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Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness - Softcover

Swidey, Neil

 
9780307886736: Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307886735 ISBN 13: 9780307886736
Verlag: Crown, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results
 
A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.”
 
In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive.
 
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death.
 
An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the book—which Dennis Lehane calls "extraordinary" and compares with The Perfect Storm—is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe.
 
Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel—behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible—lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Neil Swidey is the author of  Trapped Under the Sea, a #1 Boston Globe bestseller that was named one of the best books of 2014 by Booklist. He is also the author of  The Assist, named one of the best books of 2008 by the  Washington Post, and a co-author of the New York Times bestselling  Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy. A staff writer for The Boston Globe Magazine, Swidey also teaches journalism at Brandeis University and has been a contributing analyst for NBC News. His work has been featured in  The Best American Science Writing,  The Best American Crime Writing, and  The Best American Political Writing. He is a seven-time winner of the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society for Professional Journalists and has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award. He lives outside Boston with his wife and three daughters. As an outgrowth of his first book, he founded the Alray Scholars Program, a mentoring and scholarship nonprofit that helps give inner-city students a second chance at college.

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1

DJ

SIX YEARS EARLIER

DJ pulled into the driveway, got out of his Ford Bronco, and stepped into what felt like a 1980s music video. Straight ahead was a sun-tanned brunette washing her car while wearing ripped jean shorts and a wet half-shirt. As he trained his eyes on her, DJ could practically hear the thumping hair-metal-band soundtrack playing in his head. Actually, it wasn't all in his head. There was music coming from around the back of the house, where someone had placed a speaker facing out of a first-floor window.

At a picnic table, three attractive women in their early twenties sat in Daisy Duke cutoffs and tight tops, drinking wine coolers and taking in the sun on a late summer afternoon. It was a Friday in August 1993, and DJ, a month shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, had just returned to Massachusetts after more than two years working as an offshore diver in the Gulf of Mexico. During his time away, his mother and younger brother had moved into the upstairs apartment of this two-family house in Waltham, a former mill city west of Boston. They were away on vacation now, so DJ was on his own as he saw the new place for the first time.

A guy around his age approached him, explaining that he lived in the downstairs apartment with his girlfriend, the dark-haired car washer. He invited DJ to grab a beer and join the party that was just getting started. DJ didn't need much convincing and plopped himself down at the picnic table. Given his muscular build, broad smile, and easy conversational skills, he never had much trouble getting noticed by girls, even if he was shier than he let on.

A blonde named Lisa, in between drags on her cigarette, began chatting him up. She had a big laugh to match a big personality. When she told a story, she used her chin, not just her hands, for emphasis. DJ immediately liked her. But his eyes were more drawn to the black-haired woman sitting next to her, who introduced herself as Donna. At least that's what it sounded like to DJ's ears. But when he called her that a few minutes later, she quickly corrected him. It may have sounded like Donna, but her name was actually spelled Dana. To nail the correct pronunciation--DAH-nah--you needed to contort your mouth into a horizontal line as exaggerated as a mailbox slot. Seems like a lot of trouble for a name, DJ thought to himself. But he was so smitten that he didn't mind. Dana had bronze skin, big alluring eyes, and milky teeth that lit up her face when she smiled.

DJ could sense that all the girls were fascinated by his tales of adventure as a diver in the Gulf. He explained how he would get helicoptered way out to sea, onto a giant oil platform the size of a village, so he could do complicated work hundreds of feet underwater. When he'd left Waltham a few years earlier, he'd been just another construction worker hanging out at the bar. Now, having turned his childhood love of the water into a thrilling career, he could claim a deep well of true stories. He knew to prune from his anecdotes all the unglamorous realities of life as an offshore diver--the smelly sleeping quarters and grunt work bordering on hazing--and stick to the exciting stuff.

The party grew as the night wore on. When DJ noticed at one point that Dana had disappeared, he turned his attention to blond-haired Lisa. As night turned to morning, they made their way upstairs to his mother's apartment, where they hooked up. She took off early the next morning, explaining that she had to head out of town.

It didn't take long for day two of the party to get going. Once again Dana was there, and this time DJ didn't let her out of his sight. She told him she was a hairstylist at a high-end Boston salon. She clearly liked to have a good time, but DJ detected something classy and almost exotic about her, with her dark hair falling around her face, hiding one of her eyes.

Late that night, after most of the partyers had cleared out, DJ realized he had lost the key to his mother's apartment. "Don't worry," his downstairs neighbor told him. "You can crash on our couch."

Things heated up between DJ and Dana once they found themselves alone. Eventually they moved from the couch to the dark kitchen and then, for the crescendo, onto the kitchen counter. Suddenly someone flicked on the overhead light. Dana yelled. DJ turned to see a groggy guy who was clearly startled to find he had produced such drama--or more accurately, interrupted it. That was all the motivation DJ needed to head outside, climb up to the second floor, and crawl through a window. He then let Dana in, and they spent the night together with no further interruptions.

Even as the fun began to wind down on Sunday, DJ had something else to look forward to. While he had been working as a nonunion diver in the Gulf, his hope in returning to Boston was to join Local 56, the union for pile drivers and commercial divers. The pay and benefits were a lot better for union divers, which is why DJ worried it would be hard to break into the local. But just a few days earlier, he'd received instructions from the union hall to show up at the beginning of the week for a job rebuilding a ship terminal in South Boston. In one weekend, everything in his personal and professional life seemed to come together.

Late that afternoon Dana made a call. After she hung up, she mentioned her sister would be coming over.

"Oh," DJ said. "You got a sister?"

"Yes," Dana replied, tilting her head in surprise. "You met her."

DJ racked his brain but couldn't recall meeting her sister. Dana insisted. "You know, Lisa--the blond girl."

The words were a punch to his gut. When Lisa arrived, DJ noticed her flinch as she saw Dana caressing his arm. DJ tried the only move he could think of, a last-minute call for clemency in the form of a pained look shot directly at Lisa. With it, he was wordlessly saying: I had no idea.

Lisa, to his eternal relief, returned a forgiving look.

Later, when her sister was out of the room, Lisa said to him, "I see you and Dana are getting along well."

"Yeah," DJ replied nervously. "Listen, Lisa, I didn't know--"

She cut him off. "You don't have to explain anything. I can tell you didn't know we were sisters."

DJ couldn't have been more relieved. He was attracted to Dana in a way he hadn't felt before, though there were few signs of the role she would come to play in his life.

There was, however, more fallout from his fantasy weekend. All that partying caught up with him to the point where, on his first day of his first union job, he showed up to the worksite late. The supervisor told DJ that if he thought he could just waltz in whenever he felt like it, he should save everybody some time and go find another job. "Don't even think about being late again," the guy barked, "unless you've got a really good story."

DJ flashed an impish grin. "Have I got a story for you!" he said, launching into the tale of his weekend with two sisters. By the end, the supervisor was the one grinning. He let DJ's tardiness slide.



DJ didn't get into it then, but his full life story was just as interesting.

As a kid, he'd lived in eleven states in a dozen years. Tennessee, Maryland, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, Oklahoma. He was forever the new kid, the outsider who would never be around long enough to make real friends. In every new town, he carried an unfamiliar accent with inflections from the last stop, setting him up for taunting from the other kids.

His mother, Lorraine, had grown up on a farm near the rocky coastline of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Her father regularly traveled to the States to find work as a carpenter, and at age twenty-one, Lorraine had followed him. In Boston she fell for an Irish construction worker, got...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307886735
ISBN 13 
9780307886736
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
432
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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