Neil Swidey's Trapped Under the Sea tells the unforgettable story of how an unprecedented and ambitious engineering project led to a disaster that could have been averted. Massachusetts had been dumping sewage into Boston Harbor for so long that a layer of black sludge coated the sea floor; the harbor was recognized as the most badly polluted in the United States--an environmental ruin. When the state finally mandated a clean-up, the city built a highly sophisticated waste treatment plant on Deer Island, a feat of engineering intended to set an international standard. By 1999, the project, though overdue and over budget, was almost complete. One final task remained, requiring five divers to travel 10 miles into a narrow tunnel deep underneath the harbor--an untested maneuver that left them devoid of light or oxygen. In an accident that seems unavoidable in hindsight, two of the five died.
Swidey, a staff writer for the Boston Globe magazine and finalist for the National Magazine Award, tells his story with exhaustive research, but he also tells it with passion. He colors in the lives of each of the five divers, giving DJ Gillis, a young pile driver with a very active romantic life, the strongest presence. And he seems fueled by the idea that no great engineering feat comes without the sacrifice of otherwise unheralded workers, a theme he returns to throughout the book.
What makes Trapped Under the Sea stand out from other disaster narratives is Swidey's exhaustive, largely balanced analysis of the corporate and political pressures and the human ambitions that led to a series of bad decisions, with insights into organizational behavior and culture and the ways decisions can go tragically wrong. An arrogant engineer who misrepresented his experience, corporate jockeying, cost-cutting, the intense pressure of deadlines on a long-delayed, very expensive and very public project: that these factors are common in projects at every level makes them no less deadly--or preventable.
Swidey's focus beyond the accident and its roots to its aftermath, as the survivors and victims' families coped with trauma and guilt through the heartbreaking, frustrating effort to seek justice, will leave the reader gripped, saddened and infuriated in equal measure. --Jeanette Zwart
Shelf Talker: Swidey's gripping account of a preventable disaster--and an exposé of the personal, political and corporate factors that led to it--will appeal to fans of A Perfect Storm and A Civil Action.