Three years earlier, MacDonald had left his job as a partner in a big Boston law firm, where he had been pulling down as much as a quarter of a million dollars a year, so he could take a government agency post that paid less than half that and brought with it an unholy amount of scrutiny from the press and the public. There had been only two predecessors in his position. The first guy had been ousted after pushing through rate hikes while using taxpayer dollars to furnish his office with twelve-hundred-dollar leather chairs and hundred-dollar marble ashtrays. The second guy had more than once returned home to find death threats on his answering machine and his young daughters in tears at the sight of angry protesters camped13 in their front yard.
MacDonald’s job was executive director of the innocuous-sounding Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), the quasi-public agency that oversees sewer and water services for Boston and nearly fifty other cities and towns in the eastern half of the state. What made the position such a magnet for controversy was that the MWRA was in charge of the massive cleanup of Boston Harbor. The harbor into which colonists had famously dumped tea to protest British rule had, over the centuries, served as a different kind of dumping ground: it had become a giant, stinking cesspool for the region’s human waste.
A century earlier14, Boston had unveiled a sewage treatment system that Scientific American had trumpeted as perhaps the most sophisticated in the world. In reality, that system didn’t treat the sewage so much as use a network of tunnels to move it away from where the people were. By the 1960s, there were two plants treating the sewage of eastern Massachusetts, one on Deer Island (a peninsula attached to the small town of Winthrop, north of Boston) and one on Nut Island (a peninsula attached to the small city of Quincy, to the south). But from the start, these plants were hopelessly inadequate. Treatment basically consisted of letting the wastewater stand long enough so it could be separated into sludge and sewer water. After light treatment, the sludge was dumped right into the harbor along with the sewer water, negating much of the benefit of the separation process. About 140,000 pounds15 of that toxin-dense sludge and about half a billion gallons of that treated sewer water were released into the harbor every day. Even worse, as the population grew16 and public officials let the facilities rot, the plants couldn’t keep up, especially when the skies opened. For days after big rainstorms, millions of gallons of untreated sewage would never make it to the plant. Instead, the sewage was diverted into a system of release-valve pipes and eventually let out into the harbor. (On Christmas Day17 in 1980, the skeleton crew on duty allowed a staggering fifty million gallons of raw sewage to flow into the harbor.) How little did Massachusetts officials invest in their sewer system? At one point, the Smithsonian Institution contacted them in the hopes of acquiring one of their historic pumps. To the Smithsonian’s astonishment18, the officials explained they couldn’t part with the relic of a pump because they still relied on it for everyday use.
Long after the harbor had ceased being the linchpin of the American maritime economy in the eighteenth century, it had continued to be the source of bountiful fisheries—the fabled cod as well as soft-shell clams, lobster, and flounder—and home to seals and dolphins. But by the 1980s, the years of flagrant disregard had left the harbor thoroughly degraded. Beaches were regularly closed for health reasons, water tests found alarming levels of PCBs and pesticides, and marine life had taken on the pall of death. In the harbor’s Dorchester Bay19, the EPA had classified 86 percent of the clam beds as “grossly polluted,” finding levels of fecal coliform bacteria that were ten times what was acceptable. Winter flounder were riddled with cancer and “fin rot,” a malady as bad as its vivid name suggests. The seals and dolphins had mostly departed.
Studies found that the organic material20 from all that dumped sewage had settled and decayed on the seafloor, creating an oozing mud known as “black mayonnaise.” Rich in hydrogen sulfide and lacking dissolved oxygen, this mud was snuffing out fauna and enfeebling the food chain on which the harbor’s ecosystem had long relied. Fatigued locals turned to gallows humor to distract themselves from their disgust. They rebranded the tampon applicators21 floating out of the sewer pipes and into the water as “beach whistles” and the spent condoms as “Charles River whitefish.” The latter was a reference to the river that feeds into the harbor, whose filth had won it infamy in the 1960s thanks to the Standells’ rock ’n’ roll paean to pollution, “Dirty Water”:
In 1982 a local lawyer named Bill Golden went out for a jog along the beach and returned with his sneakers covered in sewage debris. The lawsuit he filed triggered the Boston Harbor cleanup. The sorry state of affairs mushroomed into a national issue in the presidential campaign of 1988, when Republican nominee George Bush hopped on a ferry and led camera crews around what he called “the dirtiest harbor in America.” Following up his ferry attack with a raft of national television ads, Bush successfully embarrassed his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. By then, the cleanup was already under way22, but officials had delayed so long that the federal money had dried up. That meant the cleanup’s entire price tag, initially estimated to exceed $6 billion, would have to be shouldered by average citizens. These rate payers, who had already seen their water and sewer bills triple, were incensed by the steeper hikes on the horizon.
