As the TBM ground away, foot by foot, a ventilation “bag line” of rubberized fabric material would unspool out of a canister at the back of the machine, like a supersize party noisemaker. Workers would hang the bag line to the tunnel ceiling, after which a pair of 250-horsepower fans sitting on Deer Island would pump air down the shaft and into the bag line. Like the ducts of an office building’s HVAC system, the bag line would take the fresh air from topside and distribute it along the full length of the tunnel, providing ample ambient air for everyone working down under.
The general contractor building the tunnel was a joint venture called Kiewit-Atkinson-Kenny. Although there were three names on the letterhead33, the Kiewit Corporation was the dominant partner, and shorthand for the joint venture naturally became “Kiewit” (pronounced KEE-wit). Erecting everything from bridges to power plants, the Omaha-based construction giant had built more miles of the U.S. highway system than any other contractor. Kiewit had won the Deer Island tunnel job after being the lowest bidder, at a lump sum of $202 million. If Kiewit ended up spending more to build the tunnel, it would have to eat the losses. In addition, the contract required Kiewit to deliver a completed tunnel by mid-1995, or pay a penalty of $30,00034 for every day it was late. So Kiewit was taking on considerable risk. Still, the $202 million price tag was a big deal at the time, representing the largest public contract in Massachusetts history and the biggest line item of the overall Boston Harbor cleanup project. (It preceded the Big Dig, the multibillion-dollar project that would replace Boston’s ugly elevated interstate with a highway carved under the city.) And the Deer Island tunnel deal had been made during a recession, when many contractors were submitting unusually lean bids just to keep their crews busy.
When someone builds a house, there are usually three major players: the architect who designs it, the general contractor who builds it, and the owner who pays for it. The same was basically true for the tunnel project. The designer was a world-renowned firm called Parsons Brinckerhoff. The general contractor was the Kiewit joint venture. And the owner was the agency MacDonald ran, the MWRA. To protect its interests, his agency hired a separate firm called ICF Kaiser Engineers to serve as construction manager. Essentially, Kaiser functioned as the MWRA’s advocate, or something akin to a buyer’s agent, for the entire cleanup project.
Considering his inexperience in both construction and management, MacDonald deferred heavily to his deputies and to Kaiser’s managers. They told him that, by any measure, the tunnel had gotten off to a horrible start. The problems had begun with the digging of the main shaft and had continued to mount. Once the TBM had finally been assembled and began turning and burning, it became evident that the machine’s toughest assignment wasn’t the actual boring. After the TBM had carved out a section of the tunnel, the entire circumference had to be lined with four-ton concrete segments, which reduced the tunnel diameter to twenty-four feet. Crews used an erector arm on the back of the TBM to position each five-foot-long concrete segment and then grout it into place. The concrete lining had to be thick enough to maintain the integrity of the tunnel, and the segments had to be aligned perfectly to prevent anything from interfering with the flow of the wastewater that the tunnel would eventually carry out to sea.
But the concrete segments cracked and chipped35. And the gripper arms that were used to brace the TBM against the tunnel wall broke. And the pumps that were used to remove groundwater from inside the tunnel failed. (The tunnel had been designed to be built on a slight incline, so that water seeping in through cracks in the bedrock during construction would naturally drain back to the base of the shaft, where it could be pumped up to the surface.) Twice the high-voltage panel box that controlled the TBM’s supersize power cord exploded.
MacDonald could tell that Kiewit officials were determined to get the project back into the black and make up for all the lost time and money. Under the contract, their best ways to do that would be to submit change orders for relatively small dollars and to file claims for big money; in both cases Kiewit would argue that MacDonald’s agency had to pay them more because his team had somehow failed to adequately explain what the job would involve. That meant it was a zero-sum game. For Kiewit to win, MacDonald’s team had to lose.
MacDonald watched as the brawny guy with black hair grabbed the jackhammer-type tool and held it up on his shoulder, like a mujahideen fighter pointing a Stinger antiaircraft missile toward the sky. Once the tool was in position, he leaned against a support brace and started drilling. Chips of rock began flying around him. The tool was called a jackleg36, and it’s what tunnel workers used for the smaller mining tasks that the TBM couldn’t handle. The big guy with a booming voice was a forty-two-year-old sandhog named Bobby Malkasian. But he was better known by his nickname37, Mad Man, which testified to the short fuse under his friendly demeanor.
The term sandhog comes from the soft, sandy soil that miners often encounter underground. On this job, every sandhog had a nickname—the raunchier the better. One guy was called Big Daddy because he was reputed to be hung like a mule. Walking Small got his nickname because the tiny, feral-faced guy would bark at other hogs, “Open your fucking mouth one more time, and I’ll drive a fucking spud wrench through your fucking eye.” And Fingers got his handle after he suffered a nasty tunnel accident and came out with only nine.
As MacDonald made more forays into the tunnel, he got to know Mad Man and many of the other sandhogs. Kiewit managers blamed a lot of the tunnel delays on the unruly union laborers, most of whom had no experience working with an advanced tunnel-boring machine. In other parts of the country, the contractor had developed a reputation for something approaching militaristic precision. But in Boston, Kiewit managers had a tortured relationship with the sandhogs and the equally untamable leaders of the Laborers’ International Union’s Local 88. The local’s recording secretary38 was forced out after a drug conviction, and the results of its officer elections were tossed out after a federal court found evidence that challengers had been roughed up. One challenger said that during an argument, the head of the local had pulled a.22-caliber semiautomatic handgun out of a drawer, cocked it, and pointed it at him.
Sandhogs had always been a special breed, attracting hardened men (and very few women), including more than a few ex-cons. Given the punishing conditions that they put their bodies through underground—working with explosives, dealing with the everpresent danger of a wall collapse, breathing God knows what—even those who lived to see retirement could expect to meet an earlier grave than those in other trades. At the very least, their hearing would be shot, a consequence of working around noisy machinery and clanking wrenches, whose din is intensified by the way sound reverberates in a tunnel. Before government safety standards39 required tunnel workers to wear protective ear muffs, following the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) during the Nixon years, many sandhogs would try to reduce the noise by sticking cigarette butts in their ears. Not surprisingly, when they were above ground, most sandhogs found themselves to be the loudest talkers in the room.
33 (Chapter 2, note 22)
Although there were three names on the letterhead: For the sake of clarity, I refer to the Kiewit-Atkinson-Kenny joint venture as Kiewit, the name of the lead partner, in subsequent references. Many of the project players did the same.
34 (Chapter 2, note 23)
pay a penalty of $30,000: MWRA contract with Kiewit. The liquidated damages provision appears in Section 5.2.3 (500).
35 (Chapter 2, note 24)
concrete segments cracked and chipped: Rodney Garrett, “Boston Harbor Outfall; Construction of Wastewater Treatment Plant System in Boston Harbor, Massachusetts,”
36 (Chapter 2, note 25)
The tool was called a jackleg: For a video clip of a sandhog using a jackleg, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb8LdQ9SzN8.
37 (Chapter 2, note 26)
better known by his nickname: Bobby Malkasian, interviews by author, 2010; Mike Kanash, interview by author, July 2010.
38 (Chapter 2, note 27)
The local’s recording secretary: Daniel Golden, “Under the Waterfront: From the Harbor Cleanup to the Airport Tunnel, Boston’s Building Boom Has Moved Underground,”
39 (Chapter 2, note 28)
Before government safety standards: Malkasian and Kanash interviews.