Despite Corkum’s concern for keeping his distance, his meetings with Harald had persuaded him that they had finally found a capable guy who could extricate the project from its hopeless jam. That was exactly how MWRA chief Doug MacDonald felt as well. More than anyone, MacDonald had to answer for the long delays in the project—to rate payers angry with hiked sewer bills, to his critics who had opposed the tunnel from the start, and to A. David Mazzone, the federal judge overseeing the harbor cleanup. On his periodic tours of Deer Island, Judge Mazzone would jocularly address MWRA workers with greetings like “How are you defendants doing137 this fine morning?” But MacDonald knew that it was no joke when it came to him. As the head of the agency, he truly was a defendant in the case. And after years of frustration, he saw in Harald someone who had a real handle on the problem and an absolute determination to steer everyone toward resolution. MacDonald had heard that the divers had been undergoing extensive training in New Hampshire. So when Harald and his team began mobilizing on the island, MacDonald flashed one of his classic smiles that narrowed his eyes and lit up his round face. He thought to himself: Special ops have just arrived.
To Corkum, the approaching caravan of Humvees, each jam-packed with gear, was a supersize shot of adrenaline for the stymied project. After the divers parked the vehicles138 on a dusty clearing,
Corkum walked over, flashing his gap-toothed smile. “Looks like you guys are going camping!” he cracked. No one had to remind Corkum that the tunnel was supposed to have been finished four years earlier. But he also knew that the judge’s final deadline for everything to be up and running—the new treatment plant and the two big tunnels—had all along been September 1999. The five-mile-long Inter-Island Tunnel was already operational, and the rest of the plant had moved into the final stage, as evidenced by the scent of freshly laid asphalt expanding in the summer heat. That meant that as long as they could get the Deer Island Outfall Tunnel done, they might still be able to meet the court’s ultimate deadline. All that stood in the way were those fifty-five plugs.
Dave Riggs suspected some of the younger divers on the crew relished being cast as members of a Navy SEAL-type elite military team, swooping in on a rescue mission. But as a seasoned diver as well as an actual navy veteran, Riggs knew that seeing yourself that way could only get you into trouble. Military role-playing was best left to elementary school boys skulking around playgrounds. The divers were professionals, there to do a difficult job, make a decent wage, and then be on their way.
Riggs could sense that the sandhogs weren’t crazy about seeing the divers charge onto the island. Maybe it was simply a union turf issue. In any case, it wasn’t surprising that members of Local 88, who aggressively guarded their primacy in the underground, would resent seeing a bunch of divers—some from the other side of the country—stream into a tunnel that the Boston sandhogs had ruled for a decade.
The first day on the island was a blur of unloading and unpacking, after the divers went through the drug testing that the MWRA mandated of all workers on the job. Electricians wired up Harald’s “Conex box,” a white wheelless trailer he had shipped from Spokane. It would serve as his command post for the operation. Its rooftop antenna would allow Harald to monitor by radar the marine activity in the Massachusetts Bay shipping channel sitting above the tunnel. Harald kept the radar monitor139 on a plywood table, alongside his laptop computer and below a map of the bay that he pinned to the wall. His white Conex box had been placed near the tunnel shaft, less than ten feet away from Tap’s eighteen-foot black trailer, which would serve as a combination changing area and break room for the divers. When the doors to both trailers were open140, someone sitting in Tap’s could hear what was being said in Harald’s.
During the convoy from New Hampshire to Deer Island, the dive team had suffered a setback. The hitch assembly on the custom-built two-way trailer that the Humvee would tow into the tunnel had been damaged in a roadway accident141. Given how essential the trailer was to the setup, this was a serious holdup. As soon as the divers arrived on the island, Hoss pulled out his welding torch and made it his focus to try to fix the hitch.
Riggs liked Hoss’s resourcefulness, although there were other characteristics he cared for less. When they’d first begun working together, back in Nevada on the Lake Mead job, Hoss, who zoomed around with the speed of a sprinter, had yelled, “Riggs, help me move this!” It was a twenty-five-foot-long steel beam. As Riggs bent down to grab his end, he realized it was way too heavy for them to be lifting, especially since there was a forklift close by. Hoss evidently had no time for the sensible way to handle the task. His build was ropy more than muscular. But like a wire cable, he was deceptively powerful. Riggs wondered if Hoss’s strength, combined with his cockiness, could make him a little too fast and loose.
Later in the day, the tanks of liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen were delivered to the island in a steel rack that would sit on the trailer attached to the Humvee. The tanks were, of course, the building blocks for Harald’s innovative breathing system. Despite the questions that everyone had asked back in Tap’s yard, Riggs worried that the system’s exotic feel might lead Hoss and the other younger guys to embrace it more quickly than they should. Riggs was thirty-eight, not an old man by any means. And his boyish face, with dimpled cheeks and a side part of brown hair descending onto a high forehead, made him look even younger. Still, he had lived through a hell of a lot more than a twenty-four-year-old like Hoss or even a twenty-nine-year-old like DJ. In a world where too many people moved and talked quickly, Riggs had come to rely on his more deliberative approach. His preference for thinking before talking, combined with his Texas roots, caused him to speak slowly, turning a choppy contraction like wouldn’t into the sluggish and soft-bellied woonninn. Yet he packed a lot of punch into what he said, if you knew to listen for it. His wife, Karen, certainly did. During one phone call, when she asked how the tunnel job was going, Riggs drawled, “They’re doing some real original stuff here with equipment—and the young guys think it’s cool.” Picking up on his sarcasm, she just laughed.
Riggs had joined Norwesco only one year earlier, when he’d been hired for the Lake Mead crew. He’d wasted little time in moving his wife and young kids from their place in Colorado to Boulder City, Nevada. After having spent so many long stretches away from home, Riggs got to enjoy the unfamiliar experience of eating dinner with his family most nights.
137 (Chapter 7, note 5)
“How are you defendants doing”: Tom Long, “A. D. Mazzone, Judge Who Led Harbor Effort, Dies at Age 76,”
138 (Chapter 7, note 6)
After the divers parked the vehicles: This scene was captured on raw video footage I viewed from the mission. Also, Dave Corkum, interviews by author, 2009, 2011.
139 (Chapter 7, note 7)
Harald kept the radar monitor: Raw video footage from the mission.
140 (Chapter 7, note 8)
When the doors to both trailers were open: Tap Taylor, interview by author.
141 (Chapter 7, note 9)
damaged in a roadway accident: Tom Corry, day planner, July 12, 1999.