Swidey spends much time illuminating the divers’ personal struggles and family lives, and their stories are the engines driving the narrative.
Thankfully, he avoids portraying them and the sandhogs who built the tunnel as two-dimensional proletariat heroes. A magazine writer and author, Swidey enlivens the narrative with telling images. If in one passage he overworks his material (a kneeling sandhog with a shoulder-mounted drill suggests a “mujihadeen aiming a stinger missile” at an airplane), his other metaphors, such as when contractors, water agency staff and lawyers debate claims before a judge with “the huffy indignation of a divorcing couple,” are beautifully drawn.
Beyond the analog fascinations of concrete, rock, water, "Trapped Under the Sea" portrays the discordant interplay of the project team members and how the poor relationships lead to lapses in what should be safety ABCs.
From the moment the uncomfortable subject of unplugging the outfall tunnel after the ventilating system is removed—a hazard that could have been “designed out” of the project at comparatively modest expense at the outset—is put on the backburner, and then late in the project Kiewit hands the job to the Black Dog-Norwesco arranged marriage joint venture picked by Kiewit, the die was cast for troubled outcomes.
From Ingenious to Half-Baked
"Go fever" comes in when the project team members fail to see that what seemed ingenious was really half-baked. Even the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is briefed on the plan and raises no objection. The divers sense the danger and complain, but to no avail.
Two divers, Billy Juse and Tim Nordeen, miles from the tunnel opening, asphyxiated while the three others barely escaped alive.
The significance of the various red flags visible to the project team, writes Swidey, had been “masked by more powerful crosscurrents,” such as the financial pressure on the contractor, the schedule pressure on the owner, the client-pleasing pressure felt by the diving subs and the “reputational pressure” felt by Grob. Giving in to those pressures, especially late in a project when they are felt most acutely, backfired in every way.
“Trapped Under the Sea,” finally, becomes a suitable metaphor for the project team as well as the divers. No one intended to create conditions where someone could die. Yet Stinson and Kiewit, MWRA’s project chief, PB and project manager ICF Kaiser all seemed trapped in a plasma of finance, schedule and good intentions that drowned their common sense with respect for the safety of the divers.
“Once relationships get poisoned,” says former Kiewit CEO Kent Stinson, a major character in the book, “it’s very hard to unpoison them.”
Swidey suggests that design-build could provide a solution to the project dysfunction that vexed the project, which was performed under a traditional design-bid-build contract. This may come across as a naive solution (and Swidey discusses the matter in more detail in a chapter source note). Criminal penalties could help as a deterrent, but they often pin blame too narrowly, and in the case of the tunnel accident, local prosecutors understood the shared nature of the blame and declined to prosecute.
Although there has been ceaseless self-reflection in the industry and intensified effort to limit unsafe work, not enough has changed when it comes to designing out hazards and complex interactions. Now at least there is a book full of poignant lessons, and it seems destined to become a nonfiction classic.
