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57 reviews for:
Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness
Neil Swidey
4.01 AVERAGE
57 reviews for:
Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness
Neil Swidey
4.01 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
An important work, phenomenally researched and extremely well written. Reading "Trapped Under the Sea" is like taking a master class in great reporting. It doesn't hurt that it also happens to be a gripping page-turner that exposes the shocking dereliction of duty that led to one of the most shameful construction disasters in recent Boston history. Great job, Neil!
dark
informative
tense
slow-paced
Trapped Under The Sea tells the story of the final construction on the massive Boston Harbor clean up treatment outflow pipe, a massive undertaking sending a 20+ foot diameter tunnel over 9 miles out into the ocean, under the sea floor. But before the project could be completed, 53 65 pound "plugs" had to be removed from the diffuser pipes at the very end of the tunnel.
An added complication was that, due to inter-agency squabbling and worries about cost and time, all of the support systems used to dig the tunnel, like air, light and electricity, were pulled out. So a team had to drive out in the pitch black tunnel, with a killer lack of oxygen, and pull the plugs.
After much squabbling, a barely believable plan was hatched and five men were sent out in two Humvees, set up much like Dr. Doolittle's mythical push-me-pull-you beast, so one could drive out and one could drive back. They had to bring their own breathable atmosphere, as beyond 5 miles, the air was deadly. So a plan was hatched to mix liquid gases to create breathable air and off they went.
As you can imagine, the consequences were tragic. It really is hard to imagine that no one spoke up to such a jury-rigged idea, but everyone was just happy someone was going to solve the problem and no one wanted to know too much about how. And the crew paid the price.
No one was ever charged with the negligence and the plugs were pulled using a completely different method in the end, as this method was only able to do 3 before tragedy struck.
What an amazing book. I downloaded the book from the library and, as I usually do, I started reading it a bit to see if it was interesting, with no plan to read it completely. But I was so engrossed from the start that I read 100 pages into it before I even knew what was happening and I continued to devour it, finishing it in nearly record time (for me these days anyway).
While some bits dragged, especially after the tragedy (recovery is hard and blame is tiring), it was an incisive and engrossing book. It did suffer slightly from having been adapted and expanded from two articles originally published in Boston magazine (a bit of redundancy here and there), but never too bad.
And it wasn't just about the disaster. There was plenty about the immense project that was the Boston Harbor cleanup, the amazing civil engineering that was done and the ridiculously effectiveness of it all. Swidey did a good job of explaining things as they happened and making you shake your head in amazement. Highly recommended.
An added complication was that, due to inter-agency squabbling and worries about cost and time, all of the support systems used to dig the tunnel, like air, light and electricity, were pulled out. So a team had to drive out in the pitch black tunnel, with a killer lack of oxygen, and pull the plugs.
After much squabbling, a barely believable plan was hatched and five men were sent out in two Humvees, set up much like Dr. Doolittle's mythical push-me-pull-you beast, so one could drive out and one could drive back. They had to bring their own breathable atmosphere, as beyond 5 miles, the air was deadly. So a plan was hatched to mix liquid gases to create breathable air and off they went.
As you can imagine, the consequences were tragic. It really is hard to imagine that no one spoke up to such a jury-rigged idea, but everyone was just happy someone was going to solve the problem and no one wanted to know too much about how. And the crew paid the price.
No one was ever charged with the negligence and the plugs were pulled using a completely different method in the end, as this method was only able to do 3 before tragedy struck.
What an amazing book. I downloaded the book from the library and, as I usually do, I started reading it a bit to see if it was interesting, with no plan to read it completely. But I was so engrossed from the start that I read 100 pages into it before I even knew what was happening and I continued to devour it, finishing it in nearly record time (for me these days anyway).
While some bits dragged, especially after the tragedy (recovery is hard and blame is tiring), it was an incisive and engrossing book. It did suffer slightly from having been adapted and expanded from two articles originally published in Boston magazine (a bit of redundancy here and there), but never too bad.
And it wasn't just about the disaster. There was plenty about the immense project that was the Boston Harbor cleanup, the amazing civil engineering that was done and the ridiculously effectiveness of it all. Swidey did a good job of explaining things as they happened and making you shake your head in amazement. Highly recommended.
