Heading toward the rising sun, the white helicopter glided through the sky, leaving behind Deer Island with its hulking egg-shaped digesters. The chopper flew above the swarms of seagulls that hovered over an unusually large population of sailboats and yachts clogging the harbor. Fifteen miles east of the Boston coastline, and nearly ten miles east of Deer Island, the chopper landed in a familiar spot, on the helipad of the IB-909. The green and white shopping-plaza-size barge, jacked up above the Atlantic waters of Massachusetts Bay, was back where it had been eight years earlier. Deep below the rig, beneath about a hundred feet of water and sitting on the ocean floor, was the domed mushroom-shaped diffuser head for riser number 3.
Out of the chopper stepped Ron Kozlowski, DJ’s old buddy. The short, ponytailed veteran diver and ex-Navy SEAL had returned to help finish the job he had started nearly a decade earlier. Like project manager Dave Beck, Kozlowski had been here for the riser-installation operation back in 1991 and 1992. This trip effectively marked Kozlowski’s third tour with the project. The cocksure diver was grateful that he had trusted his instincts and quit Tap’s dive team just weeks before the plug-pulling operation was set to begin in the summer of 1999. Although the lack of penetration pay had been his loudest complaint back then, Kozlowski had also been sufficiently concerned about the soundness of the plan to give DJ his unforgettable “boogie board and.45” warning. Considering the wreckage of that doomed mission, though, Kozlowski took no pleasure in knowing his intuition had been right.
After the chopper took off, Kozlowski lingered on the helipad to take in the view. Then he retrieved his video camera274 from his backpack and hit the record button to preserve the memory. “Watching the Tall Ships come in,” he said, beginning his narration. “Awesome!” The flotilla of regal ships from ports around the world hadn’t sailed into Boston since the last time Kozlowski had been standing on the deck of the IB-909. “There’s the Russian vessel,” he said, training his lens on a ship with the portholes painted to look like gun ports. “Most people have to pay to see this.”
On the deck of a transport barge idling next to the IB-909 lay an enormous green pipe that was seven feet in diameter and about a hundred feet long. Attached to the bottom of the green pipe was a seventeen-foot-long white cone that flared out to a width of just over sixteen feet at its very end. Even if it was to function like a steel straw, the entire package had the look of a giant plunger.
With his video camera, Kozlowski slowly panned the steel pipe and cone. “This is the reason we’re here today,” he said, continuing his narration. “To install a one-hundred-ton vent tube that will inflate underneath the ocean, on top of a diffuser head to ventilate the tunnel.” The engineers had chosen the route of sucking the bad air out, rather than trying to pump good air in.
Despite a length that stretched along the entire deck of the barge, the green plunger was only one piece of the 172-foot-long vent pipe that would have to be lifted upright, as straight as a sequoia, and then be lowered through 120 feet of ocean water, so it could fit over the diffuser head that capped riser number 3. The job of preparing and lowering that pipe would largely be left to the crane operators and riggers. The divers had their own challenges in front of them.
Before long Kozlowski was sitting on a smaller vessel, in front of a bank of monitors and controls at the dive station, right beside a white decompression chamber. As dive superintendent for this job, Kozlowski spent most of his time manning the station, wearing a headset that kept him in contact with whichever worker was in the water.
The divers accomplished several complicated tasks before the giant steel straw was put into place. Making their way down to the ocean floor, they first cleaned the area around the domed diffuser head. Using an underwater vacuum cleaner called an airlift, they sucked up all the gravel backfill and debris around the diffuser head, so the straw’s white cone bottom would fit tightly over it. Next up, they had to take off the diffuser’s protective dome. The heavy acrylic topper wasn’t designed to be removed, so the divers had to cut it off, with all the precision they could manage, using an underwater chain saw. The last seal between the ocean and the tunnel was a manhole cover inside the diffuser head. They prepared to remove it by loosening its bolts and attaching a steel hoop to it.
Crews then lowered the 172-foot-long plunger—the green steel straw—into place, inflating two rubber inner tubes inside the rigid white cone at the base of the plunger. That created a watertight seal with the diffuser head. They pumped out all the water inside that seven-foot-wide pipe and bell, which stretched from the seafloor all the way up to the air above the ocean. Then they rigged a second pipe—this one was white and just four feet in diameter—and lowered it down into the center of the wider green pipe. This smaller white pipe would be the actual conduit for the tunnel ventilation.
With all that in place, a crane operator lowered a cable with a hook at the end, like a long fishing line, to latch on to the steel hoop the divers had installed on the manhole cover. A year earlier Riggs had removed the safety plug from inside riser number 3’s elbow. So this manhole cover—sitting just above the diffuser head’s discharge nozzles—truly was the final barrier between the tunnel and Massachusetts Bay. Because all the water had been pumped out of the vent pipe, the manhole cover could now be removed as well.
Once it was gone, crews on the IB-909 barge attached a powerful jet-engine fan to a T at the top of the white ventilation pipe. They flipped on the switch, and the waiting game began. The initial readings on the gauges at the base of the vent tube showed how hopelessly starved of oxygen the end of the tunnel and risers had been. Now crews would monitor those gauges, waiting for the oxygen levels to rise.
It was July 14 when they turned on the massive fan from the barge. The first plume of air to exit the giant straw had the disgusting color of rust, the exhaust of all the ferric oxide that had built up at the end of the tunnel. Like the smokestack in some unapologetic third-world factory, the rust-colored plume kept going and going, for more than a day. By July 17, though, the gauges told an incredible story. Shockingly, just three days after they had turned on the jet-engine fan, the tunnel was entirely refreshed. The powerful turbine had managed to remove all of the tunnel’s bad air by drawing fresh air from topside on Deer Island, sucking it down the 420-foot shaft, along the nine-and-a-half-mile-long tunnel, all the way up riser number 3, and finally out the vent pipe that was attached to the side of the jack-up barge. There was now plenty of oxygen in the ambient air of the tunnel, allowing workers to travel along its entire length without having to worry about any kind of breathing apparatus.
A team of sandhogs275 piled into a couple of the same Humvees that DJ and the other divers had used, and they began driving east toward the end of the tunnel. The jet-engine fan on the barge276 continued to spin, ensuring a consistent flow of good air from Deer Island all the way through the tunnel. The sandhogs’ first task, on July 18, was to reestablish the mine-phone communications line. Their second task, the following day, was to remove the white Humvee that DJ, Riggs, and Hoss had left more than nine miles into the tunnel, when they’d begun their race to get out alive. Then, at long last, the plug-pulling could resume. Fortunately for the sandhogs, Riggs and Billy had already done the hardest work, having crawled through the connector pipes to remove the plugs for risers 1, 2, and 3—the ones that were located the farthest from the shaft, in the tunnel’s most distant and cramped quarters.
274 (Chapter 13, note 22)
he retrieved his video camera: Videotape recording by Ron Kozlowski.
275 (Chapter 13, note 23)
A team of sandhogs: “Removing Safety Caps—Inside the Tunnel and Under the Sea,”
276 (Chapter 13, note 24)
The jet-engine fan on the barge: Dave Corkum, interview by author, March 2013.