He was responsible for running an agency with seventeen hundred employees while also overseeing a harbor cleanup that, at its peak, employed more than three thousand construction workers23 and burned through $3 million a day. A finance industry journal called his agency “the most prolific issuer of municipal revenue bonds24” in the country and quoted a sewer specialist saying the Boston project was one of the most challenging that anyone “in Western Civilization has ever been involved with.” Its price tag put it ahead of some of the biggest megaprojects25 of the time, from Denver’s new airport to San Francisco’s expanded transit system to New York City’s third water tunnel. At one point, there were 360 different companies26 working on the Deer Island project alone. The management challenges he faced would have been a stretch for even the most experienced CEO, never mind MacDonald, who was serving as a manager for the first time in his life27. It was no surprise, then, that after the MWRA board unanimously elected MacDonald to run the agency, a politically savvy friend offered him this bit of advice: “Demand a recount28.”
For MacDonald, there had been a promising start to 1995, since construction of the new Deer Island plant was months ahead of schedule. But that progress couldn’t mask the fact that his team was woefully behind on one of the project’s other key milestones. The federal judge’s court order had set the summer of 1995 as the deadline for the completion of the outfall tunnel. By now, MacDonald knew there was no way that was going to be met.
MacDonald was just the latest in a long string of Deer Island overlords. Since childhood, he had been almost clinically inquisitive, so it seemed natural for the new executive to spend a good chunk of the little free time he had reading up on the tiny island’s sordid past.
Although the island drew its name from the deer that had been chased off the mainland by wolves, on a map it looks more like a dog. More specifically, it resembles a Labrador’s head in profile, tipped down, as though drinking from a bowl. The top of the dog’s head, to the northeast, was the location of the deep shaft leading to the outfall tunnel. The side of the dog’s face represented the center of the island, home to the new treatment plant. The dog’s mouth and snout, at the southeastern end, was where the dozen egg-shaped giant digester tanks stood guard. And the dog’s neck, to the northwest, was the spit of land that had attached the island to the mainland ever since a 1938 hurricane had moved around enough sand to close up the little channel.
The more MacDonald read, the more he found himself riveted by the island’s story. Its darkest chapter dated back more than three centuries. In the mid-1600s, a Puritan minister named John Eliot29 had used his mastery of the Algonquian tongue to translate the Bible and convert hundreds of Indians to Christianity. His missionary work led to the creation of fourteen “praying towns,” villages ringing Boston that were populated by Christianized Indians. In 1675, when the Wampanoag leader King Philip led the charge to oust the colonists from the area they had rebranded New England, most Christianized Indians remained loyal to the colonists. But the Massachusetts Council, seeing enemies all around, ordered that the Christianized Indians be rounded up from their praying towns and forced into confinement on Deer Island. They were penalized by the colonists for the sin of having believed them.
The combination of the island’s barren soil and its lack of protection from the pounding waves of the Atlantic led to the deaths of about half of the five hundred30 interned Indians, if not more, during the brutal winter. When the survivors were released in the spring, many returned to their villages to find that their land had been confiscated. The island was then converted into a prisoner camp for captured combatant Indians, many of whom were later sold into slavery in the West Indies and Africa.
In the centuries that followed, Deer Island continued to be the place where Boston quarantined its problems. Even after that hurricane turned the island into a peninsula, the place still somehow managed to stand apart. In the mid-1800s, when the potato famine brought desperate Irish to the shores of Boston, city officials sent many of them31 to a holding station and hospital on Deer Island. In just a couple of years, more than eight hundred died on the island and were buried in a makeshift cemetery. In later years, when the island was housing the poor, the criminal, and the insane, several thousand more people ended up making their final rest there.
In 1920 more than four hundred eastern European immigrants were rounded up and herded into a filthy, overcrowded prison on Deer Island. They had been caught up in the so-called Palmer Raids, part of the nation’s first Red Scare, which took its name from Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. He had ordered the arrest of several thousand eastern European immigrants in about thirty cities on baseless charges that they were Communists and anarchists conspiring to bring down the government. In the chaos of the first few days of confinement on Deer Island, one prisoner hurled himself to his death, another was committed as insane, and several others attempted suicide.
MacDonald was struck by the common themes in these dark incidents. Leaders had let fear get the best of them, deeming people suspect simply on account of their otherness, then had used the remoteness of a barren island as cover for their misdeeds. Deer Island was still being used as the solution to a problem few people wanted to think about, but at least human beings were no longer the problem that needed solving, just their waste. That seemed like progress.
As he was lowered more than four hundred feet down the shaft leading to the tunnel, MacDonald could feel his boyish enthusiasm begin to bubble up. While he was headed down, “muck”—the chunks of rock that had been mined and excavated below—was headed in the other direction, up to topside, via a vertical conveyor belt. Stepping out at the base of the shaft, with sunlight snaking down from above, MacDonald breathed in stale air that smelled like a musty basement. He hopped aboard an open-air tram, which was pulled by a locomotive—or “lokey”—and traveled along railroad ties that ran the length of the tunnel. Eventually, the lokey deposited him behind a gargantuan rock-eating beast called a tunnel-boring machine. This TBM looked like a giant flat-nosed bullet but functioned like an enormous drill bit. On its rotating faceplate, called a cutter head, the TBM had fifty steel teeth. While the cutter head rotated, pressure from the teeth hitting the bedrock—Cambridge argillite, formed hundreds of millions of years earlier—was powerful enough to turn it into chunks of muck.
The $15 million TBM was carving32 out a tunnel with a diameter that matched the width of the machine itself, twenty-six feet. Weighing seven hundred tons with the horsepower of thirty cars, it was energized by a 13,800-volt electrical power line, essentially a fat extension cord bracketed to the tunnel wall. The TBM’s main body was forty feet in length, but a series of trailing sections stretched it out as long as a football field.
23 (Chapter 2, note 12)
more than three thousand construction workers: Shani Wallis, “Boston Activity: Boston Harbor, Massachusetts,”
24 (Chapter 2, note 13)
“the most prolific issuer of municipal revenue bonds”: John J. Doran, “Massachusetts Is About Ready to Start Cleaning Up Its Dirty Harbor,”
25 (Chapter 2, note 14)
some of the biggest megaprojects: “Pay Controversy Fogs Denver Airport Project,”
26 (Chapter 2, note 15)
360 different companies: Robert A. Grace,
27 (Chapter 2, note 16)
serving as a manager for the first time in his life: MacDonald benefited greatly from the expertise of his deputies Dick Fox, Walter Armstrong, and Ralph Wallace, as well as their deputy for construction, Charlie Button. They handled much of the day-to-day management of the massive project. In addition, MacDonald’s predecessor as executive director, Paul Levy, was a planning whiz who had tackled many of the knottiest planning issues around the project and put it on solid footing.
28 (Chapter 2, note 17)
“Demand a recount”: David L. Chandler, “Frugal MWRA Head May Be What Ratepayers Seek,”
29 (Chapter 2, note 18)
a Puritan minister named John Eliot: Jill Lepore,
31 (Chapter 2, note 20)
city officials sent many of them: “Island Facts: Deer Island,” National Park Service, accessed 2010, www.nps.gov/boha/historyculture/facts-deer.htm.
32 (Chapter 2, note 21)
The $15 million TBM was carving: Dick Robbins (former CEO of the Robbins Company, which made the TBM), interview by author, September 2010.