Suspicions ran just as deep on the other side. Kiewit officials felt that Kaiser, PB, and the MWRA were unified in trying to push all of the risk onto them. These seasoned tunneling veterans couldn’t understand why the MWRA seemed to be so unquestioning in its deference to Corkum. During the brainstorming session, one Kiewit executive argued74 that if Corkum and PB were truly concerned about worker safety, they would have accepted Kiewit’s suggestion to remove all the plugs and install one giant bulkhead at the venturi. That would give workers plenty of time to make it safely back to the shaft. The fact that they remained opposed, he said, “indicates the tunnel is your priority—not personnel.”
Despite Corkum’s suspicions, Kiewit was moving aggressively on an entirely different legal front75. The contractor had engaged one of Boston’s more influential lawyers and power brokers, a man by the name of Fran Meaney, who had shifted his focus from the courtroom to the halls of government. Meaney, the former managing partner of Kiewit’s law firm Mintz Levin, now ran its lobbying arm. He decided he needed to see the tunnel for himself.
So he rode the lokey-pulled tram as far into the tunnel as it would take him, all the while snapping pictures and making mental notes.
The thought of sending workers into an endless, pitch-black tube and forcing them to bring in their own air struck Meaney as madness. He was convinced that if those in power were forced to confront this reality, they would come to the same conclusion. He went about turning his thoughts and photographs into a PowerPoint presentation, which he felt could be devastating. If he couldn’t persuade the MWRA with his PowerPoint, he planned to take it to government regulators at OSHA. If that didn’t work, he would take it to the news media.
While that was unfolding, Kiewit was following through on the one mildly promising idea to have emerged from the brainstorming session. Corkum had renewed his push for the contractor to consider installing a temporary bag line that would be much smaller and easier to remove than the big one that had brought air to the sandhogs for nearly a decade. But that idea was shaping up to be another dead end.
So that it could proceed with its schedule of installing the precast pipes at the very end of the tunnel and then “backing out,” Kiewit had already removed the ventilation from the tunnel’s final mile, running a temporary extension duct off the main line. At a meeting shortly after the brainstorming session, Kiewit had relayed its findings that a temporary bag line could be installed, but it would be “both difficult and expensive76.” To erect something that wouldn’t kink and that would be strong enough to ventilate all nine and a half miles, Kiewit reported, crews would likely need to use electrical transformers and rail cars. If they needed all those services, how temporary and easily removable could this smaller bag line really be? Kiewit estimated that a temporary line would cost at least $1 million, if not much more. During that follow-up meeting, the Kiewit tunnel manager had stressed that if they went forward with this temporary-line route, they wanted the MWRA to foot the bill. In a memo summarizing the meeting, he wrote, “Mr. Corkum responded77, presumably on behalf of MWRA, that if that was our position, we could forget such a plan. He stated we should go ahead and get out the bottled air, and he would be standing at the top of the shaft counting diffuser plugs as we brought them out.” Although Corkum later disputed the suggestion that he had been so flippant, he freely admitted to having told Kiewit that the cost of installing a temporary bag line would be its alone.
Not long after this exchange, as Kiewit’s lawyer-lobbyist was putting the finishing touches on his presentation, he received a startling call78. Ken Stinson, the imposing Kiewit chief back in Omaha, had personally vetoed the plan for a public confrontation with the MWRA. As much of a brass-knuckle negotiator as the Vietnam veteran was, Stinson didn’t want to see his company engage in a campaign of publicly shaming one of its clients. That just wasn’t the Kiewit way. Meaney was told to shelve his devastating PowerPoint.
The Kiewit team had spent more than a year arguing vehemently against the idea of sending workers into the tunnel to pull plugs after the ventilation and lighting systems had been removed, given the “exponentially higher” risk of catastrophe. But now exhaustion led to an about-face. Kiewit called in a team of commercial divers with instructions to do exactly that.
4. Arranged Marriage
At the start of 1998, Tap Taylor got wind of an exciting job prospect. Once again Kiewit’s headache could be his opportunity.
When Tap had been working in Vermont four years earlier, his Kiewit bosses had thrown him the small-bore work that the company couldn’t be bothered with. He and diving buddy Billy Juse had used that work to launch Black Dog Divers as a legitimate business. In the years since, Black Dog had grown into a viable if still small company, thanks largely to the contracts and referrals Kiewit had continued to toss their way.
Now Tap was hearing that Kiewit managers were sniffing around for a dive company to help them finish their long-delayed Deer Island tunnel. Even if the Kiewit division running the tunnel job was different from the one that had been Tap’s rainmaker, he figured his close association with the company might give Black Dog an edge. He made a few calls, and it wasn’t long before he and Billy were invited out to Deer Island.
The Kiewit managers explained the challenge, stressing that it wasn’t of their own making. Divers would have to journey to the end of the tunnel, crawl the length of each of the narrow pipes connecting the fifty-five risers to the tunnel, yank out each sixty-five-pound plug, and then transport them all back to Deer Island. The job sounded challenging but relatively straightforward—until they mentioned the key work condition, the reason Kiewit was casting about for divers in the first place: they’d be removing the plugs after the tunnel had been stripped of all its utilities. So the divers would need to bring in their own air.
To get a better feel for the assignment, Tap and Billy went down the 420-foot shaft and hopped on the lokey-pulled tram. The Black Dog partners were both in their early thirties. Physically, though, they were a study in contrasts, Tap with his thick, six-foot-two build, balding head of light brown hair, and vise-grip hands; Billy with his lean five-foot-nine frame, sweep of black hair, and dense, dark mustache.
Even though Tap was used to being at sea, and even though there was still plenty of ambient air in the tunnel, he found it eerie to be so far underground, so far under the sea. What was most striking was just how far the tunnel extended. Each concrete-lined section they passed on the tram looked like the one before it and the one after it, which made for one monotonous ride. Although it was noisy, even the noise was monotonous, dominated by the lokey’s jet-engine roar and occasionally punctuated by the honk of its horn.
Still, it was cool to get this rare view of the underworld. Even more exciting was the prospect of Black Dog scoring a possible million-dollar job while solving a massive migraine for Kiewit. As usual, Tap was relieved to have Billy at his side. He had complete faith in Billy’s abilities, going back to their first days working together in Vermont, when he’d be coming up from the water, looking for a certain tool, and Billy would always be holding exactly what he needed. Tap felt his buddy’s mechanical skills bordered on wizardry. He would often compare Billy to MacGyver, the secret agent at the center of the 1980s ABC drama of the same name who could fix a blown fuse with nothing but a gum wrapper and repair a leaking radiator by cracking eggs and dumping the whites inside it. As they left the tunnel, it was clear that for all of Kiewit’s vast resources and experience, the company was stymied. The way Tap saw it, Kiewit needed them to come in and do what Billy had always done best: MacGyver them out of a jam.
74 (Chapter 3, note 28)
one Kiewit executive argued: Kiewit, “Minutes of Hemispherical Plug Removal Meeting.” January 19, 1998. Kirk Samuelson was the Kiewit executive who made this point.
75 (Chapter 3, note 29)
an entirely different legal front: Fran Meaney, interview by author, May 2010.
76 (Chapter 3, note 30)
“both difficult and expensive”: Robert Regazzini, memo to Dave Corkum, “Subject: Diffuser Plug Removal, FTM No. 282-2335,” February 11, 1998.
78 (Chapter 3, note 32)
he received a startling calclass="underline" Meaney interview; Corry deposition; Stinson interview, 2011.