It was MacDonald’s job to try to mollify them. All the while, the fifty-year-old had to preside over a leviathan construction project with multiple components. A state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant—the second largest in North America—was being erected on Deer Island, a two-hundred-acre smudge on the map of Boston Harbor. And two separate, massive tunnels were being bored under the sea. The first of these was the five-mile Inter-Island Tunnel, which would carry sewage from Nut Island to Deer Island for treatment. Once the sludge was separated out, that smelly guck would be sent back to Nut Island, ingeniously in a small tube installed inside the new tunnel, where it would then be converted into fertilizer pellets and sold to commercial clients nationwide. The second tunnel was the far more complicated 9.5-mile-long Deer Island Outfall Tunnel, which would carry the treated sewer water away from the harbor and release it deep into Massachusetts Bay, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean. Angry activists on Cape Cod were pushing to halt construction of this tunnel, fearful that all the wastewater flowing out of it would harm marine life and damage the ecologically fragile waters off the Atlantic coast. Since the tunnel’s endpoint was about sixteen miles from the national marine sanctuary known as Stellwagen Bank, some environmentalists worried that all the treated sewer water would harm the important population of marine mammals, especially the endangered northern right whale. As if this weren’t enough to contend with, MacDonald had to answer to a bow-tied federal judge who served as the cleanup project’s robed referee, threatening stiff fines or worse if the deadlines he imposed were not met.
MacDonald was a recently divorced father of two and a diabetic whose doctor had implored him to reduce the stress in his life. During one medical exam, he took a health quiz that asked him to check off sources of stress in his personal and professional life; each item on the list was worth ten points. He scored 180 out of a possible 200. Yet he had aggressively campaigned for his thankless post. He was a workaholic who could no more avoid stress than a pack-a-day smoker could resist lighting up after a nice meal. His pace often left the people around him feeling drained, but he tempered his relentlessness with an affable personality. He’d regularly flash a smile that would turn his eyes into slits behind his boxy glasses and light up his jowly face. Despite graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, he brought a childlike enthusiasm to everything he did, especially to the construction side of his job.
13 (Chapter 2, note 2)
angry protesters camped: Paul Levy (former MWRA executive director), interview by author, November 2010. The protesters were opposing the controversial decision to site a sewage landfill in Walpole, Massachusetts.
14 (Chapter 2, note 3)
A century earlier: “The Boston Sewer System and Main Drainage Works,”
15 (Chapter 2, note 4)
About 140,000 pounds: Walter G. Armstrong and Ralph Wallace, “A Case Study of Construction Management on the Boston Harbor Project: Reflections at Project Completion,” CM eJournal, January 2001.
16 (Chapter 2, note 5)
Even worse, as the population grew: Norman Boucher, “The Dirtiest Job: Not Everyone Would Take on the Task of Cleaning Up the Nation’s Most Polluted Harbor and Wrestling with the Political Fallout. Enter Paul Levy,”
17 (Chapter 2, note 6)
On Christmas Day: Charles M. Haar,
18 (Chapter 2, note 7)
To the Smithsonian’s astonishment: Norman Lockman, “Dukakis Proposes Sewer Authority as New MDC Unit,”
19 (Chapter 2, note 8)
In the harbor’s Dorchester Bay: Haar,
21 (Chapter 2, note 10)
They rebranded the tampon applicators: Scott Allen, “Closing In on a Healthy Harbor,”
22 (Chapter 2, note 11)
By then, the cleanup was already under way: “During the 1970s, the federal government provided up to 75 percent of the funds necessary to construct wastewater treatment facilities [to comply with the Clean Water Act]. Throughout the 1980s, however, the total amount of federal grants declined steadily. By the end of the decade, federal grants for constructing sewage treatment facilities ceased.” Armstrong and Wallace, “Case Study of Construction Management.”