Trapped Under the Sea

Starred review from November 4, 2013
Since the opening of Boston’s immense Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant in September 2000, the “giant, stinking cesspool” of Boston Harbor has cleared significantly in what has been widely hailed as an environmental engineering triumph. This gripping history focuses on construction of its business end: the world’s longest dead-end tunnel, which travels 9.5 miles though bedrock, ending in 55 vertical pipes that diffuse effluent far out to sea. In hindsight, disaster was inevitable, since the project’s contract stated that these pipes’ 55 safety plugs could be extracted only when the tunnel was complete—meaning all drainage, ventilation, transportation, and electrical systems were removed. Commercial divers tackled the job. Years of research and interviews by Boston journalist Swidey (The Assist: Hoops, Hope, and the Game of their Lives) has produced a fascinating account of these skilled blue-collar men and their mission, aborted when a malfunctioning oxygen supply killed two of them. While others later completed the job, Swidey describes the years of bitterness and litigation that followed. This virtuoso performance combines insights into massive engineering projects, corporate litigation, environmental science, and cutthroat free-market behavior with vivid personal stories. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.

February 1, 2014
Sprawling account of a preventable tragedy during the gigantic cleanup of Boston Harbor. Boston Globe Magazine staff writer Swidey (Journalism/Tufts Univ.; The Assist: Hoops, Hope, and the Game of Their Lives, 2008) tackles an obscure topic with precision, looking at the little-known field of commercial diving and its otherworldly environs. In 1999, a small crew of divers was recruited to solve a minor-seeming problem; after nearly a decade of tunneling deep under the harbor, the mammoth Deer Island sewage-treatment tunnel was completed, except for the removal of 55 "safety plugs" that had protected the tunnel builders from flooding prior to the removal of the tunnel's ventilation system. At this point, there were so many construction corporations and governmental entities involved that, after extensive disagreement on the best way to remove the plugs, the task was subcontracted to two small diving companies and a socially awkward whiz-kid engineer who considered himself an expert in hazardous dives. Yet, the engineer foisted upon the divers a jury-rigged air delivery system that a state police investigator later thought resembled "an eighth-grade science fair project gone horribly wrong." Two divers died, and three more barely escaped from the tunnel's airless atmosphere. In the prologue, Swidey sketches the flash-point moment when the divers' system failed and then skillfully builds suspense, showing the development and gradual unraveling of the complicated plan. The author leisurely builds his characters' back stories, contrasting the ambitions and eccentricities of both roughneck divers and the hard-charging "suits" who were simultaneously under court order to finish the project and determined to minimize their liabilities. Remarkably, despite investigators' recommendations, neither the cocksure engineer (who "had shown willful disregard for the lives of the divers") nor anyone else was held liable for the deaths. Swidey delves enthusiastically into the minutiae of law, diving, public works and worker safety under extreme circumstances. The complicated narrative sustains interest despite occasional meandering. A story of infrastructure told on a human scale and a trenchant reminder that the modern metropolis comes with high risks and savage costs.

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Starred review from January 1, 2014

Here is an enlightening look at one municipal infrastructure project and its cost in human lives. In the 1990s, Boston built a game-changing sewage treatment plant with an outfall via an undersea tunnel ten miles long. At the tunnel's far end there would be more than 50 tall pipes with dispersal nozzles to release the treated water into the Atlantic. Once the tunnel itself was completed, the last job was to open the outfall pipes; this needed to be accomplished after all the equipment and air handlers in the tunnel were removed. With no oxygen in the tunnel, five professional divers were given an elaborate breathing system and sent down into the darkness. Something went wrong; two men died, and the three who survived struggled for years with guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder. Swidey (staff writer, Boston Globe; The Assist: Hoops, Hope, and the Game of Their Lives) provides immense detail about the challenges, solutions, politics, management, legalities, and personnel involved in a huge, expensive, necessary project that transformed Boston Harbor from an open sewer into a recreational area. VERDICT The author provides masses of facts yet never loses sight of the people involved. The result is a valuable resource for all engineering, urban planning, and journalism collections.--Edwin Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KS

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2013
In the summer of 1999, after an extraordinary project to clean up filthy Boston Harbor was stalled, five commercial divers were brought in for a dangerous, high-stakes mission hundreds of feet beneath the ocean floor. To unstick the Deer Island sewer treatment plant project, the men entered a 10-mile-long tunnel, a dark and claustrophobic space in which oxygen was fed to each man through an umbilical hose. When the mission went wrong, the men found themselves fighting for their lives in a race to get out of the tunnel. Swidey spent five years poring over documents and interviewing all the major figures, including the surviving divers, who speak for the first time about the tragedy and its lasting impact on their lives. More than just an exploration of the elements of a mission gone wrong (the politics, engineering, and design), this is a look at the dangerous jobs done by countless workers executing the grand plans of politicians and engineers that are taken for granted. With the pacing and feel of a special-ops adventure and the insight of a public-policy investigation, Swidey details the lives of the divers, leading up to their fateful mission, the horrors of the ordeal, and its aftermath as the survivors coped with trauma and guilt.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)