As much as MacDonald shared Kiewit’s frustration with the antics of Local 88, he found himself charmed by the sandhogs. These guys did tough work and followed their own code. When things between two sandhogs became heated, one would throw down his tool belt and head behind the muck pile, and the other guy would instinctively follow so they could settle the matter with their fists.
For MacDonald, the sandhogs’ roguish charm was epitomized by Mad Man, whose path into the field had been far from typical. After graduating from college, Mad Man had begun teaching high school in his hometown, Cambridge, when he bumped into a few sandhogs working on the extension of Boston’s subway. Outside the gates of rarefied Harvard Yard, one sandhog proudly wore a sweatshirt that read, in big block letters, motherfucker. Their work sounded interesting to Mad Man—more interesting, he would explain later, than “sitting in a classroom dealing with rectal sphincters.” So he signed on. By the time of the Deer Island job, he had become a brassy veteran who wouldn’t take crap from anyone. Once when he caught a sandhog defecating near where the guys stored their sodas, he and a few pals poured cement into the back seat of the offender’s car. He especially had no use for the few sandhogs who kissed up to the bosses. He accused one of trying to fellate his way into management’s good graces, nicknaming him Jimmy Blew.
MacDonald was especially impressed with how sandhogs like Mad Man wielded the jackleg. The MWRA boss knew firsthand how hard that task was, having once received permission to use the jackleg himself, just to see what it felt like. After drilling two feet into the tunnel wall, he was wiped out, thinking to himself, That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. And this guy does it all day?
MacDonald knew that one of the biggest challenges of the tunnel job was that it was really two separate and incredibly complex construction projects—handled by two unaffiliated joint ventures. While the sandhogs had been using the TBM to mine the outfall tunnel, a different crew of drillers and commercial divers, employed by a different contractor, had been working off a jack-up barge parked nine miles out in Massachusetts Bay. Their job had been to sink the fifty-five vertical pipes, called risers, that the tunnel would eventually connect to in its final mile.
The setup of the tunnel and those risers was something like a water main running underneath a neighborhood street, with a bunch of smaller pipes shooting out from it, each one delivering a portion of the water supply to a different house. When everything was completed, the horizontal tunnel would connect with those fifty-five vertical risers, which would each extend from tunnel depth, climb up through the bedrock, and finally punch through the ocean floor. At the point where each riser poked through the seafloor, it would be topped with a mushroom-shaped discharge port, a domed contraption known as a diffuser head. After exiting the Deer Island plant, the wastewater would flow along the main tunnel, up through one of those fifty-five riser pipes, out through sprinkler nozzles on one of those fifty-five diffuser heads, and finally out into the ocean. The intricate process was designed to slow down and spread out the flow of the wastewater, “diffusing” it in an effort to limit its impact on marine life and water quality. The entire system was an engineering masterpiece. Gravity, rather than engines or pumps40, would propel the wastewater along its epic journey under, and then out into the sea.
But in order for this marvel to work, the crews from those two separate joint ventures had to do their jobs in perfect alignment. That was asking a lot, since one operation had to be done from high above the water, miles out in the open ocean, while the other was being done underground, deep below the sea.
Surprisingly, the crew of the IB-909 jack-up barge (which had included DJ’s friend Ron Kozlowski) completed the installation of those fifty-five risers ahead of schedule and on budget. But MacDonald knew that achievement would matter little if the locations of either the tunnel or the risers turned out to be off target. And in a vast ocean, there was very little margin of error for that horizontal tunnel to make its subsea rendezvous with all those vertical risers.
The moment of truth came in the waning days of 1995. By then the TBM had mined and lined more than eight miles of the outfall tunnel. Three days after Christmas41, Kiewit’s chief surveyor in the tunnel, a man by the name of Bill Currier, headed down the shaft. Currier had been responsible for making sure the TBM moved in precisely the right direction, both horizontally and vertically. On a job defined by its stiff challenges, Currier’s was one of the stiffest. This far down into the earth, GPS was of no use. And with only one entrance to the tunnel, there were no intermediate points he could use to confirm his calculations. His primary tool was something called a north-seeking gyroscope, which sat on a tripod. He pulled it out every five hundred feet or so, using his measurements and earlier calculations to adjust the laser-based guidance system on the TBM. This was all in the service of keeping the earth-eating beast on the correct path. Still, he would have no way of knowing for sure if his calculations were right until sandhogs began drilling probe holes from the side of the tunnel, in the hopes of connecting with a riser.
Currier was a forty-four-year-old career surveyor who followed the adage favored by carpenters and tailors: measure twice, cut once. Considering the stakes, he took his caution to a higher level, taking his measurements closer to five times before making any adjustments to the direction of the boring machine.
The tunnel was designed to carry treated sewer water nearly 10 miles into Massachusetts Bay. The wastewater would travel through the tunnel, up 55 risers, and then exit through diffuser heads sitting on the seafloor.
Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant
For more photos and illustrations, visit www.neilswidey.com
At last the troubled TBM limped its way to the 8.15-mile mark. If Currier’s numbers were correct, riser number 55—the one closest to Deer Island—would be nearly twenty feet due north of the tunnel. If his numbers were wrong, the project would be looking at more draining delays. Even worse would be if the survey had been so off-base that the riser wasn’t north of the tunnel but instead was due east and therefore about to get plowed over by the TBM.
Before the jack-up barge crews installed the fifty-five risers, they had filled each one with eight thousand gallons of seawater, which had been dyed fluorescent green. So when the sandhogs in the tunnel drilled out to make the connection to each fiberglass riser, they’d quickly know if they’d hit it in the right spot. If they had, they’d see bright green liquid gushing back toward them.
Currier looked over his measurements one last time, grabbed a thick permanent marker, and marched over to the tunnel wall. He made a big X. That, he told the sandhogs, was where they should start coring into the bedrock. Then Currier, wearing his yellow rain slicker, stepped back, cracked open one of the Tom Clancy paperbacks he’d brought with him, and started to read. He knew it would take the sandhogs lots of careful work to get the probe hole all the way out to the riser, adding drill steel as they went along. Because they were drilling the probe hole into bedrock, they wouldn’t see anything more than modest water seepage until they actually tapped into the eight thousand gallons of green sitting in the riser. This would be a tedious process.
40 (Chapter 2, note 29)
Gravity, rather than engines or pumps: Project documents; Charlie Button and various project officials, interviews by author, 2010-11.
41 (Chapter 2, note 30)
Three days after Christmas: Bill Currier, interview by author, April 2011; Malkasian interview and photos. Also, Paul Zick, “One Step Closer: A Major Milestone,” Deer Island Job News from December 28, 1995, Hard Hat News (project newsletter), 1996.