Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness by Neil Swidey

(Crown, $26)

“You will never look at a bridge or tunnel the same way,” said Greg Emmanuel in Men’s Journal. In Neil Swidey’s “captivating” new book, five men are asked to undertake a nearly impossible task to complete a massive public works project in Boston, and a reader stays with them to the bitter end. All five were veteran commercial divers in 1999 when they agreed to descend a mile below Boston Harbor and traverse 10 more miles in an airless, dry tunnel in order to render a new $4 billion sewage treatment plant operational by removing several dozen 65-pound safety plugs. In places, the men would have to crawl in the dark on their bellies. Standard breathing equipment was too bulky to carry.

The fatalities that resulted from the mission “could have been passed off as a one-day story—regrettable but inevitable,” said Steve Weinberg in The Dallas Morning News. But Swidey suspected there was more to be learned, and his five-year investigation proved him right. A “know-it-all” engineer had managed to convince dozens of other project overseers that his improvised breathing apparatus would work, and the gear’s failure doomed two of the crew. But Swidey comes to understand that a series of bad decisions led to the final tragedy, and he “offers timeless lessons” on how money pressures, stubbornness, overconfidence, and frustration can combine to produce tragedy.

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The victims certainly deserved better, said Nancy Rommelmann in The Wall Street Journal. Judging from Swidey’s detailed portrayals, the deceased crew members were “the kind of men you’d want at your back when trouble started.” Swidey brings all five hard hats to vivid life so that you can feel the pain of the survivors when the story devolves into a court battle and the divers end up winning a settlement instead of the justice they were seeking. Alas, all these years after the three survivors risked their lives to turn the dreams of politicians into reality, “there can be no justice—only a cautionary tale, which Swidey writes with splendid heart.”