Tom Corry, the Kiewit executive who oversaw the Deer Island project from Nebraska, had personally summoned Tap for further talks about his plan. But Tap was not the only one invited to Omaha.
After shaking Tap’s hand, Corry introduced him to two other guests. They were both representatives83 of Norwesco Marine, a Washington State diving company similar to Black Dog though considerably larger. The first guy, Harald Grob, was a short and stocky thirty-eight-year-old Canadian engineer with a low voice and deep-set eyes on a round balding head. As soon as he started talking, he struck Tap as intelligent. The second Norwesco representative was a low-key forty-six-year-old named Roger Rouleau. He had a lantern jaw and thick, graying hair that he wore combed back, giving him a passing resemblance to the current occupant of the Oval Office, Bill Clinton. Roger was far more reserved than Harald, and Tap noticed that when he did speak, it was more likely to be about financial matters than about diving. But Tap was heartened to learn that Roger was in charge, since he owned Norwesco. Like Tap, Roger had started as a diver and had found his true calling as a businessman. Tap felt he could work with Roger and maybe even learn from him. Although Norwesco was only a few years older than Black Dog, it was doing $3 million a year in business, to Black Dog’s quarter of a million.
The Kiewit executive explained that Black Dog and Norwesco had both submitted strong bids for the Deer Island job, and he now wanted them to work together to fashion the best possible approach for removing the plugs. Given all the energy and hope he had invested in crafting his plan, Tap was eager for it to get a full airing from Norwesco.
Roger Rouleau liked to joke that only a crazy man would start a diving business in landlocked Spokane, a small inland city sitting near the Idaho border and a four-and-a-half-hour drive from the Seattle coastline. In fact, his decision had previewed the savvy, pluck, and luck that he would ultimately rely on to make Norwesco successful.
He had gone to dive school, but after failing to find work on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, he had returned to the Pacific Northwest and got by pumping gas and working as a farmhand. Things changed when, in his early thirties, he met a dynamic inventor named Phillip Nuytten, who ran a big-name company called Can-Dive Services in Vancouver. Nuytten’s creations included the “Newtsuit,” a bulky, puffy breathing apparatus that made a diver look like the Michelin Man but served as a sort of personal submarine, allowing deep dives without requiring decompression. Roger boldly asked Nuytten if he could open a U.S. affiliate office for Can-Dive in Spokane. At the time, Can-Dive’s offshore work in the Arctic was beginning to slow. So Roger’s offer to pound the pavement in search of small construction jobs on inland dams sounded worthwhile, especially since Roger was willing to do it for five hundred bucks a month.
Before long Roger, who’d always thought of himself as only a mediocre diver, stopped working in the water altogether. His real talent, he found, was bidding jobs and attaching the right divers to them. Success soon attracted84 some unwanted attention, though, when union workers picketed his office because he was using nonunion divers. Chastened, he switched to union labor. A bigger crisis emerged at the start of the 1990s, when Can-Dive sought legal protection85 from its creditors and shed assets in order to stay afloat. But Roger turned it into an opportunity, borrowing money from his parents to buy the equipment his office had been using, then incorporating his own business, Norwesco Marine.
Not long after that, Roger bid on a job for Kiewit to build a guide wall as part of an Oregon dam’s new navigation lock system for barges. Given the complexity of the project, a few Can-Dive associates suggested to Roger that he bring on an engineer by the name of Harald Grob. Roger was immediately taken with Harald’s brains and credentials, and the two men were soon collaborating on lots of projects. Here was a self-assured, worldly pro who had earned his civil engineering degree from the University of Waterloo, spoke both English and German, and was an innovator with experience supervising dives in zero visibility and at depths of up to 240 feet. Unlike other project managers, Harald seemed relatively uninterested in the size of his payday. When he came to Spokane to work on a bid with Roger, he would sleep in a room above Norwesco’s office in an industrial park. What seemed to motivate Harald most was the challenge inherent in a job.
Their relationship wasn’t without some bumps. Roger would sometimes hear complaints from divers who simply couldn’t handle working with Harald. As Roger saw it, Harald’s biggest deficiency as a manager was his lack of social skills. The same single-minded determination that fueled Harald’s desire to push boundaries in his field worked against him when he interacted with others. “The guy’s kinda like a nerd,” Roger once said of Harald. “It’s like talking to an eraser-head.” If a problem arose on the job, Harald, rather than pulling together all the divers and encouraging them to toss around ideas for the best solution, would draw deeper into his own shell, determined to work things out himself. And if Harald didn’t respect someone else’s opinion, he couldn’t even feign interest in hearing that person out. He would simply walk away. Things got so bad on one job in 1995 that Roger had to remove Harald as project manager.
Still, the gusto with which Harald pursued towering engineering challenges made him a huge asset to Roger’s company. And for all of Harald’s social awkwardness, Roger’s wife, Tawnie, would point out how naturally Harald interacted with their young daughter, whose cerebral palsy made many other people uncomfortable. Tawnie would tell her husband that she felt Harald had a kind way about him.
In 1997 Harald helped Roger land a transformative job for Norwesco, working on a new international wastewater treatment project to curb pollution in the Tijuana-San Diego area. Norwesco divers helped install86 a 150-foot-long, nine-foot-wide riser pipe, which would connect to a new outfall tunnel. When the crew of the drill rig had trouble penetrating the seabed for the riser, Harald sent the divers down to investigate. Instead of the expected sand and silt on the sea bottom, the divers found about five thousand boulders, up to two feet in diameter, all of which had to be removed. Harald also designed a system for divers to do inspections with cameras mounted on their helmets, and for deeper areas, they relied on remote-operated vehicles, or ROVs.
For Roger, the San Diego job led to even higher-paying work. For Harald, it answered the desire he had noted on his resume: “Of particular interest are special projects where difficult conditions exist or new technologies are developed and used.” Harald went on to deliver a lecture about it during a major industry convention and write a feature-length story about it for Underwater magazine.
Their alliance was feeding the needs of both men: Harald’s desire to be seen as a bright light in the dive world, and Roger’s desire to succeed in ways he could have scarcely imagined when he’d been pumping gas and working as a farmhand. It continued to flourish in 1998, when they landed their biggest project. This one took place in Lake Mead, Nevada, outside Las Vegas, and once again the employer was Kiewit. Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, had been created by damming the Colorado River to build the Hoover Dam in the 1930s. By the 1990s it was supplying water to a large swath of the rapidly growing Southwest. But now Lake Mead was struggling to quench the thirst of the Las Vegas Valley, which could claim the world’s biggest supply of hotel rooms, even before the planned addition of another twenty thousand on top of the existing one hundred thousand rooms.
83 (Chapter 4, note 5)
They were both representatives: Descriptions in this section are from Tap Taylor, interviews by author, June 2009 and February 2011; Roger Rouleau, interviews by author, June 2009 and September 2010; and Rouleau deposition, OSHA case, November, 283.
85 (Chapter 4, note 7)
Can-Dive sought legal protection: Leslie Ellis, “Entrepreneurs Revisited: Up from the Depths; March 1991; Can-Dive Services, Inc., and International Hard Suits, Inc.,”
86 (Chapter 4, note 8)
Norwesco divers helped instalclass="underline" Paul Rosta, “Outfall Goes Deep in San Diego,”