Tap saw Harald sitting like a statue at his wooden table now, staring at his laptop and radar screen, saying nothing. Finally, at 1:55 p.m., a few minutes after Tap had shown up, the mine phone rang again. Watching Harald pick up the receiver, Tap moved in closer to try to hear the voice on the other end of the line. The diver said something about how they were “coming out,” something about how the guys were “still unconscious233.”
Tap suddenly felt unmoored, a surge of dread and confusion building up inside him. Some kind of disaster had struck in the tunnel, though he couldn’t tell how bad it was. Instantly, he decided he wasn’t going to wait around the trailer, hoping Harald would toss him a few more crumbs of information. He grabbed one of the VHF handheld radios, rushed over to the man cage, and signaled for the crane operator to lower him down the shaft.
At the base of the shaft, he tried to get through to the divers on their radios. Since he’d been the one to purchase those handhelds, he knew their range was limited to somewhere between three and four miles. So he’d need to wait until the Humvee got closer before he had any hope of connecting with the divers.
A few minutes later, Tap heard a noise and turned to see the man cage being lowered once again down to the base of the shaft. The metal door swung open and a pair of paramedics hustled out, pushing a stretcher and a cart with breathing tubes and other life-support equipment. The paramedics looked almost like twins: a pair of young, fit guys with short brown hair, though one of them kept his hair spiky and the other, closely cropped. The guy with the military cut approached Tap, introduced himself as Keith, and asked for the essential information.
Keith Wilson and his partner had been driving around Boston in their ambulance, having just cleared a case at Massachusetts General Hospital, when the call came through on their radio. The fact that the call had been preceded by an extremely long tone, followed by a lengthy list of units being told to respond, immediately conveyed the gravity of the situation. All the dispatcher had said, however, was that there were people “trapped, below grade,” on Deer Island. He and his partner, Steve Fleming, had been out to Deer Island a few times over the past couple of years, but those calls had been for routine matters. This one sounded a lot more serious. They made a U-turn and headed for the island, knowing they’d need to navigate around a bunch of narrow side roads before they could get there. Along the way, Wilson found himself wondering what they were going to find.
They arrived on Deer Island a few minutes after two o’clock, with the sun strong and high in the late-July sky. Several units from the Boston Fire Department were already there. Wilson spotted a deputy fire chief huddling with some “white hats,” construction supervisors wearing white hard hats, surrounded by sandhogs in yellow hard hats. There was an air of barely controlled panic.
The chief brought Wilson up to speed. Down in the tunnel, hundreds of feet below grade and miles out under the ocean, two divers had been found unconscious by three other divers who were now trying to escape with their lives. “We’re not sending personnel down there,” the fire chief told the paramedic. There was no fire, no smoke, no wall collapse, he explained, so essential medical personnel were the only ones needed. “It’s a medical case.”
Wilson was in no position to question authority. He was just twenty-eight years old and had been a licensed paramedic for only a couple of years, after having started as an EMT. During his time working for Boston Emergency Medical Service, he’d responded to calls in the sketchiest sections of the city. He once showed up to the scene of a reported homicide even before the cops got there, finding a warm body slumped over in a recliner and the smell of gun smoke still hanging in the air. Another time, when he’d bent down to tend to a stabbing victim, the guy had lunged at him with a knife. As scary as those situations had been, Wilson had always felt equipped to take care of himself. But this?
He was being asked to go down a 420-foot shaft leading to a forbidding tunnel to care for two men who were unconscious. At least everyone was saying they were unconscious. Wilson knew that if these divers had been deprived of oxygen for long, they weren’t unconscious. At best, they were in cardiac arrest. As seriously as he took his job, he couldn’t avoid asking himself: Is there some mystery gas filling up the tunnel? Is there a chance that I’m going to be the next victim?
He and his partner knew that once they went down the shaft, there would be no coming back up for more equipment. So into the man cage they packed whatever they thought they might need—endotracheal tubes, defibrillators, IVs, a cardiac monitor, as well as a stretcher. The crane operators had set up a bigger man cage than the cramped one that had been used most often during the plugpulling job. This one was roomy enough to fit Wilson and his partner and their equipment as well as another pair of paramedics from Boston MedFlight, whose chopper had just landed on Deer Island. If there turned out to be more than two victims, they would have enough paramedics to handle them. If it was just the two, each of the fallen men would have a pair working to revive him.
The white hats on site assured Wilson and the other paramedics that there was plenty of ambient air at the base of the shaft, so they would be fine to wait down there without relying on any breathing apparatus themselves. Still, as he and his partner were lowered in the cage, Wilson was concerned. What if some bad air makes its way to the shaft? What if the cable holding up this man cage breaks? He knew better than to put words to these worries. Instead, he looked over to his partner and said, “You all right? You ready for this?” When his partner nodded, Wilson decided humor might ease the tension. As the metal cage began its slow descent, he cracked, “Going down? What floor?”
When they made it to the base, Wilson spotted a white hat standing on the ramp, cradling a handheld radio. He went over and introduced himself. The manager, who looked distraught, said his name was Tap.
Wilson was struck by how cold and damp it was at the base of the shaft. The temperature was about thirty degrees cooler than topside. As bad as the indications were for the survival of the unconscious divers, given the ticking clock and the miles the Humvee still had to travel to make it back to the shaft, Wilson took the uncomfortable conditions as a good sign. Cold temperatures can help to preserve a body, providing a shred of promise for even those rescue attempts with the longest odds. As the saying in paramedic circles goes, “They’re not dead until they’re warm and dead.”
Paramedics are trained to remain optimistic, even in the face of dire indicators. And for good reason. There were real cases in the medical literature that supported the “warm and dead” aphorism. They fell into a category called cold water immersion, where people submerged in frigid waters managed to survive. In those cases, facial contact with cold water triggered something called the mammalian diving reflex, which shuts the body down, effectively freezing the second hand on the stopwatch of death.
The most unbelievable of these cases had occurred just two months before the divers showed up on Deer Island. It involved a twenty-nine-year-old skier in Norway. As she made her way down the slopes234, she crashed through the ice into a flooded gully. With her head wedged under thick sheets of ice, and her fellow skiers unable to free her, she found an air pocket and managed to stay conscious for forty minutes before giving out. After another forty minutes, her friends were finally able to extricate her, though by then she had long been clinically dead. By the time doctors managed to revive her, her heart had been stopped for nearly three hours235. But the frigid water had saved her, lowering her internal body temperature by almost 50 percent. The mammalian diving reflex protected her236 by rapidly redirecting blood flow away from her limbs and skin and toward her vital organs. Sending more of the remaining oxygen to her brain and heart had staved off the neural devastation that accompanies oxygen deprivation. The skier, whose stunning story would be detailed in the British medical journal The Lancet, would go on to spend more than a month breathing off a ventilator237. But her recovery would be so complete that eventually she even returned to the slopes.
234 (Chapter 11, note 15)
As she made her way down the slopes: “Skier Revived from Clinical Death,” BBC News, January 28, 2000, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/620609.stm.
235 (Chapter 11, note 16)
stopped for nearly three hours: John Naish, “Can Humans Hibernate?”
236 (Chapter 11, note 17)
The mammalian diving reflex protected her: John Rennie, “How the Dive Reflex Extends Breath Holding,”
237 (Chapter 11, note 18)
a month breathing off a ventilator: “Skier Revived from Clinical Death,” BBC News.