Neil Swidey

Now that I've read Neil Swidley's Trapped Under the Sea, I have a whole new appreciation for air. Wonderful, marvelous air, which is made up of the perfect proportion of 21% oxygen, 70% nitrogen and the rest other gases, surrounds us. We who dwell on the surface of the earth rarely have to think about air, unless it is polluted. Air is always there.

The five men featured in Swidley's nonfiction work were not so fortunate. In 1999 this team of five underwater construction divers was assigned show more to finish the last step of a mammoth public works project, a state-of- the-art-waste treatment plant on Deer Island, MA. The final step was removal of fifty safety caps located over 400 feet under the bottom of the harbor, in a tunnel almost ten miles long. The construction project had gone on for years, and everyone involved was anxious to see it completed. Due to what strikes the reader as incredibly poor planning, the final step had to be completed after the ambient light and air sources that were present for earlier tunnel work had already been removed. The men had to rely on a makeshift air supply system, which resembled "an eighth-grade science fair project gone horribly wrong," (p. 254), The system failed. That any of the men made it out alive is a miracle.

The book is a little long for its subject (Swidley provides over 200 pages of back story before the climatic life-or-death scene), and the material might have been better presented as a series of newspaper articles rather than as a book. Nonetheless, like Five Days at Memorial,Trapped Under the Sea is an excellent case study of systemic failure. Eagerness to wrap up the project, desire to save money, and, most crucially, blind trust in an engineer who didn't know half as much about underwater ventilation systems as he pretended, all contributed to this preventable tragedy under the sea.

As a result of reading this book, I not only have a whole new appreciation for air--I also have a whole new appreciation for the workers who put their lives at risk so that we may have functional infrastructure, and the dangers these workers face each day.

In honor of those who lost their lives on that July day, and those who survived, this book deserves a wide readership. show less

Sad and harrowing account of how politicians, business people, lawyers, and one arrogant engineer ended up putting the lives of ordinary blue collar workers on the line, ultimately in the hope of saving money. The author takes us into the lives of the people involved, and does a great job of helping us understand all the colliding forces that led to things going so wrong.

The quality of reportage and writing here is certainly worth four stars, but I found this too depressing to say I "really show more liked" the book. show less

From the start of 'Trapped Under the Sea" the book has you caught. It brings to life the dangers of workers who are expected to do the unexpected to accomplish what we call progress. This book takes you down into the tunnel as if you were there. The desperation, the tension, the fear. Neal Swidey filled out the background so flawlessly that the book held you spellbound wondering what would happen next. The lack of preparation of the engineers for the unseen was grossly inapt. It points out show more that greed and politics ran the whole project especially after it fell into millions of dollars in over costs. What happened could have been prevented if they had listened to the divers who knew what the conditions were at the end of the tunnel. It took five very brave and heroic men to do what they did with an air system that was hopelessly flawed. Two men lost their lives for greed. It should never have happened. show less

There isn't a word to describe this book. I started this review about ten times and just kept backing up over the first line because I simply couldn't describe it that easily.

Trapped Under the Sea is the tragic story of five divers who went down to work in the Deer Island Tunnel in Boston. It not only covers the lives of the divers in an interesting and captivating way, but it tells the story of the people who worked above them, the men and women who made the choices on the project and who show more were given the difficult task of assigning blame when everything came to a sudden stop because of the accident in 1999. Swidey has a gift for taking research and turning it into a compelling story rather than just a list of facts and made me feel as if I had met the divers in person. I can not imagine the amount of time and effort that was put into this book in order to properly memorialize those who died and honor those who lived on.

Starting on the day of the accident, then moving backward in time to properly introduce you to the miners and others involved in the project, there is a sort of mystery involved. If the news you were watching at the time focused on the John F. Kennedy, Jr. plane crash, then you probably missed the news of this event, which was hidden behind all of that publicity, meaning you will instantly be curious to know who survived and how everything happened. The build up to the final events was in no way a means of capitalizing on a bad situation, but a true memorial, a way of making you see with your mind something that even the divers said you could not understand if you had not been there. My only issue with this very fluid transition through time was that sometimes a character would meet someone and the story perspective would change without much notice. You would be reading about one person's life, then they meet someone and you're following that person's life. These transitions were the only thing that threw me and were not frequent.

I could not put this book down, yet I found it took me some time to get through, which seems an odd combination until you realize that this is the kind of book that seeps into your soul so that it can help you live the experience. I think it is the perfect way to honor those involved and to bring to light the struggles that those in the industry face every day just so the general public can be comfortable in their lives.

Note: Though this book was a free gift from the author, the content of my review was in no way influenced by the gifting. The book speaks for itself and my review would have been worded just this way even if I'd gone out and bought it. show less