If you’ve ever flown into Boston’s Logan Airport or stared out over the harbor, you likely noticed the dozen egg-shaped structures sitting out on Deer Island. Those are key components of the second largest sewage treatment facility in the United States. The construction of the outflow pipes from that facility is the key point in Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness by Neil Swidey.
The communities of Greater Boston had been dumping barely-treated and raw sewage into Boston Harbor since it was founded. Boston earned the unwanted honor of having the nation’s filthiest harbor. I Love that Dirty Water, but it was time to clean up. By federal and judicial mandate Massachusetts constructed the sewage treatment plant at Deer Island.
In addition to the treatment, the outflow need to be sent somewhere. The design was to send it out to sea through a 9.5-mile-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the harbor and into the deep water of Massachusetts Bay.
The final step in the construction was to remove the caps at the end of that tunnel. The construction issue was how to do that. The eventual plan was to send a team out to the end of the tunnel to pull the plugs.
At that point in the construction, the ventilation and lighting systems had been removed from the tunnel. The oxygen level had dropped below a level where a human could live. Near the end of the tunnel, its diameter grew smaller and smaller, until it was less than five feet at the end. Then the worker would have to crawl through a three foot side tunnel to reach the sixty-five pound plug. Then repeat that 54 times. No thanks, I’d rather sit at my desk.
The construction company hired a dive team that would use an experimental breathing system to pull those plugs. As you can tell from the title of the book, things go wrong.
On the first day in the tunnel air hoses tangled, the oxygen supply malfunctioned before they could pull any plugs, and the truck wouldn’t start when they tried to drive back to the tunnel entrance. On the second day, the men worked out some of the problems and managed to remove two plugs. On the third day, everything went wrong.
Mr. Swidey keeps the action moving and the tension mounting as he retells the events leading up to the tragedy and what ensues. He is very detailed.
For a compliance angle, you can see the conflict between the pressure to get the tunnel done and the safety of the workers. There is also a great view of the ensuing investigation.
Mr. Swidey points out that injuries and deaths tend to happen at the end of projects, when tolerance for delays is low and confidence is high. It’s normalization. When someone does something without suffering a bad outcome, the harder it becomes for them to remain aware of the risks and bad behavior. You see this with fraud and ponzi schmes.
There was a great piece in the Boston Globe written by Parker Pettus:
These men were not rich or famous or privileged. Certainly they would have preferred not to have been in a dangerous tunnel hundreds of feet below the surface and miles from any help.
They died while doing a hazardous, unheralded job, and their contribution to a clean, revived Boston Harbor will last for generations. They will not be immortalized in the media, they will not be buried at sea from the decks of a warship.
These workers are the kind of heroes who are so often taken for granted. We would do well to think of Boston’s clear, blue, living harbor as a monument to the courage and sacrifice of the ordinary heroes who made it a reality.
Trapped Under the Sea should be a great addition for your “to-read list.”
Sources:
- More Lessons From Workplace Safety for the Compliance Practitioner by Tom Fox
- Episode 68-Neil Swidey-author of Trapped Under the Sea by Tom Fox
- ‘Trapped Under the Sea’ by Neil Swidey by Martin W. Sandler in the Boston Globe
- Book Review: ‘Trapped Under the Sea’ by Neil Swidey by Nancy Rommelmann in the Wall Street Journal