Three years after the accident, Riggs traveled from his home in Nevada to Deer Island for a ceremony to dedicate a pair of memorial plaques and benches. He loathed the idea of returning to this dungeon of dark memories, but he had agreed to attend because he felt Tim and Billy should be remembered properly. Now that he was here, though, something felt wrong. In truth, ever since the accident, not much had felt right.
The weather was beautiful—warm September sun—and the bronze plaques looked classy. Billy’s mother, Olga, had worked closely with the agency that owned the tunnel to plan a tasteful ceremony. Still, Riggs had to wonder what they were really all doing here. Hoss couldn’t come because of work, but DJ was there with Riggs. Standing alongside them were many of the key players behind the tunnel project, all solemnly commending the ultimate sacrifice of two divers as though they were war heroes, all ignoring the many preventable screwups that had combined to rob Tim and Billy of their lives. Riggs thought to himself333, What the fuck?
He found himself thinking, and saying, fuck, a lot lately. He recognized the irony of his situation. The good Christian who, before the accident, had admonished DJ and Hoss to watch their tongues, now swore like the sailor he had once been. It wasn’t the only echo from his navy days. He’d responded to the tunnel accident the same way he had responded to the deadly crash aboard the USS Nimitz two decades earlier, dulling his pain with beer. As he saw it, he had been living the right way, doing the right things, busting his tail to provide for his family, being a good diver and a good father. Yet where had it gotten him?
In the immediate aftermath of the tunnel accident, Riggs had sought guidance from the same structures that had served him well for so long. He had showed up at Lake Mead in Nevada, where Norwesco was finishing up its long project, and gotten right back in the water. He knew that people managed to recover from all sorts of tragedies. Like Hoss, he refused to see himself as a victim. He would tough it out. Once he realized the folly of that approach, he left Lake Mead and Norwesco for good.
He tried therapy, something Hoss encouraged him to stick with whenever they spoke by phone. But Riggs wasn’t as fortunate as Hoss in finding a therapist he could trust. Besides, like some PTSD patients, Riggs found little good in talking to some stranger over and over again about the horror he had witnessed. Words did little to fix the hollowness he felt from knowing that all the good in the world had disappeared when he and four other guys were trapped down in the tunnel. And words seemed powerless to curb the nightmares that returned him to that hell at least once a week. He knew he was the kind of guy who worked best when he was able to figure out his problems on his own. So he took the meds the therapist offered and tuned out the rest, chasing down the pills with beer. He knew that intake would probably do little more than sand down the edges of his problems, but that was better than nothing. More and more he and his wife, Karen, alternated between long silences and occasional arguments.
Their worst fight had taken place334 shortly before his last trip to Boston, for the mediation session in the civil lawsuit. One morning, furious that Karen was riding him for what felt like no good reason, he got in her face and yelled, “Why are you trying to fucking provoke me?” He was so infuriated, and got in so close, that the bill of his baseball cap hit her face. From her perspective, that was no accident—it was an assault. And it was something she could have never imagined happening before the tunnel disaster, when she’d always seen her husband as a kind man and a doting dad. Later that day she told him he needed to leave the house before the cops got involved. He decided to head to Boston earlier than planned, crashing with DJ and Lorraine for several weeks before flying home and forging a precarious peace.
Once Riggs accepted that he wouldn’t be returning to diving, he set about getting qualified as a certified welding inspector. He was good at this job, inspecting bridges and other structures, and it kept him close to the water without requiring that he get in it. But prior to getting his certification, he’d been out of work for so long that he had begun to worry his family might lose their house. He was grateful for the lawsuit settlement money because it had spared him the shame of foreclosure. In many other ways, though, Riggs regretted having agreed to it. Like Hoss, he’d wanted the responsible parties to admit to their guilt. But the settlement felt like just another transaction. And the depositions that he, Hoss, and DJ had been forced to undergo just to get to the mediation phase had ripped the scabs off their mental wounds. He had tried not to let the pressure of those proceedings get to him. When one defense lawyer had asked him what he did to treat the searing headaches he’d reported suffering since the accident, Riggs had said, “Take some ibuprofen and drink a couple of beers335.” When the lawyer asked if that worked, Riggs replied, “If it doesn’t, I drink a couple more.” As the deposition wore on, though, he’d been unable to hide his distaste for the well-dressed defense lawyers peppering him with accusatory questions. If their goal had been to get him angry, they had succeeded. Ever since the accident, Riggs had anger to spare.
The more he’d learned about advanced breathing systems, the more he’d understood how hopelessly and inexcusably flawed Harald’s setup had been. One saturation diver friend pointed out that Harald’s setup violated a cardinal rule in having the excursion team breathing off the same system as the Humvee crew. Riggs burned with rage toward Harald for having failed them, and with Roger for having failed to police Harald.
Still, in his most introspective moments, he was tougher on himself, and that felt a whole lot worse. He knew some people might blame the divers for not having walked off the job in the face of all the warning signs. But just like in the military, if you couldn’t trust the people you were working for, you were probably a casualty before the battle began. He took responsibility for entering that tunnel, but he felt guilty about something he had done once inside it, something he believed might have contributed to the deaths of the other guys in his foxhole. At one point during his deposition, when a defense lawyer was mortaring him with questions that implied errors on the part of the divers, Riggs had expected him to bring up this point. To his surprise, neither that lawyer nor any of the others had ever mentioned it. But that didn’t mean it weighed any less heavily on Riggs’s mind.
When he and DJ had been removing the plugs at the very end of the tunnel, they’d felt the need to work as fast as possible to compensate for the aborted missions of the two previous days. Still, they knew that they could make up significant ground once they cleared out of the final five-foot-diameter section of the tunnel, and that would happen after they’d finished with plug number 3. Once they could stand up straight, they’d be able to proceed much more quickly. And by the time they had pulled the plugs all the way up to number 12, where the Humvees were parked, they’d be able to move with real dispatch. They just needed to get over this one last, hellish hump. So he and DJ had worked hard, really hard, dragging plugs, carrying sandbags, and duck-walking as fast as possible, all in pursuit of that goal. They had been so damn close. Riggs couldn’t help but think that, in doing all that intense work, he and DJ had strained the mixed-gas system to the point where they had overbreathed it, causing it to fail. In other words, Riggs couldn’t help but wonder if his actions, however well intentioned, were what had caused Billy and Tim to die.
333 (Chapter 15, note 5)
Riggs thought to himself: Dave Riggs, interview by author, July 2010. I drew the details about this memorial service from interviews with numerous attendees as well as photographs, the ceremony program, and other firsthand documents. An additional account was Adrianne Appel, “Ceremony Honors 2 Divers Who Died in Outfall Pipe,”
334 (Chapter 15, note 6)
Their worst fight had taken place: Dave Riggs and Karen Riggs, (separate) interviews by author, July 2010.
335 (Chapter 15, note 7)
“Take some ibuprofen and drink a couple of beers”: Dave Riggs, deposition, 101.