Later that afternoon, when the swing-shift sandhogs arrived to relieve the first-shift guys, Currier kept right on reading. “Man, you’re one cool cucumber,” a sandhog told him. No use admitting how apprehensive he was feeling. After all, in the vast earth around them, their target was just thirty inches wide—the width of the riser. Later that night, when the graveyard-shift sandhogs showed up, Currier continued to keep his nose in his book. But as December 29 dawned, it became harder for him to concentrate. Partly, that was a function of knowing his moment of truth was drawing nearer. And partly it was a function of who was standing a few feet away from him. The graveyard-shift crew included none other than Mad Man Malkasian, perhaps the loudest character in a tunnel that was teeming with them.
By three in the morning, Currier had put aside his Clancy paperback and was watching closely. Finally the sandhogs had cored the correct length—nineteen feet, six inches—in precisely the right direction. For Currier, the seconds began to feel like hours. Then Mad Man shouted. In an instant, a torrent of water as green as Gatorade came pouring out, spraying and splashing Mad Man and Currier. “Hot damn!” Mad Man shouted, then pulled out his camera to capture the moment.
Their job was hardly done. But with all the setbacks the tunnel project had seen so far, it was a relief to be able to bask in the green glow of one step that had, against the odds, gone flawlessly.
For much of the twentieth century, the hazards of being a tunnel worker could be summed up by the rule of thumb that every civil engineer and sandhog could recite: “a man a mile.” If you built a ten-mile-long tunnel, you could expect to lose ten men. Although MacDonald had come to his post with no experience in tunneling, it hadn’t taken his staff long to share that bit of fatalistic shorthand with him.
Despite the introduction of worker safety measures over the years, tunneling remained extremely risky. The Channel Tunnel—the thirty-one-mile, two-entrance tube connecting England and France, which was winding down construction just as the Deer Island project was kicking into gear—had claimed ten worker lives. Even though the Boston Harbor cleanup involved the construction of some fifteen miles of tunnels, MacDonald had begun with the firm belief that the project would finish with no worker fatalities. With the right mind-set and precautions, he felt, that goal was attainable. But just five months into his tenure, he had been forced to bow to reality.
On the first day of July 1992, Kiewit had been completing its work on a small secondary tunnel that it had built to connect operations on Deer Island itself. Several sandhogs on that job were working their final shift. Their last task was to set a thirteen-ton concrete cylinder in place, completing a manhole that led to this small tunnel. Kiewit had already moved most of its equipment to a different job, so crews borrowed a crane from another company working on the island. Around lunchtime42, the crane lifted the precast concrete cylinder, as Michael Lee and three other sandhogs worked to install a large rubber gasket that would sit underneath it. Lee, a forty-year-old welder with a big, swooping mustache, was an experienced sandhog popular for the cakes and sausage bread he regularly baked at home to share with the other guys. The workers were struggling to get the gasket into place, so Lee moved in closer to try to shift it. Just then, the crane’s brake slipped, and the thirteen-ton load that was suspended in the air crashed down on Lee’s head. He was pronounced dead at Massachusetts General Hospital.
As investigators began focusing on safety problems that had been overlooked on the borrowed crane, MacDonald came to understand a counterintuitive lesson about workplace safety: the most dangerous day43 on a job is often the last one. Workers and managers, feeling eager or pressured to get the job done and brimming with confidence, are more likely to let their guard down and take chances. A homeowner using an extension ladder to clean his gutters will likely begin the work by climbing down and moving the ladder every few feet, rather than risk a fall by stretching his arms too far. But by the time he’s cleaning the last stretch of gutter, that same homeowner is more likely to chance an especially long reach rather than take the time to move the ladder yet again.
