13. This Crazy Idea
Standing on a hill in a pristine harborside park, Doug MacDonald let his eyes scan the horizon. The park was on Nut Island, a peninsula in Quincy, the same south-of-Boston city where nearly two decades earlier a lawyer had stumbled across sewage during his early-morning beachside jog and ended up triggering the court-ordered cleanup of Boston Harbor. From the spot where smelly holding tanks had once stood, the MWRA chief now could gaze out at a sprawling expanse offering a mile of paved trails and unobstructed views of the Boston skyline. In place of the foul tanks, there was a single, essentially odorless pump-house building253. It received the sewage from toilets flushed across communities south of Boston and then sent it on to Deer Island through the new five-mile-long Inter-Island Tunnel, which had been up and running for more than a year254. If only MacDonald could say the same for the other massive tunnel built on his watch.
On this Friday in mid-September 1999, nearly two months after the deaths of Billy and Tim, MacDonald sat under a tent with a hundred people who had gathered to celebrate the rebirth of Nut Island. One Quincy official told the crowd, “This place is like an instant hospital255 that offers eco-environmental care.” Whether you’re walking the trails or just sitting and watching the boats bobbing in the harbor, the man said, “All your cares just drift away.”
The magic was somehow not working on MacDonald.
When he had taken the job as head of the water and sewer agency seven years earlier, he had arrived as a neophyte manager unschooled in megaproject public construction. He had been able to surmount one hurdle after another as he steered the unwieldy project to its conclusion. The stress had left its mark on the workaholic whose brown hair was turning gray. But he felt it had all been worth it. Sure, the Deer Island tunnel was on track to cost $100 million more256 than its original $202 million estimate. But the price tag for the overall harbor cleanup—thanks to some significant cutbacks in scope and better-than-expected contractor pricing—had been shaved from its early $6 billion estimate down to $4 billion. Shellfish beds257, after years of having raw sewage dumped on them, were open again. Swimmers, after years of avoiding the city’s beaches for fear of contracting hepatitis, were returning in large numbers.
All this was thanks to the dramatically improved sewage treatment process at the new Deer Island plant, and to the decision, years earlier, to end all the stomach-churning sludge dumping into the harbor. Yet the MWRA was still forced to dump the treated sewer water directly into the harbor every day, leaving it cloudy and producing algae blooms258. MacDonald knew that this would all change once the Deer Island tunnel was up and running. But that couldn’t happen until somebody figured out how to get those cursed plugs out.
Now, as he looked out at the crowd in Quincy, MacDonald couldn’t help but think of the ceremony he should have been presiding over. Despite all the headaches, all the interim milestones met and missed over the years, September 1999 had always been the ultimate deadline for the Boston Harbor cleanup. Although the schedule had been set long before MacDonald assumed his post, he was bound by it. Like a prisoner making scratches on his cell wall, he had come to view it as his release date, the time when he and his agency might finally be freed from their status as defendants. Ever since the diver deaths, though, the tunnel had been in limbo. As he looked out from under the tent, the light rain that had been falling turned into a downpour259.
MacDonald had been trying to walk a careful line between respecting the loss suffered by the divers’ families and relentlessly working to get the project back on track. A few days before this Nut Island dedication, he had told a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, “We may be many weeks away260 or months away from filling the tunnel.” Truthfully, he had no idea how far off the end might be. What’s more, the tunnel critics whom he had managed to vanquish years earlier were using the diver deaths as an opportunity to reload. The same Monitor article quoted the cofounder of an antitunnel citizens’ group reviving concerns about how all that treated sewer water released into Massachusetts Bay might consign the relatively pristine waterway to the same degradation that had ruined Boston Harbor. Several scientific studies had concluded that the whales and the fish and the fauna living in the wide-open waters of the Atlantic should be fine. What’s more, the MWRA261 had agreed to spend millions of dollars every year testing the tunnel discharges to ensure that they weren’t harming marine life. The monitoring program, which environmental officials called the most extensive in the nation, would routinely test discharges for 158 pollutants and collect some two million pieces of data annually. Still, the critics remained unconvinced.
With some work, MacDonald felt confident that he could beat back those critics once again. But he had to admit he had no idea how the project would be completed. The answers to even the most fundamental questions—such as who could authorize a new plug-removal plan—eluded him. State police and OSHA were conducting separate probes into the deaths of Billy and Tim, and OSHA wasn’t letting anyone back into the tunnel until workers could survive inside it without needing to bring along breathing equipment.
After months of fruitless meetings, MacDonald came to an important conclusion. As much energy as he’d spent aggressively fencing with Kiewit CEO Ken Stinson over the contractor’s claims for more money, MacDonald figured that this was not the time to haggle. The price of inaction would be far higher than the price of any plug-removal project. Once the plugs were out, they could worry about who would pay what. Until then, he decided, the MWRA would cover the costs to keep the project moving.
In light of OSHA’s stance, MacDonald’s team seemed to have no choice but to install a new ventilation system similar to the massive bag line that had supplied air to the sandhogs during tunnel construction. But it had taken more than a year for crews to dismantle and remove that bulky system. It would probably take crews six months to install a new bag line and then remove the plugs. If it took them an additional six months to dismantle the new line, that would mean adding a full year to the schedule of a project that was already woefully late. What’s more, for the six months that it would take to remove the new bag line after the plugs were gone, crews would be working in the tunnel with no secondary protection from the ocean above. The MWRA had found that option unacceptable years earlier, when Kiewit had proposed yanking out the plugs while it was pulling down the old bag line. So how could it be acceptable now?
253 (Chapter 13, note 1)
essentially odorless pump-house building: Ray McEachern, “Houghs Neck Advocate, Project Praised; Nut Island Officially Joins National Park,”
254 (Chapter 13, note 2)
running for more than a year: MWRA, “A History of the Sewer System: Massachusetts Water Resource Authority,” www.mwra.state.ma.us/03sewer/html/sewhist.htm.
255 (Chapter 13, note 3)
“This place is like an instant hospital”: McEachern, “Houghs Neck Advocate, Project Praised.”
256 (Chapter 13, note 4)
on track to cost $100 million more: Kiewit executives, interviews by author, 2011; Ria Convery (MWRA communications director), interview by author, 2010.
257 (Chapter 13, note 5)
Shellfish beds: Beth Daley, “For Harbor Cleanup, a Light at the End of the Tunnel; Sewage Outfall Pipe Prepared for Use,”
258 (Chapter 13, note 6)
leaving it cloudy and producing algae blooms: David Holmstrom, “Pulling the Plug,”
259 (Chapter 13, note 7)
the light rain that had been falling turned into a downpour: McEachern, “Houghs Neck Advocate, Project Praised.”
260 (Chapter 13, note 8)
“We may be many weeks away”: Quoted in Holmstrom, “Pulling the Plug.”
261 (Chapter 13, note 9)
What’s more, the MWRA: Peter J. Howe, “Permit Clears the Way for Mass. Bay Sewage Outfall Pipe,”