questions and concerns and placated his Norwesco boss by saying that a key component had yet to arrive from Europe, that everything would be fine.
It was not. When the MAP Mix arrived it looked like nothing so much as "an old-model toaster oven." There was no time to test it. Increasingly apprehensive, the divers confronted the inventor: Was he sure the Map Mix would work? Thin-skinned, with a marked "lack of social skills," Mr. Grob brushed them off. He was sure, and into the hole the men went.
Barely anything but the men and their resolve functioned as it should have. An engine stalled, air hoses tangled and a first arduous slog down the tunnel was aborted before any plugs were pulled. On the second day, the men managed to yank out two. The third day was when the horror show started. Tim and Billy handled the Humvees—one always towing the second facing backward, as it was too confined to turn around—that transported the men as deep as the narrowing tunnel allowed. Hoss, DJ and Riggs walked the rest of the way. They managed to remove the third of the 55 plugs before their oxygen started getting thin. DJ and Riggs slumped to the ground. On the verge of passing out, Hoss radioed back to the Humvees: What was going on with the air supply? The reply was an expletive, and the line went dead. With his almost dying breath, Hoss switched the three men's breathing source from the MAP Mix to the back-up oxygen, after which they recovered and trudged full of dread back to the Humvees. Tim and Billy were dead. They'd died instantly after getting "a pure shot of nitrogen" when the MAP Mix froze.
Why did the breathing system fail? Because the MAP Mix 9000 wasn't designed for use on people but for packaging cheese and burritos, "to give them a sort of vacuum seal that would lead to longer shelf life," writes Mr. Swidey. Mr. Grob had dismantled the device and changed its settings despite bold type on page one of the user's manual warning against just this. More, he had instructed Tap Taylor to adjust the settings on the handheld gas monitors in order that their alarms and flashing lights "wouldn't be going off constantly, making it hard to get work done." They would not be triggered until the oxygen level dropped to 6%—the death zone. The divers had been human canaries.
Norwesco moved quickly to shift the blame. Mr. Grob's credulous boss said he'd come to believe that "[Grob] didn't know what was doing." If no one at Norwesco appreciated that their lack of accountability was problematic, possibly criminal, others did. Mary McCauley, the state trooper who led the death investigation, felt Mr. Grob "had shown willful disregard for the lives of the divers." Joan Parker, safety director in the Massachusetts attorney general's office, wanted to bring manslaughter charges against him but found, after months of investigation, that the AG's office wouldn't prosecute. "She also couldn't help but wonder," writes Mr. Swidey of Ms. Parker, "if Boston's power brokers, who were desperate to end the tortured saga of the harbor cleanup, were applying pressure to avoid a potentially messy criminal prosecution." The three surviving divers, crushed by guilt, were awarded damages when what they wanted was justice. But there can be no justice; only a cautionary tale, which Mr. Swidey writes with splendid heart.
And there remained the need to pull the remaining plugs. The solution, which I will not spoil, came not from an engineer but from MWRA's Doug MacDonald, as desperate as anyone to solve the problem and avoid additional casualties on his watch. His self-described "crazy idea" worked better and faster than anyone expected, and it is bracing to see it succeed in the wake of so much hardship.
—Ms. Rommelmann is the author of "The Queens of Montague Street," a memoir of growing up in 1970s Brooklyn Heights.
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