Just three weeks later, workers on the jack-up barge in Massachusetts Bay had successfully installed fifty-four of the fifty-five risers and had just begun working on the last one. Adding to the upbeat mood on the barge, Ricky Spears, a forty-seven-year-old, silver-haired foreman, was passing out novelty cigars whose label read “It’s a boy44.” He was just back at work after his wife had delivered their baby son. Spears and his crew were standing on a drill platform that had been placed atop a two-hundred-foot pipe, which a crane had positioned perpendicular to the ocean floor, as straight up as a sequoia. The floor of the drill platform was actually a set of hydraulic doors that opened like a cellar bulkhead. Suddenly that sequoia-size pipe dropped deeper into the seabed, causing the bulkhead doors of the drill platform to fling open, catapulting Spears thirty feet into the air and costing him his life. Although he had lived to see his baby45 brought into the world, he had never had the chance to hold the boy in his arms.
Three years later, inside the tunnel, an inspector named Dick White had been attempting to board the railroad tram from the wrong side when the lokey that was pulling it had suddenly lurched forward. White was a crusty but well-liked character46 from Arizona who topped three hundred pounds and had piercing blue eyes. During this particular shift change, when the lokey had advanced without warning, White had been pinned between the railcar and a steel beam that was part of the TBM’s trailing gear. His chest had been crushed. The sixty-four-year-old had been planning to retire in a few months.
Each of these deaths weighed heavily on MacDonald, a man whose tendency to tear up was nearly as well known around the agency as his workaholic ways. But he didn’t feel he could afford much mourning. He was under federal court order to bring this stalled and stymied project to a close. As safely as humanly possible, he was determined to see it through.
3. Memo Wars
Just after two o’clock on a warm afternoon in mid-December 1996, thousands of people milled about a trendy New Orleans business district on the banks of the Mississippi. Shoppers settled on Christmas gifts47 at the boutiques in the upscale Riverwalk mall, diners lingered over lunch or munched on beignets at the cafes, and gamblers tried their luck at the docked riverboat Flamingo Casino.
At 2:07 p.m. an alarm began blaring in the distance, puncturing the holiday cheer. The complex of shops and restaurants was built on a wharf next to a parking garage and a Hilton Hotel. As pedestrians on walkways and shoppers on balconies craned their heads to look up the muddy Mississippi, it didn’t take long for them to spot the source of the siren. A red and black beast of a freighter48—stretching longer than two football fields, weighing nearly seventy thousand tons—was barreling toward them, seemingly out of control.
Three minutes after the pilot of the Bright Field sounded the alarm and notified the Coast Guard of an engine failure, the freighter barely missed colliding with two cruise ships, which were parked just up-river from the shops and loaded with passengers. Now, with its alarm still blaring and flares shooting up from its deck into the afternoon sky, the beast was headed for the mall. The shoppers and diners, who had initially worn puzzled looks, shifted into full panic, screaming and trampling each other in a desperate stampede.
42 (Chapter 2, note 31)
Around lunchtime: OSHA report on death of Michael Lee; “Michael R. Lee, 40, Harbor Tunnel Worker,”
43 (Chapter 2, note 32)
the most dangerous day: Doug MacDonald, interview by author, April 2011.
44 (Chapter 2, note 33)
“It’s a boy”: Cathy Spears, interview by author, April 2011; Greg Kolacz, interview by author, May 2011; Dave Beck, interviews by author; OSHA report on death of Ricky Spears.
45 (Chapter 2, note 34)
Although he had lived to see his baby: Cathy Spears, interview by author, 2011. Cathy explained that even though Ricky had picked up her and their baby son, Cody, at the hospital and driven them home, Cody was sleeping a lot, and Ricky didn’t want to wake the baby. Ricky, a decorated Vietnam vet, left for work offshore that same afternoon. The next time Cathy saw her husband, he was on life support at Boston City Hospital.
46 (Chapter 2, note 35)
well-liked character: OSHA report on death of Dick White; Dave Corkum, interview by author, November 2011.
47 (Chapter 3, note 1)
Shoppers settled on Christmas gifts: James Varney and Petula Dvorak, “Rammed: Runaway Freighter Smashes Riverwalk; Scores Injured, Several Believed Missing,”
48 (Chapter 3, note 2)
A red and black beast of a freighter: National Transportation Safety Board,