Following the emergency response triggered by DJ’s first call, news of the accident began radiating to other key players in the project. MWRA chief Doug MacDonald received a call from an aide who said gravely, “I’ve got some bad news. We have two divers in the tunnel who are unconscious.” MacDonald was incredulous. No! he told himself. Do I get to wake up from this dream now? This is not happening. His vow hadn’t simply been to guide the tunnel and harbor cleanup project to completion. It had been to do it without losing any more lives. After calling Judge Mazzone, the cleanup overseer, to notify him of the accident, MacDonald headed straight for Deer Island to get his updates firsthand.
Dave Corkum, the tunnel manager who had jousted for years with contractor Kiewit over the plugs and insisted that they not be removed before the main utilities, had taken a rare day off on this Wednesday. He had just finished coaching his son’s hockey game when he got the call on his two-way radio. The message said only, “There’s been an accident in the tunnel.” He hurriedly dropped his boys off at a friend’s house and then headed straight for the island. In neighboring Winthrop, he turned onto a street to find two unmarked police cars, with their lights flashing, traveling ahead of him. Corkum sensed those cops were heading to the same place he was. So he pulled up behind the second car, keeping pace as it barreled along the narrow side streets leading to the island.
When news of the accident came in to the Local 56 union hall, business agent Dan Kuhs was the one who took the call. Instantly, he remembered his visit to Tap’s yard. That day was the first and last time Kuhs had ever seen Harald, but he recalled how the engineer had proudly showed off the exotic breathing system, pointing out all the redundant safety mechanisms he had incorporated into it. The bad news coming in now from Deer Island was that two men were down in the tunnel. But as a veteran diver himself, Kuhs was sure of two things. First, that exotic breathing system, despite all its redundant safety features, had to be at least partly to blame. Second, given how far out into the tunnel the two unconscious guys had been, they both had to be dead.
Riggs knew they were getting closer, and making better time than expected, even if he still couldn’t see any lights in the distance. Just a little while earlier, all three of the guys had felt a fog of what seemed to be their certain demise settle over them. Riggs sensed his fog lifting, and he started thinking about what would await them once they made it back to the shaft.
With his hands on the wheel, he turned to Hoss and DJ and said, “Let’s stick together.” When they get to the shaft, he said, “don’t let anyone separate us.” The others nodded in agreement.
The base of the shaft might have been near, but it still wouldn’t be easy to get there. Riggs spotted a deep dip in the path of the tunnel, where the standing water was at its highest. Going through it was like driving along a low-lying roadway after it had been washed out in a torrential downpour. The driver needed to operate with a delicate balance of gusto and restraint. Too little power, and the Humvee would stall. Too much, and it would spin out. Riggs carefully made it through, although water splashed all around the vehicle.
Half a mile later Hoss turned to Riggs and asked him to hit the brakes. “We need to check on the guys,” he said. With all that water they’d just gone through, Riggs agreed it was a good idea.
Hoss was thinking about more than just the water. His mind had flashed back to a job a couple of years earlier, when Roger had dispatched him to a hydro plant in Montana. When he arrived, he had learned the nature of his assignment. He had the dreadful task of searching for the body of a worker who had tried to jump out of a collapsing crane, only to get hit in the head by the boom and never make it out of the water. After two days of searching, Hoss and his fellow divers had managed to find the body. If that chore hadn’t been draining enough, Hoss was taken aback by what was waiting for them when they returned to the plant. A scrum of photographers from the local media had arrived to snap pictures of the recovered body. The experience had left Hoss nauseated.
Fearing that there might be camera crews waiting on Deer Island, he got out of the Humvee determined to preserve Tim and Billy’s dignity. DJ quickly followed, while Riggs remained behind the wheel, keeping the Humvee running. Hoss found the bodies lying on the trailer more or less where he had left them, though they had been jostled and sloshed around during the hellish ride back. Tim’s leg was hanging over the side of the trailer. As Hoss bent down to move it, his heart sank. On the side of Tim’s left boot, a long gash of the tan leather was missing. Inside of that, a two-and-a-half-inch-long section of flesh from his big toe was gone. Part of the bone literally had been ground down, like a freshly sanded piece of oak.
Hoss felt like crying. Instead, he straightened Tim’s body and closed Billy’s mouth. “Let’s cover them,” he told DJ. “I don’t want them all splayed out.” So he and DJ unfolded a couple of blankets and gently placed them over the two bodies. Then they climbed onto the trailer and yelled to Riggs that they would ride back there, holding the bodies, for the rest of the drive to the shaft. They weren’t going to let anything else happen to Tim and Billy.
Paramedic Keith Wilson stood on the ramp next to Tap. It seemed like hours since Tap’s last communication with the divers, even if it hadn’t been very long. Finally the headlights of the Hummer came into view. Still, given the necessarily slow pace of the vehicle through all the standing water, it took a while for it to make it to the ramp.
Wilson had been a paramedic long enough to know how infinitesimal the divers’ chances of survival had become. He had been waiting with Tap for the Humvee for nearly an hour and a half. Still, he refused to give up hope altogether. As the Humvee drew closer, he expected to see the other divers hunched over the fallen guys, furiously doing chest compressions. Instead, when the trailer came into view, Wilson saw the bodies covered up with blankets. He was upset. Why had these guys given up?
At 3239:36 p.m., Riggs navigated the Humvee up the ramp, threw it into park, and cut the engine. Wilson and his partner rushed toward the trailer with their backboards and equipment, and Tap followed along. “What the hell happened?” Tap asked the divers.
Even if there was almost no shot of reviving these guys now, Wilson knew it was always crucial for the friends and family of a victim to see evidence that the paramedics had done everything in their power to try to save their loved one. Only then, Wilson had learned, could they hope to begin the healing process. For him, the hardest emergency calls were those when he’d show up at a home to find a baby dead in her crib, evidently from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. As devastating as those cases were, he’d learned how important it was for grief-stricken parents to see their baby removed from the house, worked on fully and aggressively, and pronounced dead at the hospital, rather than having the paramedics cover the baby in resignation right there in the family’s nursery. Otherwise the parents would probably never set foot in that nursery again. Similarly, in this case, he figured these divers might never enter another tunnel if they didn’t see the paramedics doing everything they could to revive their buddies and get them to the hospital.