By now, Tap knew one of the reasons Kiewit had decided against giving him the main contract. He had been unable to secure bonding—financial protection for the operation, in the event the job couldn’t be completed. Unlike Norwesco, Black Dog was simply too small to obtain bonding for such a complex project. Given the hell that Kiewit had gone through on Deer Island, Tap could understand why the company was not willing to roll the dice with an unbonded subcontractor.
When Corry, the Kiewit executive, came back into the room and asked how the two subcontractors had made out, Tap smiled along with the others. It was now clear to him that he was being asked to play a junior role to Harald and Norwesco, most likely because Tap could provide some cover with the Boston labor unions for Kiewit’s decision to bring in a West Coast company with a history of union problems. At the same time, he would offer logistical support for the operation, lining up local workers, equipment, and facilities. Even if the project no longer presented the game-changing, million-dollar payday that Tap had once envisioned, it would still allow his divers to earn some good wages while giving Black Dog a subcontract that would easily exceed $100,000. What’s more, Tap saw it as preserving Black Dog’s position as a trusted problem-solver for Kiewit.
In his hotel room that night and on the flight home, Tap repeatedly read over Harald’s plan. When he returned to New Hampshire, he had Billy do the same. Even if Tap hadn’t made a great connection with Harald, he had to admit that the Norwesco project manager’s design, with its military feel, was dazzling.
The white Chrysler K car pulled up to the terminal at Logan Airport, and Roger squeezed in. Waiting in the car for him was Tom Corry94, who’d flown in from Omaha, and two Kiewit managers from Deer Island. It was July 31, 1998, two months after the Omaha gathering. Roger had been asked to fly to Boston to attend a meeting that Kiewit viewed as critical.
Roger was grateful that the Deer Island job appeared to be shaping up well for Norwesco. He knew there were plans95 for him to sign a revised contract with Kiewit that would pay Norwesco $776,100, or nearly $200,000 more than Harald’s original estimate, once additional costs and services had been factored in. That promised a tidy profit, even after Norwesco’s considerable outlay of cash to buy the Humvees. Still, Roger wasn’t happy to be in Boston. For him, the trip had come about unexpectedly, after Harald had told him, “I can’t make the meeting. Can you go?”
“Jeez, I don’t know much about this job, Harald,” Roger had replied. “What am I going to be doing over there?”
“You’re going to be meeting with OSHA,” Harald explained. “They want to go over the plan.”
“Well, that means I better know a whole lot more about this thing,” Roger replied. He spent his long, expensive, last-minute flight to Boston via Minneapolis reading over Harald’s revised plan. There were parts of the design he still didn’t fully understand. But given his confidence in Harald’s abilities, Roger reassured himself, We’re cool This thing’s good.
Now, as they made their way in the K car to the OSHA regional office in suburban Boston, the Kiewit team briefed Roger on what to expect. They would be meeting with three representatives of the federal workplace safety agency, including its assistant area director. The Norwesco plan had already won plaudits96 from Dave Corkum, the Kaiser manager with whom Kiewit had been sparring for years, as well as from other key players. Roger knew that, in addition to Harald’s creative solution to the plug problem, one of Norwesco’s supplemental selling points to weary project officials was the company’s status as fresh-faced outsider, an expert consultant arriving with new ideas and a can-do attitude.
At the start of the meeting in the OSHA conference room, Corry introduced Roger as the president of Norwesco. But mostly Roger kept quiet, letting the Kiewit executive lead the discussion. The three OSHA officials taking part in the meeting were quite familiar with the Deer Island tunnel, since, during its long construction, the agency had fined Kiewit for a series of safety violations97. Now Corry handed them copies of Harald’s Norwesco plan, and Roger watched as they flipped through it. Sitting at the table, Roger felt like a puppet. Of course, some of the important details of the plan had yet to be worked out, such as the precise manner in which the liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen would be mixed and delivered to the divers. But the main components were all there. The plan presented to OSHA made it abundantly clear that by the time of the plugpulling operation, the tunnel would be entirely stripped of its ventilation and other utilities, so dive crews would be bringing in their own air for life support. The meeting lasted about an hour.
Before he knew it, Roger was once again in the K car. Although OSHA did not have statutory authority to preapprove a plan, the Kiewit team talked about their relief in seeing how receptive the government officials had been. Despite the plan’s unconventional use of supplied air, the OSHA reps had raised no red flags about it, and their only questions had struck Roger as rather mild.
Roger, though, left the meeting feeling annoyed. His command performance would cost him the better part of two workdays in travel time, not to mention significant travel expenses, all so he could sit in a room and watch a few government employees breezily flip through the plan Harald had crafted. Roger thought to himself, What a waste of time.
A month later Tap was on the move, inside the rapidly darkening tunnel. While Roger was back in Spokane, Tap and Billy and two other Black Dog divers joined Harald and a couple of Norwesco divers for a fact-finding mission into the Deer Island tunnel. By this time, in late August 1998, sandhogs had removed the bag line, rail tracks, and lighting from more than half of the tunnel. As they backed out, the sandhogs had used a special dam car to pump the standing water—the seepage from those cracks in the bedrock that Kiewit had complained about in its “water too wet” claims—gradually moving the water westward back toward the shaft.
The goal of this fact-finding trip was to get a more precise handle on conditions in the tunnel, particularly the presence of any explosive or toxic gases, so there would be no awful surprises during the actual mission. The divers’ specific assignment was to measure the levels of oxygen and various other gases in the ambient air far from the shaft, so Harald could refine his plans for the ultimate operation. Consistent with the pattern that had been established in Omaha, Harald had taken the lead98 in designing and running this mission, with Tap playing a supporting role.
As the divers rode the tram along the remaining rail tracks, they occasionally spotted numbers spray-painted onto the tunnel wall. Those numbers represented “rings,” the metric by which the sandhogs had long charted distance in the tunnel. Each ring represented the five-foot length of one of the concrete segments lining the tunnel wall. So if the spray paint on the wall read “1000,” that meant the workers were at ring 1000, or roughly one mile in. Around ring 4000, or just shy of the four-mile mark, the tracks ended. There the divers stepped off the tram and began unloading gear. They put equipment for communications, air monitoring, and air supply into two flat-bottomed aluminum boats. Then they attached wheels on collapsible legs to the boats, allowing the vessels to float or be pushed like hospital stretchers, depending on how deep the standing water was in certain spots.
94 (Chapter 4, note 16)
Waiting in the car for him was Tom Corry: Roger Rouleau, interview by author, 2010; Rouleau and Corry depositions.
95 (Chapter 4, note 17)
He knew there were plans: Rouleau interviews; Norwesco subcontract with KAK.
96 (Chapter 4, note 18)
The Norwesco plan had already won plaudits: Dave Corkum (Kaiser area manager), memo to contractor Kiewit, “Subject: Diffuser Plug Pulling Operation—Submittal 282-01650,” July 21, 1998.
97 (Chapter 4, note 19)
a series of safety violations: The fines included $250,000 that OSHA levied in 1992 for ten workplace safety violations that the agency said had contributed to the death of worker Michael Lee. See Steve Adams, “Two Workers Die in MWRA Tunnel Under Bay,”
98 (Chapter 4, note 20)
Harald had taken the lead: Footage of the fact-finding mission, Mazzone Collection, Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston; Hoss, interview by author; Tap Taylor, interview by author; diver Patrick Seiden, interview by author, February 2011.