Still, McCauley could detect no contrition in him. Instead, she sensed a detachment bordering on arrogance. The interview lasted nearly four hours. As she left the trailer, she told herself, I definitely need to talk to this guy again. Yet there were so many other people she felt she needed to speak with first. In the weeks that followed, she began working her way down the list.
Around the same time as that first interview with Harald, McCauley’s partner called her from the medical examiner’s office. It would take months for the full toxicology reports to come back, but after performing the autopsies on Billy and Tim, the ME’s office could now report a preliminary cause of death: asphyxia by exclusion of oxygen. The autopsies found gas bubbles282 in the vessel areas of both brains, which could suggest excess nitrogen bubbling out of the tissue. McCauley’s partner mentioned one strange discovery. The ME had found what she called an ulcer on Tim’s left foot, a two-and-a-half-inch-long-by-one-and-a-half-inch-wide section around his big toe where the skin and a good part of the bone had worn away. “What is that all about?” McCauley asked. None of the surviving divers had mentioned it. She added it to her growing list of questions that needed answers.
In the weeks after the accident, McCauley became a regular visitor to Deer Island, where she had secured a locked storage garage to hold evidence. She met there with a man named Tim Reading, who was the safety manager for Airgas Northeast, the company that had supplied the tanks of liquid gas and HP air. After inspecting the setup and the Humvees, Reading rattled off a host of examples of its poor design283. The valves bumped up against one another. The disabled interior dome lights in the Humvee, while helping to conserve battery power, had made it much harder for the divers to monitor the mixer and accurately note the levels. The process for measuring the oxygen content of the breathing air was unreliable, and the access to the backup air supplies was poor.
McCauley was disturbed by Reading’s findings, though she reminded herself that he represented a company that had served as a supplier and therefore held some potential liability. McCauley realized she needed a diving expert who was an entirely neutral party. She and her OSHA counterparts found the person they were looking for at the U.S. Navy. Dr. Marie Knafelc was a leading authority on diving and the senior medical officer of the navy’s Experimental Diving Unit, based in Panama City, Florida. It didn’t take long for the navy physician, whose Slovenian name was tricky to pronounce (Kah-NAY-fulls), to show up on Deer Island. Although Hoss had already returned home to Idaho and Riggs to Nevada, McCauley was grateful that DJ was still close by. He agreed to come back to help Knafelc understand the original operation.
McCauley was impressed that for all her credentials, the navy doctor was a straight shooter like herself. When Knafelc inspected the sophisticated oxygen-injection system that each Humvee had been equipped with, then compared it to the improvised mixed-gas breathing system the divers had been given, she couldn’t hide her disgust. “Oh my God,” she said at one point. “They cared more about that Humvee than they did about the divers.” She told McCauley that she would reserve final judgment until returning to Florida to review her notes and write a full report. But McCauley had little doubt which way it would fall.
Based on her growing knowledge of the events leading up to the incident, the detective knew she needed to reinterview Harald. He was clearly the man behind the curtain. And yet she was becoming just as convinced that ultimate responsibility would not end with him.
McCauley felt as though she’d been sucker-punched.
At 9:20 on a mid-August morning in 1999, after she’d been working the investigation for nearly a month, she found herself in the conference room of OSHA’s regional office. Her state police partner was there with her, as was the woman who had become another partner for the purposes of the tunnel probe, OSHA’s Elena Finizio. While the state police were in charge of the criminal probe, the federal workplace safety agency was conducting its own investigation mainly to assess employer responsibility for the deaths. Because the witnesses were the same, and because OSHA had expertise that the state cops didn’t, McCauley had been collaborating extensively with Finizio, and their styles seemed compatible.
They were in the conference room to interview key managers for contractor Kiewit, construction manager Kaiser, and project designer PB. If it struck someone like McCauley, who’d never gone to engineering school or even been scuba diving, that Harald’s Norwesco plan should have flunked the common-sense test, how could it not have been more obvious to people with extensive industry experience? So she asked the managers how they could have gone along with Harald’s plan, which relied on divers using portable “supplied air,” when OSHA regulations made it clear that a “mechanical ventilation” system like the bag line was mandatory whenever there were workers in the tunnel.
“You’re aware,” one of the managers replied, “that OSHA was consulted long before the divers went in, aren’t you?” He explained that officials with Kiewit and Norwesco had met with several OSHA officials284, in this same agency conference room, back in July 1998, a full year before the divers drove the Humvees into the tunnel. During that meeting, they had handed OSHA managers copies of Harald’s plan. Although the plan listed liquid gas as only one of several sources of breathing air, it was abundantly clear that the divers would be relying exclusively on supplied air—and not on mechanical ventilation—for their mission.
McCauley thought, This is a joke, right? She turned to Finizio and asked, “Is this true?”
Finizio hesitated but did acknowledge that OSHA people were involved in some capacity, although she was not aware of the details.
As proud as McCauley was of her detective skills, she knew she lacked a poker face. Now she was helpless to mask the apoplexy surging inside her. Granted, no one at OSHA had hatched the crazy plan that led to the diver deaths. And it seemed clear to her that Finizio herself hadn’t been complicit—she was a good investigator whose involvement had begun only after the fatal accident. Nonetheless, unlike McCauley, Finizio wasn’t hearing about this early OSHA involvement for the first time.
McCauley had been deferring to OSHA’s technical knowledge and sharing all her crime scene materials. Now she wondered: Who could she trust? She knew that the longer this investigation went on, the more lawyered-up the key people were getting. She also knew everyone’s deniability would become more plausible if they were able to show that they had given a preview of their plans to the government’s gatekeepers.
Later that day McCauley fired off an angry letter285 to Brenda Gordon, OSHA’s area director, demanding an explanation. Gordon’s defense286—that OSHA did not have statutory power to approve plans—struck McCauley as utterly unpersuasive. The detective decided she needed to keep some daylight between her and the federal safety agency.
In December, the medical examiner’s toxicology reports and final autopsy results for Billy and Tim crossed McCauley’s desk. No drugs had been found in either diver’s body, and the ME could confirm the preliminary report from back in the summer. Billy and Tim had died as a result of asphyxia287 when air rich in nitrogen and starved of oxygen had flowed into their facemasks. They had been killed quickly, while trying to complete a task. Evidently that was why Tim had been found with his shoulders turned to the back seat and why Billy had been found lying on his back on the tunnel floor.
282 (Chapter 14, note 3)
The autopsies found gas bubbles: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Timothy Nordeen Autopsy Report, July 22, 1999.
283 (Chapter 14, note 4)
Reading rattled off a host of examples of its poor design: Timothy Reading (Airgas Northeast safety and compliance manager) to Mary McCauley, July 30, 1999.
284 (Chapter 14, note 5)
Kiewit and Norwesco had met with several OSHA officials: Brenda Gordon (OSHA area director) to Mary McCauley, September 15, 1999.
285 (Chapter 14, note 6)
McCauley fired off an angry letter: Mary McCauley to Brenda Gordon, August 12, 1999.
286 (Chapter 14, note 7)
Gordon’s defense: Brenda Gordon to Mary McCauley, September 15, 1999.
287 (Chapter 14, note 8)
Billy and Tim had died as a result of asphyxia: Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner, Nordeen Autopsy Report.