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
It sounds like the plot to a far-fetched disaster movie. Five men are more than nine miles into a tunnel that dead ends. All they have for light is what they brought. They're connected umbilical like to a breathing system because otherwise they'd lose consciousness and die from lack of oxygen. Suddenly, the breathing system fails. And, by the way, the tunnel they're in is some 400 feet under (yes, under) Boston Harbor.
But as Neil Swidey explains in the plainly told but engrossing Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness, that is just what happened in July 1999. He looks at almost every aspect of what led to the men being in that situation, the variety of people involved and the ramifications. In doing so, he looks at almost every aspect of the event, often through the eyes and thoughts of one of the trapped men, D.J. Gillis. And while some of the contributing factors are rather complex, the reporter for The Bowston Globe Magazine renders it all in coherent detail.
The background may be as outside the norm as the event itself. For decades, Boston Harbor had been the end point for human waste from Boston and nearly 50 other cities and towns. Half a billion gallons of sewer water and some 140,000 pounds of lightly treated sludge were being discharged into the Harbor daily. By the 1980s, the sludge had decayed and settled to the ocean floor, creating a disgusting mud known as "black mayonnaise." A lawsuit led to a multi-billion dollar project was planned to try to clean up the harbor, including a massive sewage treatment plant on Deer Island that would be "the destination for every toilet flush in the eastern half of Massachusetts." The project, overseen throughout by a federal judge, also included the world's longest dead-end tunnel. Extending nearly 10 miles under Boston Harbor, it would carry treated sewer water away from Boston Harbor to discharge it deep into Massachusetts Bay.
Akin to another Boston megaproject, the Big Dig, the tunnel alone took twice as long as planned, almost a decade, and cost the general millions of additional dollars. One last step remained for the tunnel to be complete, removing 65-pound plugs that had been placed in each of 55 30-inch wide pipes leading from the side of the tunnel to risers that would actually discharge the water to protect the miners. Not only were the plugs in an area where the tunnel itself was only five feet high, they were to be removed only after taking out the extensive ventilation, electrical and transportation systems used by the miners. That meant the area also would not have enough oxygen to breathe. The solution? Use commercial deep sea divers, although they would not be able to wear the equipment they normally use.
A reader is struck not only by how jerry-rigged the solution was but how relatively harebrained it seemed. An untested breathing system designed for this task by an engineer with a small Spokane, Wash., commercial diving firm would be placed in one of two Humvees. The Humvees were connected back to back because the tunnel was too small for them to turn around, requiring one to be pointed into the tunnel and the other out. Hoses would extend from the breathing system to allow the men to walk to the side tunnels and crawl into them to remove the plugs.
Swidey takes the interesting approach of placing the moment of disaster in the book's prologue. From that point, he traces the stories of the men and companies involved, how the plug problem arose and this particular solution was chosen, and takes the reader inside the disaster and ensuing investigation and aftermath. Thus, Trapped Under the Sea tells not only the personal aspects of the story but the institutional ones, including how not wanting to take ownership of the problem or its solution seems to have led inexorably to disaster. He makes both interesting.
The book shows the payoff of Swidey's hundreds of hours of interviews with those involved and years of study of the project. It allows us to understand both the men and the processes. It also provides some unique insight into the men involved. In fact, weeks after reading the book I am still struck by the incident that, despite all the horror, sticks in the mind of one of the survivors, one that involves a 2½ inch strip of skin.
Given how extraordinary the event was, many readers may wonder why they never seem to have heard of it. It seems to have been swallowed up by the "important" news dominating local and national media -- the effort to recover the body of John F. Kennedy, Jr., after the plane he was piloting crashed in the Atlantic Ocean off Martha's Vineyard. As Swidey observes in his extensive notes, six columns of the front page of the next day's Boston Globe dealt with Kennedy. The story of death and nail-biting survival involving five men trapped 400 feet under Boston Harbor was relegated to an item in the local news section.
(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.)
But as Neil Swidey explains in the plainly told but engrossing Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness, that is just what happened in July 1999. He looks at almost every aspect of what led to the men being in that situation, the variety of people involved and the ramifications. In doing so, he looks at almost every aspect of the event, often through the eyes and thoughts of one of the trapped men, D.J. Gillis. And while some of the contributing factors are rather complex, the reporter for The Bowston Globe Magazine renders it all in coherent detail.
