During a break in Tap’s yard, Tim called home to Washington to check in with Judy. He told his wife that they were getting the chance to work with what seemed to be millions of dollars’ worth of equipment. “Well, is it the right equipment?” Judy asked. “Is it going to work?”
Tim said he thought it would, though he acknowledged that none of them had ever seen it before.
Not wanting to worry his wife further about the exotic tunnel job, Tim stressed how smart Harald was, and how Harald had assured the divers that his sophisticated system was fail-safe, with multiple backups. Tim knew that the only way to deal with the hazards associated with his line of work was to believe in the people he was working with. Still, as trusting as Tim was, even he had to concede that this Deer Island job was a radical departure from his usual assignments. In a moment of candor, he admitted to Judy, “It’s so far out that if we get all the way out there and something goes wrong, we are totally fucked.”
With the Humvees and breathing equipment assembled, the final two days in Tap’s yard were devoted to training. Harald gave the divers a primer on the breathing, transportation, and communications systems they’d use during their mission. He went over everything from quarter-turn valves and facemasks to battery-operated water pumps and handheld radios.
By the time the crew began doing run-throughs, DJ and Billy had established a good rapport with Hoss and Tim. DJ especially liked how Hoss talked with more than a little cowboy in him, tossing around lines like, “Don’t try to baffle me with your bullshit.”
Although he still didn’t know quite what to make of Riggs and his curious aversion to profanity, DJ had been seeing evidence that at least the guy knew what he was doing as a diver. The questions and recommendations that Riggs brought up about Harald’s system struck DJ as sensible ones. If the divers were going to have to be lugging around heavy equipment when they were in the tunnel pulling plugs, Riggs suggested, they should be doing that kind of strenuous work when they were testing their breathing equipment in Tap’s yard, rather than doing easy, sweat-free simulations shimmying through the pipe. Yet as far as DJ could tell, Harald seemed as unresponsive to Riggs as he was to the others, like a taxi driver traveling with the cruising light on his roof turned off, advertising to the world his lack of interest in interacting. To DJ, the fact that he and Riggs were in the same predicament with Harald suggested that Riggs might be all right after all. Tim had also reassured DJ that Riggs, though a bit prickly, was deep down a good guy who knew his stuff.
As the week in Tap’s yard progressed and the divers became more comfortable with one another, the distance between them and Harald became more pronounced. The divers began to bond over their shared frustration with how Harald, in the face of setbacks, seemed to be drawing inward rather than turning to them for advice. The divers were experienced and perceptive enough to sense how the burden of the calendar seemed to be affecting the job. DJ felt a distinct time-is-money pressure hovering in the air. And the guys began to wonder aloud why the centerpiece of Harald’s breathing system, the gas mixer that would blend the vapors from the liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen, was not on site during this training period. As Harald explained it, the MAP Mix 9000 was coming from Europe126 and appeared to have gotten held up in customs along the way.
Harald did not share the mixer’s backstory with the divers. After his supplier in Spokane told him a month earlier he couldn’t find an approved mixer, Harald had searched the Internet127 and found three possible models. Harald’s supplier determined that only one of them was appropriate, the MAP Mix 9000, manufactured by the Danish company PBI Dansensor. And although the supplier had arranged with a Massachusetts distributor called Topac to have the mixer imported and drop-shipped to Harald in Tap’s yard, the unit continued to be AWOL as their planned mobilization to Deer Island drew near.
Harald tried to compensate for the missing mixer by showing the divers diagrams. He’d also brought along a copy of the device’s slim instruction manual, which some of the guys flipped through. Although the divers went ahead and donned their facemasks attached to their umbilicals, it seemed almost pointless since they had no working mixed-gas breathing air system to plug into. Instead, they breathed off the HP air that would serve as their backup supply during the actual mission. Riggs termed it “playing like we have a mixer.” The divers had been called in to be the closers on the multibillion-dollar, decade-long Boston Harbor cleanup, yet this sure seemed like a strangely improvised way to approach the bottom of the ninth.
When DJ persisted in posing even minor questions to Harald, the supervisor put up his guard, almost indignantly. Harald stressed that everything had already been worked out. The implication was clear: DJ was the hired help, and he should simply do what he was told. He saw Harald treat Tap the same way. Eventually DJ got the message. From then on, if he spotted something that didn’t seem right, he reminded himself to keep his mouth shut and just collect his pay.
Harald was upbeat when a visitor from Boston showed up at Tap’s yard to look over the operation. Dan Kuhs was the business agent for Local 56. A no-nonsense guy with a lineman’s build, he was an experienced diver who was relatively new to the union front office. Kuhs quickly recognized the concrete elbow that was attached to the mock-up pipe lying in Tap’s yard. Nearly a decade earlier he helped fabricate the real elbows that now connected the Deer Island tunnel to those fifty-five risers, and he’d also been part of the dive team that installed the risers from the jack-up barge in Massachusetts Bay. Even if the Norwesco guys were strangers to him, Kuhs had worked on jobs with Billy and had seen Tap and DJ around the union hall enough to get to know them. Although he was bogged down with the demands of supplying workers for Boston’s insatiable Big Dig megaproject, Kuhs had decided to drive to Tap’s place to look over the unusual breathing equipment he’d been hearing about.
Now when Kuhs met Harald, the engineer struck him as bright and all business. When Harald explained his system, Kuhs was not put off by the use of liquid oxygen, knowing how arduous it would have been to transport enough bottles of HP air to the end of the tunnel. Although the full system wasn’t in place by the time of this visit, Kuhs left reassured by Harald’s explanations of the multiple backup systems that the engineer had marbled into the setup. If any of his Local 56 divers had concerns about Harald’s system, they didn’t mention them to Kuhs.
As much as the divers had managed to break down some of the barriers between the East and West Coast contingents, a week of working together could do only so much. There was no getting around the fact that the crew had been cobbled together from two distinct groups, to the point where they’d even taken their mine rescue training in different parts of the country. Even the equipment reflected this divide, since about half of it had been assembled by Norwesco crews back in Spokane, while the other half was put together by the combined East-West crew in Tap’s yard128. Because DJ and the other divers still had trouble reading each other’s signals, it was hard for them to question Harald in any kind of unified way. So instead of seeing a gradual improvement in communication and comfort between the divers and their equivalent of Mission Control, the training week was devolving into little more than a series of testy flare-ups. DJ found himself wondering: Is this way to prepare for the kind of job nobody’s ever done before?
126 (Chapter 6, note 4)
the MAP Mix 9000 was coming from Europe: DJ, Hoss, and Riggs, interviews by author; Drybanksi deposition; Corry day planner.
127 (Chapter 6, note 5)
Harald had searched the Internet: John Prescott, memo to file “Gillis/Juse—Conversation with Harald Grob,” September 13, 2000, following his questioning of Harald.
128 (Chapter 6, note 6)
the combined East-West crew in Tap’s yard: Trooper Mary T. McCauley, “Interview of Harald Grob,” Massachusetts State Police Suffolk County Detective Unit, January 7, 2000, 4; DJ, interviews by author.