DJ couldn’t tell if the project’s bosses viewed his crew as their cavalry or as the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. The few sandhogs still hanging around on Deer Island certainly seemed to resent the divers’ arrival, as though it signified a failing on their part. When the divers suffered a delay after one of their equipment trailers was damaged, a veteran sandhog had reacted with exasperation, asking, “How long is it going to take to fix it?” Hoss hadn’t missed a beat in putting the guy in his place. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he had said, smiling with a wad of chew bulging under his lip. “It ain’t gonna take nine years.”
At the base of the shaft, it was cold—about fifty degrees—and misty. There was a decent amount of light and air there, but when DJ let his eyes wander east into the tunnel, they quickly got lost in the dark. To him, it looked like the very center of a black hole.
High above that hole, Deer Island was in the final stages of its conversion into one of the largest and most sophisticated sewage treatment plants in the country, the destination for every toilet flush in the eastern half of Massachusetts. On the southern end of the island stood the plant’s most unmistakable component, a cluster of giant digester tanks that looked like mutant eggs from some 1950s sci-fi movie set. Each egg was fourteen stories high1, and fittingly, there were a dozen of them. But the most complicated part of the project, the construction of the Deer Island Outfall Tunnel, had taken place far from view.
Imagine you are venturing into a tunnel that’s been bored into the bedrock underneath the ocean and that continues straight out, hundreds of feet below the seafloor, for almost ten miles. There is no light, besides the faint glow coming from the bulb on your helmet. There is no sound, besides the water dripping overhead or sloshing around your boots. Most important, there is no breathable air, besides what you brought in with you, a lifeline pumping through a hose and into your facemask. At the end of the tunnel, you don’t even have enough room to stand up straight, since it chokes down to just five feet in diameter before ending abruptly. It’s the world’s longest dead-end tunnel, so there’s no way out other than turning around and making the hazardous trek back to where you started.
For perspective, consider that the deepest ocean point on earth, the Challenger Deep valley in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, lies 6.8 miles below the surface of the water—a distance nearly three miles less than the Deer Island tunnel’s total length. Granted, the character of Challenger Deep’s remoteness is vertical, and the tunnel’s is mostly horizontal. But because of the tunnel’s forbidding conditions, its endpoint effectively makes it farther from the surface than the base of that trench.
All the sewage treated at Deer Island’s new plant would ultimately make its way to the end of that horizontal tunnel, then travel through a series of vertical pipes climbing up to the ocean floor, before being released into the sea. But that couldn’t happen unless DJ and the other divers managed to get all the way out there first. They had been dispatched on a hazardous, high-stakes mission to fix a problem that had confounded some of the world’s top engineering and construction companies for years. If the divers were successful, the empty tunnel could be flooded, allowing billions of gallons of treated sewer water2 to begin flowing out to sea. Left unsolved, the problem threatened to turn the new tunnel into a $300 million white elephant, if not render the entire court-ordered cleanup of Boston Harbor a multibillion-dollar waste of taxpayer money.
Boston Harbor was once a national embarrassment, a waterway indivisible from American history but blackened by the smothering amounts of sewage and sludge dumped into it every day. Thanks largely to the Deer Island treatment plant and tunnel, it is now considered one of the country’s cleanest urban harbors, an unambiguous environmental success story, with no shortage of academic papers extolling it as a national model. The part of the story that is seldom discussed, however—and the part that offers critical lessons for understanding how very bright people can make very bad decisions—is how a vast engineering marvel of a project ended with a handful of divers being sent into the darkness with an improvised, untested plan. And how their mission turned into a harrowing race to get out alive.
DJ and the other divers were used to danger. They were Navy SEAL-type guys who ran toward it when everybody else was running away. Unlike their usual assignments, this one wouldn’t require them to work while submerged in water. But the conditions they would face in the tunnel were far more hazardous. They had been hired because they knew how to do construction work in dicey settings where they had to supply their own breathing air. And by this point, the long, empty tunnel had become an oxygen-starved, toxic tube.
It wasn’t hard for the divers to detect the grumbling and fingerpointing coming from the project’s major players. Yet DJ and the others were completely in the dark about the intensity of the battles that had preceded their arrival. They didn’t know that brinksmanship between the contractor building the tunnel and the government agency that owned it had triggered the fateful decision to strip the tunnel of all its lighting and breathable air. And they certainly had no idea the contractor had warned, in an eerily prescient memo one year earlier, that if a dive team were to be sent in after the tunnel’s ventilation had been removed, “the risk of catastrophe would be exponentially higher.”
As it turned out, the divers were asked to do something so experimental, requiring them to be so utterly cut off from civilization, that they might as well have been working on the surface of the moon.
In other ways, though, they were simply continuing a tradition where blue-collar workers are the ones expected to transform the dazzling dreams of engineers and the promises of politicians into concrete reality. True, they weren’t working in the days of the Hoover Dam’s3 construction, when regulation was scant and the loss of about one hundred worker lives was viewed as an actuarially unremarkable toll for such an ambitious undertaking. The threshold for acceptable human loss had been lowered dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the divers were working at a time when designers and engineers—emboldened by new technology and pressured by governments and corporations to address a growing population’s rapacious need for more fuel, transportation, and waste management—were pushing the limits of the possible. And no matter how impressive an engineer’s solution might have looked on a computer screen, it still required a bunch of workers in hard hats to carry it out.
These are the largely invisible laborers who build our bridges and repair our pipelines, dig our tunnels and erect our towers. While the designers and developers take the bows at the banquets and ribbon cuttings, the workers are the ones who assume the real risks. Yet they tend to flash into public consciousness only when groups of them are killed or imperiled. In 2010 alone, eleven oil rig workers lost their lives4 on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, twenty-nine coal miners were incinerated in the Upper Big Branch explosion in West Virginia, and thirty-three miners were trapped for sixty-nine days in the San Jose copper and gold mine in Chile. A year earlier, the Las Vegas Sun won a Pulitzer Prize5 for exposing the deaths of twelve construction workers within eighteen months during a frenzied building boom along the Vegas Strip—a worker death rate of one every six weeks.
1 (Prologue, note 1)
Each egg was fourteen stories high: Although different sources report varying heights for these tanks, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) says 140 feet (or roughly the equivalent of fourteen stories) is the accurate measurement.
2 (Prologue, note 2)
billions of gallons of treated sewer water: The technical term for this is
3 (Prologue, note 3)
in the days of the Hoover Dam’s: The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation reports the official number of industrial deaths during construction of the dam at ninety-six, but it acknowledges that the true number was likely much higher. For instance, some workers who were injured on the job but who did not die on site were likely not counted in the official number. For more, see www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History/essays/fatal.html.
4 (Prologue, note 4)
In 2010 alone, eleven oil rig workers lost their lives: David Barstow, David Rohde, and Stephanie Saul, “Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours,”
5 (Prologue, note 5)
the