The background may be as outside the norm as the event itself. For decades, Boston Harbor had been the end point for human waste from Boston and nearly 50 other cities and towns. Half a billion gallons of sewer water and some 140,000 pounds of lightly treated sludge were being discharged into the Harbor daily. By the 1980s, the sludge had decayed and settled to the ocean floor, creating a disgusting mud known as "black mayonnaise." A lawsuit led to a multi-billion dollar project was planned to try to clean up the harbor, including a massive sewage treatment plant on Deer Island that would be "the destination for every toilet flush in the eastern half of Massachusetts." The project, overseen throughout by a federal judge, also included the world's longest dead-end tunnel. Extending nearly 10 miles under Boston Harbor, it would carry treated sewer water away from Boston Harbor to discharge it deep into Massachusetts Bay.
Akin to another Boston megaproject, the Big Dig, the tunnel alone took twice as long as planned, almost a decade, and cost the general millions of additional dollars. One last step remained for the tunnel to be complete, removing 65-pound plugs that had been placed in each of 55 30-inch wide pipes leading from the side of the tunnel to risers that would actually discharge the water to protect the miners. Not only were the plugs in an area where the tunnel itself was only five feet high, they were to be removed only after taking out the extensive ventilation, electrical and transportation systems used by the miners. That meant the area also would not have enough oxygen to breathe. The solution? Use commercial deep sea divers, although they would not be able to wear the equipment they normally use.
A reader is struck not only by how jerry-rigged the solution was but how relatively harebrained it seemed. An untested breathing system designed for this task by an engineer with a small Spokane, Wash., commercial diving firm would be placed in one of two Humvees. The Humvees were connected back to back because the tunnel was too small for them to turn around, requiring one to be pointed into the tunnel and the other out. Hoses would extend from the breathing system to allow the men to walk to the side tunnels and crawl into them to remove the plugs.
Swidey takes the interesting approach of placing the moment of disaster in the book's prologue. From that point, he traces the stories of the men and companies involved, how the plug problem arose and this particular solution was chosen, and takes the reader inside the disaster and ensuing investigation and aftermath. Thus, Trapped Under the Sea tells not only the personal aspects of the story but the institutional ones, including how not wanting to take ownership of the problem or its solution seems to have led inexorably to disaster. He makes both interesting.
The book shows the payoff of Swidey's hundreds of hours of interviews with those involved and years of study of the project. It allows us to understand both the men and the processes. It also provides some unique insight into the men involved. In fact, weeks after reading the book I am still struck by the incident that, despite all the horror, sticks in the mind of one of the survivors, one that involves a 2½ inch strip of skin.
Given how extraordinary the event was, many readers may wonder why they never seem to have heard of it. It seems to have been swallowed up by the "important" news dominating local and national media -- the effort to recover the body of John F. Kennedy, Jr., after the plane he was piloting crashed in the Atlantic Ocean off Martha's Vineyard. As Swidey observes in his extensive notes, six columns of the front page of the next day's Boston Globe dealt with Kennedy. The story of death and nail-biting survival involving five men trapped 400 feet under Boston Harbor was relegated to an item in the local news section.
(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.)
About 12 workers are killed each day on the job in the US. This is the story of two such deaths. It is a somewhat unique story in that it happened in a tunnel under Boston Harbor that was under construction. But the causes are not that unusual. Putting schedule ahead of safety. The book is really three tragic stories: First the story of the fatalities, Second the story of the legal cases and Third the story of what happened to the three survivors after and their struggle with PTSD. It is a very sad story without much hope, but the author does include a very helpful introspective epilogue that ruminates on the root causes of workplace fatalities. Well written as well.
SWE book club. This was a sad book and full of lessons - things like peer review is essential, no matter how smart or experienced you are; letting money matter over people is usually the path to failure; people can do amazing things.
Easily understandable descriptions of equipment and events. It's very well paced and engaging.
4.5 stars. The author gets a 10 as a researcher and reporter of facts and events, but a 4 for his writing style when it comes to interpersonal dialogue and some portions of the characters back-stories.
This book was almost too sad to get through at a certain point, but I pushed through - a lot of life lessons can be learned from this tragedy.
This book was almost too sad to get through at a certain point, but I pushed through - a lot of life lessons can be learned from this tragedy.