That fall, during a blue-sky brainstorming session with his lieutenants and engineering consultants, MacDonald tossed out a question. Unlike most of the others in the room, he had no framed engineering degree, so he asked it with some tentativeness: Is there any way we can use one of those diffuser heads to get air into the tunnel from the other side? He worried that the question might be laughed off for its naivete. Instead, one of his top engineers said the idea262 of off-shore ventilation was promising.
It owed its viability, in large part, to the work the divers had done before Billy and Tim were killed. Because the divers had managed to remove three of the fifty-five safety plugs, the first three risers now offered a direct connection between the tunnel and the seabed. Before long, MacDonald’s offhand question triggered a rush of sketches and calculations by a team that included two of the tunnel managers who’d battled Kiewit during construction, Kaiser’s Dave Corkum and his counterpart with designer PB, Eldon Abbott. No one was sure if this unproven approach could work. How could they even open up one of the diffuser heads to pump in good air without letting ocean water flood into the tunnel? Still, after months of despair, at least there was finally some hope.
In addition to the engineering challenges, they faced a huge potential roadblock: the MWRA would have to get Kiewit officials to embrace the idea. None of them had been present at the blue-sky meeting, and MacDonald was fairly sure that they wouldn’t greet the suggestion as enthusiastically as everyone else had. In fact, Kiewit might simply walk away from the tunnel job. If the MWRA couldn’t get the contractor on board with some sort of solution, MacDonald knew his agency would be stuck in neutral. Given the enormous stakes of the harbor cleanup, the relentless demands of the calendar, and the revived campaign by the tunnel’s critics, he also understood that neutral really meant reverse.
Back in Omaha, Ken Stinson had a lot more on his plate than just one endless tunnel out in Boston that somehow refused to get finished. A year earlier he’d been promoted from CEO of Kiewit’s construction group, which had seen the most successful year in its history, to chairman and CEO of the whole corporation. At fifty-seven, Stinson was running a company that had posted $3 billion in revenue, had no long-term debt, and had just made the Fortune 500 list for the first time in its history.
But it weighed heavily on Stinson’s bald head that he hadn’t been able to help his team get the Deer Island project right. In the decade since the tunnel job began, one of Kiewit’s junior partners263 on the Deer Island project, a San Francisco company called Atkinson, had filed for bankruptcy. On the bright side, partly as a result of all the trips Stinson had made to Boston to negotiate with MacDonald, the MWRA had agreed to pay Kiewit an additional $34 million. But Kiewit’s separate $62 million “rock too hard” and $60 million “water too wet” claims were still pending before an independent review board. After the MWRA’s auditors reviewed Kiewit’s books, they confirmed that the contractor was perhaps $80 million in the hole264 on the job. Moreover, because of the disastrous end to the diver mission, it wasn’t clear how, when, or even if this project would ever get finished.
Now word was filtering back to Omaha that the MWRA gang had been spitballing about an experimental approach to ventilate the tunnel from offshore. MacDonald had apparently tossed around the idea with some of the same managers Kiewit had been battling for years. Stinson was a civil engineer to his core, so the challenge of finding solutions to towering problems spoke deeply to him. But so did his common sense. He felt Kiewit had been burned more than once by the MWRA and its consultants, and he wasn’t about to let his team get too close to the flame again.
Stinson even felt scorch marks on his own skin. Back during the height of the “memo wars” in 1997, when his managers on the Deer Island job had been warning of catastrophe and planning a public relations assault by PowerPoint against the MWRA, Stinson had been the one to veto that offensive. While he’d agreed with his managers that the only logical sequence would be to remove the safety plugs while the tunnel still had ventilation, it had become clear back then that the MWRA and its advisers were not going to allow it. So Kiewit had the choice of either walking off the job or engaging in a high-wire campaign to shame its client. Neither approach, Stinson had decided, would have been up to Kiewit standards. Instead, the Vietnam veteran had chosen a path of deescalation. As crazy as Kiewit managers had felt the idea was to send a dive team into the tunnel, the Omaha powerhouse’s expertise was in construction, not exotic breathing systems. Stinson had decided his lieutenants should seek input from some experienced diving companies. That had led them to Harald Grob and Norwesco. That, in turn, had led to the experimental mixed-gas diving operation, which had left Billy Juse and Tim Nordeen dead.
Now, although Kiewit couldn’t even access the tunnel without permission from OSHA, it still bore responsibility for finding a resolution. Anyone who suspected that Kiewit might walk away from the job clearly did not know Stinson. However, with the deep financial hole that Kiewit officials found themselves in, and the enormous legal exposure they faced as a result of having consented to someone else’s sequence, Stinson was going to make sure his company was more cautious than ever. He wasn’t going to ignore his gut again.
Not long after MacDonald’s blue-sky meeting, a thickset middle-aged engineer named Dave Beck began hearing talk about the stymied Deer Island tunnel job. Beck was once again working in Boston after having logged several years on a tunnel in Hong Kong. But he knew all about Deer Island. In the early 1990s, he had served as a project manager for the installation of those fifty-five risers and diffuser heads, logging lots of hours on the giant jack-up barge that had been parked in Massachusetts Bay. Now, searching for his next assignment, he picked up the phone and dialed Eldon Abbott, the veteran project manager for PB who had become a fixture on the Boston job.
Abbott told him there were three ideas265 being tossed around for how to remove the remaining fifty-two plugs. The first option was to send crews in once again on supplied air, but OSHA was standing firm against that. The second was to install a new bag line along the entire tunnel, but Kiewit wanted $30 million to do that and it would present all kinds of problems relating to its removal. The third was what he called “this crazy idea,” which had come out of a brainstorming session. It called for the tunnel to be vented not from the shaft side but out at sea, by tapping into one of those fifty-five diffuser heads. Sitting in his office, staring at the framed photo he kept of a diffuser head, Beck smiled and said, “Eldon, that’s not a crazy idea.”
Beck wasted no time in reaching out to the joint venture partners who’d been behind the riser-installation job, to gauge their interest in being reenlisted. He asked the owner of the IB-909 if that three-thousand-ton monster barge would be available. The company told him the barge was off the coast of Venezuela at the time, but for the right price, it could be brought back to Boston.
A few months and lots of engineering sketches later, Beck and the reconstituted joint venture sent the MWRA a formal proposal for venting the tunnel from the IB-909 barge parked in the waters over riser number 3. The MWRA liked the plan but stressed that nothing could happen until they figured out a way to get Kiewit on board.
262 (Chapter 13, note 10)
one of his top engineers said the idea: MacDonald says Ken Chin, senior construction manager for the MWRA, played a crucial role in taking his offhand idea to the next level.
263 (Chapter 13, note 11)
one of Kiewit’s junior partners: “Bankruptcy Claims on Guy F. Atkinson,”
264 (Chapter 13, note 12)
the contractor was perhaps $80 million in the hole: MWRA, “Boston Harbor Project CP-282 Effluent Outfall Tunnel Status Report for the Office of the State Auditor,” 4-5.
265 (Chapter 13, note 13)
Abbott told him there were three ideas: Tom Walsh, “No Quick Fix for Troubled Tunnel; Completing Sewage Outfall Pipe Where 2 Workers Died Will Add Millions to Project’s Cost,”