McCauley walked in carrying a bulging box under each arm. The cartons contained memos and reports, photos and notebooks, VHS tapes and audiocassettes. The detective had arrived at this Boston office in the spring of 2000 to introduce herself to the woman who would be taking over the case. Joan Parker was the director of safety in the Massachusetts attorney general’s division of fair labor and business practices. McCauley’s supervisor had asked her only to brief Parker and share copies of her investigative materials. Right from the start, though, McCauley made it clear that she was too invested to simply dump and run.
Given the uphill battle the case faced, McCauley was hoping to be able to hand it over to a fearless field general who wouldn’t back down. As she gave Parker the once-over, she was worried. The woman struck her as a sort of hippy-dippy beatnik—the kind of brainy lefty who carried around organic produce in a reusable burlap sack, or drove a well-loved Volvo with a bumper sticker that read JUNG AT HEART; in other words, the kind of person who wouldn’t last long in a tough neighborhood like the one McCauley grew up in.
The two women seemed like complete opposites. With her unmistakable accent, rapid-fire speaking style, and don’t-even-try-to-snow-me posture, McCauley was Boston through and through. She kept a gun on her hip and her dirty-blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Parker, meanwhile, was a citizen of the world. Born in Peru, she’d been raised in a succession of exotic locales—Morocco, Panama, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Tall, with long wavy reddish-brown hair, she had a light voice and an artsy flair. At fifty-two, she was nearly two decades older than McCauley.
No matter, McCauley thought. You go to battle with the army you have. “This is outrageous!” she told Parker, launching into an overview of how powerful parties had off-loaded the enormous risk of the plug-pulling operation onto Harald and Norwesco, and then Harald had off-loaded it onto the actual divers.
After McCauley’s pitch, Parker began peppering her with probing questions that made it clear how much she’d already read up on the case. Despite McCauley’s initial fears about the woman and their obvious stylistic differences, she suddenly saw in Parker a kindred spirit. First impressions can be deceiving. Though it was true that Parker was a bit bohemian, she had a real toughness to her. She drove around in a stick-shift Ford pickup truck with no air-conditioning and a big, shaggy mutt riding with its head out the passenger window. The only sticker on the truck’s bumper read: MY DOG CAN LICK ANYONE.
When her boss had first asked her to look into the diver deaths, Joan Parker had been cautious. She knew how difficult it was to prove cases like this. She also knew that no special statutory enforcement powers would be available to the state attorney general. The only relevant statutes were those of common law, the same ones that the district attorney had determined were inadequate to charge Harald or anyone else. Prosecutors would have to prove criminal recklessness to support a charge of either homicide or manslaughter, since Massachusetts, unlike many other states, had no lesser statute of criminal negligence on the books. Still, she understood why the case had landed in her lap. The AG’s office, with a safety director and team of inspectors, had far greater expertise in workplace safety cases than did the DA. Although Parker was primarily focused on inspection and enforcement rather than prosecution, she could leverage her deep experience to make sure no avenue was overlooked during this second-round vetting. And as she read up on the case, she could feel it awaken a passion in her.
Nearly twenty years earlier, after graduating from Cornell with a degree in horticulture, Parker had been working as a plant researcher in a lab. Inexplicably, she and her coworkers began getting sick. Eventually she learned that a faulty ventilation system was exposing workers to the fumes from pesticides being tested in the lab. With her eyes opened about worker safety, she decided to change careers, ultimately moving to Boston to earn a graduate degree in industrial health and engineering at the Harvard School of Public Health.
In her many years in the field, investigating claims of child labor and unsafe working conditions, Parker had come to believe that too often employers were willing to sacrifice their employees’ wellbeing in pursuit of a dollar. She often felt she had very little power to stop them, besides writing up reports that employers could simply flick away like a fallen eyelash.
But when she found this animated state police detective sitting across the table from her, Parker felt invigorated. I love this woman! she told herself. Nonetheless she knew that a successful prosecution could not be built on passion alone.
As she began to marinate in the volumes of tunnel material, she had one important advantage. She’d actually been in the tunnel twice before—not just to the base of the shaft, like McCauley, but miles and miles in. Several years earlier she’d ventured in to evaluate complaints from sandhogs that the tunnel conditions were giving them respiratory ailments. It wasn’t lost on her that as utterly remote as she had found the tunnel to be, her visits had taken place when it still had good light, ample air, and a working transportation system. She could only imagine how the divers must have felt down there in dark desolation at the moment when their air supply went bad.
When she came across the audio recordings of Harald’s four-hour interview with McCauley and OSHA, she could scarcely believe what she heard. Despite taking heavy responsibility for the design of the system, Harald seemed unwilling to acknowledge the connection between the failings of his system and the fact that Billy and Tim had not come out of the tunnel alive.
An eye-opening example was his response to the OSHA investigator’s question about how quickly things could have gone wrong without the five divers realizing it.
harald: But the people, once the oxygen level drops, they would become aware of it, and they have a backup air supply to switch to.
investigator: So why didn’t Bill and Tim switch over to their backup?
harald: I don’t know, but the excursion crew did305.
investigator: Basically, these people were overcome quickly. They obviously didn’t realize what was happening, because they didn’t switch or they weren’t successful in switching to another system.
harald: You’re speculating that, because we don’t know that.
Stunned, Parker rewound the tape and played it again. After dispatching the divers into a hostile underworld with a system that independent experts had since determined was hopelessly flawed, after downplaying or ignoring the divers’ concerns and simply sending them back in while he remained safe in his topside trailer, was Harald really trying to suggest that it could have been Billy and Tim’s fault that they had died? Just the suggestion made Parker irate.
The more she read and listened, the bigger the gap she found between what Harald said and what the investigation had found. He insisted that he had been working to devise and refine the system for over a year. But Parker had seen the letter sent by his contact at A-L Compressed Gases just a month before the job was to begin, asking another supplier to quote a “turn-key system for new equipment.” Parker wondered: If the design of the system was still so wide open at such a late date, what had Harald been doing for a year? Before the mission, he had assured tunnel managers that he had ample experience using systems blending liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen, notably in “small submarines306.” But when pressed after the fatalities, he had to admit that the tunnel job had been his first time using such a system. He acknowledged that he hadn’t told his New Hampshire gas supplier that the tanks of liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen would be used for human consumption. But he didn’t seem to grasp the recklessness of that decision. He insisted the system was sound because of all the redundancies and backups he had marbled into it. But he seemed unwilling or unable to confront the fact that whether the system had three or thirty or three hundred backups, it wouldn’t have mattered if there was no reliable mechanism to alert the divers when the main system failed—then automatically switch to a backup supply. Even machines packaging burritos had that mechanism.
305 (Chapter 14, note 26)
I don’t know, but the excursion crew did: McCauley, “Interview of Harald Grob,” 14.