He’d met Karen in Colorado six years earlier, when the compact athlete was visiting from Minnesota as a coach for the Junior Olympics ski racing team. Riggs was by then splitting his time between working as a diver in California and running a business in Colorado called The Cruisin’ Cameraman, where he would ski or snowboard alongside families while holding his camera, capturing their mountainside fun on videotape. At the time, Karen had twin four-year-old sons, but her marriage to their father was over. She and Riggs had hit it off immediately and married quickly. When Karen gave birth to their first child, Riggs insisted on naming the boy Enzo, after the macho character in the movie The Big Blue. That character was a “free diver,” someone who holds his breath for unimaginably long stretches underwater. From the start, Riggs was an engaged father to both his son and his twin stepsons. But feeling the need to make more money, he scrapped the ski slope business and began working as a diver full time, even though that required him to chase work in locations as distant as the Persian Gulf. Shortly after Karen gave birth to their daughter, Swasey, Riggs received the offer to join Norwesco. The Lake Mead job was expected to last at least another eighteen months. The timing was perfect, since it would give him both steady, well-paying work and the ability to stay close to his young family.
Even though the itinerant nature of the profession required divers to move to whichever company happened to have work at the time, Riggs saw an opportunity with Norwesco to settle down, both professionally and personally. But at Lake Mead, he found the Norwesco circle of divers harder to penetrate than he’d hoped. That was partially because while they all went out for beers after work, he went home to his family. The one time he did join the guys at a sports bar, he nursed his O’Doul’s nonalcoholic beer while they tossed back the hard stuff. After a long period of commotion in his life, Riggs had been sober for five years, having found focus in his family and through the Lord. He had no desire to change that.
His biggest disappointment with Lake Mead was that the job progressed too quickly. To his surprise, it began to wind down after he’d been there for just about a year. When he was asked to be part of the crew going to Deer Island, he quickly signed on. Even if it kept him away from his family for a while, at least it would allow him to stay with the same company. One of the things he had come to detest about life as a diver was the uncertainty and indignity of constantly having to scrap for the next job.
As long as he had to be away from his family, Riggs felt he might as well be working as many hours and earning as much overtime as possible. That’s why he had no patience for the youthful nonsense that other divers like DJ seemed so interested in. Riggs had done his share of carousing and had seen how it could only lead to woe after the buzz inevitably wore off. He was at a place in life where he could get a high from a simple phone conversation with his four-year-old son, hearing Enzo pepper him with questions about what kind of diving Daddy was doing and relaying stories about the black and gold “diver man” toy he played with in the bathtub. When Riggs wasn’t able to be on the clock, racking up the OT, he’d cool his heels in his room at a Howard Johnson’s motel north of Boston. He’d even brought his PlayStation console from home to fill his downtime responsibly. No one ever had to be bailed out of jail after a night playing Formula One.
If party boys like DJ thought that made Riggs an uptight bore, so be it. Riggs had already seen enough of DJ’s antics—his tardiness, his raunchy mouth, his attempts to paper over his lapses by playing buddy-buddy with Tap—to conclude that he didn’t trust the guy. Riggs considered himself to be, first and foremost, a professional. He knew what he was doing and why he was there.
On Tuesday, the day after the cavalry charged onto the island in Humvees, the divers arrived in a more understated manner. They came packed into the kind of small school bus used to transport the elderly. All through the tunnel construction project, the MWRA had required construction workers to get to the island either by bus or barge142. This was done to appease neighbors by reducing congestion along the narrow residential streets leading to the island. For the divers, the morning commute for the duration of the job would be the same. The Norwesco guys would meet in the lobby of their HoJo’s motel in nearby Revere, pack into a rental car, and arrive by six-thirty a.m. at the parking lot of an old racetrack called Suffolk Downs. There they’d meet up with the Black Dog guys, who drove their own pickups to the track, and then everyone would pile into the school bus, which would get them to Deer Island by seven.
On the island that morning, Riggs watched as workers attached cables to the handles on the hoods of the Humvees, which a crane then lowered down the tunnel shaft. There were two sets of Humvees—one primary pair and one backup—with each set consisting of a white four-door hard-top pickup and a four-door wagon in either gray or green. Following the Hummers down the hole was an endless supply train of hoses, regulators, rebreathers, vaporizers, VHF radios, pumps, sandbags, fire extinguishers, hand tools, manifolds, inflatable boats with outboard motors, flat-bottomed boats with collapsible wheels, tanks of liquid nitrogen, tanks of liquid oxygen, and tanks of HP air.
A cluster of guys in hard hats stood around the rim of the shaft, watching the gear descend into the earth. In addition to the divers, there were sandhogs, equipment operators, and supervisors and safety officers from Kiewit, Kaiser, and the MWRA. Riggs could sense Tap’s frustration in not knowing what his role in the whole operation should be. At one point, the owner of Black Dog Divers looked like a dad at his daughter’s dance recital, gamely videotaping a Hummer being lowered down the hole. Riggs noted how the duct that had supplied ventilation for the sandhogs was still blowing air down the length of the shaft but stopped abruptly at the start of the tunnel.
Despite all his effort, Hoss had been unable to fix the trailer hitch, and they had to call a welding company143 out to Deer Island to make the repair. All around them the divers were feeling pressure, even if they didn’t know that Tom Corry, the high-level Kiewit executive who’d flown in from Omaha, was keeping track of their delays with notations in his day planner: “2nd Hummer trailer requires major repairs. Lost one day144.”
By Wednesday, the divers were working at the base of the shaft, assembling the various components of their intricate system. Kiewit had arranged for a crew of sandhogs to install a temporary deck, made of aluminum slats. The deck was wide enough for two Hummer Humvees to be parked side by side, and high enough for the divers to stay dry from the three feet of standing water sloshing around the bottom of the tunnel and shimmering in the light through the slats. The divers spent the day145 essentially repeating the setup work they had done in Tap’s yard, since most of the components had been disassembled in order to be transported from New Hampshire and then down the shaft.
To reach the safety plugs, the 5-man crew drove a Humvee. A trailer in tow carried a rack of liquid gas tanks as well as another Humvee that faced the opposite direction for the return trip. The tunnel was too narrow to allow a vehicle to turn around.
Like the divers, each Hummer’s internal combustion engine needed oxygen to function. A diesel engine uses a series of tiny explosions to convert the chemical energy available in fuel into mechanical energy, which in turn moves the pistons, which connect to a crankshaft that helps turn the vehicle’s wheels. But instead of relying on spark plugs to ignite the explosion, as a gas-powered engine does, a diesel engine compresses the air before the fuel is injected. Once compressed by the pistons, the air gets hot. That heat is enough to light the fuel—provided, of course, there’s enough oxygen around.
142 (Chapter 7, note 10)
to get to the island either by bus or barge: Paul Levy, Walter Armstrong, and Ralph Wallace (former MWRA executives), interviews by author, 2010.
143 (Chapter 7, note 11)
they had to call a welding company: Harald Grob, topside log, July 13, 1999.
145 (Chapter 7, note 13)
The divers spent the day: Trooper Mary T. McCauley, “Interview of Harald Grob,” Massachusetts State Police Suffolk County Detective Unit, January 7, 2000, 3.