He looked over to see DJ and Riggs, who were both sitting on the tunnel floor, begin to come around. They were obviously still disoriented, as though startled to wake up from an unexpected flash of sleep while behind the wheel of a car.
Hoss was still foggy himself, though that narcotic feeling quickly wore off. He felt lucky that he’d had enough presence of mind to lunge for that lever when he did. At the precise moment when the divers’ lives depended on their ability to make fast, smart decisions, Hoss had every reason to believe they had all been suffering some form of oxygen deprivation from breathing that 8.9 percent air.
Even though humans cannot function without oxygen, we basically can’t conserve it either. Brain cells, which have a high metabolic rate, are always hungry for oxygen and will generally consume whatever’s around. As stress hormones kick in during high-pressure situations, the oxygen demand spikes214. When the supply of oxygen to neurons starts to dwindle, human brains can’t function like shipwreck victims rationing their few remaining bottles of water and cans of tuna fish. The brain cells continue to devour oxygen until the supply begins to dry up. When that happens, the synapses start to malfunction. As the cells’ oxygen supply gets exhausted, the executive functions governed by the brain’s prefrontal area weaken, making it more difficult to sense the consequences of dangerous actions. After enough oxygen deprivation, those brain cells simply die. Without oxygen, the human brain resembles a lit candle with a glass placed over it. The flame will dim and flicker before it finally fades out for good.
Hoss tried calling Tim but couldn’t get through. He figured Tim and Billy had stepped outside the Humvee to turn the valve that would switch everyone to the main backup HP supply. He spotted some water on the microphone attached to the comm wire and wondered if that had somehow fried the system, making it impossible for Tim to reach him.
Still, Hoss was taking no chances. He decided the excursion crew should pack up and head back to the Humvee. Problem was, they needed to take the boat with them, because their emergency air and manifold were inside it. And Hoss had done such a good job organizing all the gear in the boat that its total weight approached six hundred pounds—entirely too much for the guys to have to drag back with them when time was of the essence. Just one of those sixty-five-pound salad bowls took up nearly a third of the surface area in the well of the narrow boat, so Hoss had creatively jammed more pliable gear into the spaces around and on top of the plugs. Looking at the packed vessel now215, Riggs told Hoss, “If we’re bailing out, we need to get this stuff out of the boat.”
“You’re right,” Hoss said.
As Hoss unloaded, Riggs resumed the task he had started before he’d blacked out, coiling up his and DJ’s tangled hoses so they wouldn’t trip over each other. He was relieved to see how much more success he was having now that his head was clear. He sent DJ back into the five-foot-diameter final section of the tunnel, coiling hose behind him. Once DJ’s umbilical was straightened out, Riggs focused on his own, as DJ shifted his attention to helping Hoss unload the boat.
Everything was going well. Then, out of nowhere, Riggs’s facemask started free-flowing, leaving him unable to slow the hissing air that was rushing into his mouth. He knew this was a surefire way to burn through the one HP tank that all three divers were now relying on to stay alive. Riggs tried adjusting his regulator216, to no avail. He tried kinking the hose in the hopes that it would reset the system and stabilize the flow. Still no luck.
In desperation, he decided his only option was to kink off his umbilical and hold it, releasing it just a little bit every time he needed to inhale, and then kinking it back up every time he exhaled. Handling this task demanded almost all of his attention, so he couldn’t help with the boat. Instead, he stayed about ten feet behind Hoss and DJ as they began pushing the boat back toward the Humvees. In addition to handling his own airflow manually, Riggs focused on keeping everyone’s umbilicals from getting tangled up.
They had a lot of ground to cover, about eleven hundred feet of eerie, misty darkness. And they needed to make sure the boat they were pushing didn’t roll along the tunnel’s Jersey barriers and flip over. They realized they could move only so quickly.
As they got about halfway, Hoss, who had been keeping a nervous eye on the HP bottle’s pressure gauge, told everyone to stop. “Don’t panic,” he told Riggs and DJ. “Let’s take our time so we don’t overbreathe the system.”
After a nearly twenty-minute trek, they had made it to within 150 feet of the Humvees. Riggs whistled as loud as he could. No response. Hoss was the first to spot the white Humvee pickup in the distance. He had expected to find a hive of activity, with Billy and Tim standing beside the vehicles, shining their miner’s lamps, waiting to chew out the other guys for somehow having screwed up the communications system. Instead, there appeared to be no movement at all. Riggs whistled again.
Suddenly DJ yelled out, “Man down!” and sprinted ahead, his three-hundred-foot umbilical rapidly unspooling behind him, like a fire hose at the scene of a blaze.
DJ raced up to the white Humvee pickup and kept going, hustling even though he felt petrified by the stillness of the scene. He maneuvered himself along the tight space between the first vehicle and the Jersey-barrier sidewall to get past the trailer and finally make it to the second Humvee, the gray wagon, which was pointed west, back toward the shaft. There, on the tunnel floor next to the passenger’s door, he found Billy, in his tan coveralls, with his facemask on. His legs were underneath the Hummer, as though he had stepped out of the vehicle, turned back to face it, and then accidentally slid right under it. His torso was at a forty-five-degree angle, pinned against the curved bottom of the Jersey barrier. The light on his hardhat was shining toward the tunnel ceiling.
As DJ knelt down beside Billy, he could see that his friend’s eyes were open. But there was nothing in them. He tried shaking Billy to get a reaction, but there was no response. He needed to tilt Billy’s head back to open his airway, but the space between the Humvee and the sidewall was too tight to give him enough leverage. He grabbed Billy by the waist and slid his legs farther under the Hummer until he was lying flat. Then he put his arm under Billy’s neck and shifted his head back.
DJ wanted to rip off his facemask and start giving Billy mouth-to-mouth. But he knew from his training that if he did that in the oxygen-starved tunnel, after a few breaths he’d be lying unconscious next to his friend. That would do neither of them any good. It was like what the flight attendants always said during their safety announcements before takeoff—reminding passengers to affix their own oxygen mask before helping anyone else with theirs. Logically, it made perfect sense, but in the moment of crisis, was a father really going to feel morally right if he took time to put on his own mask while his terrified four-year-old daughter stared at him, waiting for help?
With mouth-to-mouth out of the question, DJ turned to the next-best thing. There was a purge button on the side of Billy’s facemask. When DJ pressed it, it forced a rush of air into Billy’s mouth and nose—sort of like mouth-to-mouth by remote control217. Then he turned to the jaw joints on the side of Billy’s mask. Jamming his fingers into these joints gave DJ the ability to pry Billy’s mouth open. With that, he started doing chest compressions to try to force air into Billy’s lungs. When none of this produced a response, DJ furiously repeated the steps, desperate for a reaction.
214 (Chapter 10, note 24)
the oxygen demand spikes: “Stress—The Body’s Response,” University of Maryland Medical Center, February 13, 2009, www.umm.edu/patiented/articles/what_biological_effects_of_acute_stress_000031_2.htm#ixzz2N7EplWvW.
217 (Chapter 10, note 27)
mouth-to-mouth by remote controclass="underline" Trooper John O’Leary, “Interview of: Donald J. Gillis,” Massachusetts State Police Suffolk County Detectives, July 28, 1999,