MEN SUFFOCATED, BUT HAD BACKUP AIR SUPPLIES
Date: 07/23/1999 Page: B1
Section: Metro
Author: By Jordana Hart, Globe Staff
The two commercial divers working nine miles inside the new Deer Island sewage outfall tunnel Wednesday had three emergency air supplies to tap when their main system malfunctioned. One backup was on their hip with access in seconds.
But they died anyway.
The men were breathing a mix of oxygen and nitrogen from the same tanks used by three co-workers, working 1,000 feet away.
But the three other men survived.
These puzzling questions confronted State Police and federal workplace safety investigators yesterday as they tried to unravel why the two men apparently suffocated inside their Humvee all-terrain vehicle, parked in the tunnel built 400 feet beneath the floor of Massachusetts Bay.
``The men were highly experienced and trained, including test sessions for all kinds of potential operational problems,'' said Nancy Sterling, a spokeswoman for Kiewit Atkinson Kenny, the main contractor for the project.
``This is not only a tragic accident, but also a highly unusual one, given that the men had so many fail-safe systems in place.''
The men, said Ralph Wallace, a deputy director for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which manages the tunnel project, ``were all comfortable and familiar with using air supplies, and with being in confined spaces.''
MWRA spokesman Thomas Lee identified one of the dead men yesterday as William Juse, 33, from Greenland, N.H. Juse was an experienced diver who worked for Black Dog Divers of New Hampshire.
Lee did not identify the other diver last night at the request of his family. The diver worked for a Spokane, Wash.-based dive company called Norwesco Marine Specialty Contractors.
Lee also would not answer questions or speculate yesterday about what could have gone wrong, such as kinks or breaks or blockages in air supply hoses. ``We are in the middle of a federal and state investigation,'' he said.
The tragedy was made more ironic because the two men who died were monitoring oxygen levels for their three co-workers. All five were in a distant section of the 9 1/2-mile tunnel where the lack of airflow makes supplemental oxygen essential.
A week ago, the team had begun unplugging safety caps at the bottom of 55 diffuser pipes that rise up to the floor of the bay. Treated sewage is due to begin flowing through the tunnel and up through smaller pipes and the diffusers by this fall.
Both Norwesco and Black Dog have good federal safety records, according to John Chavez, a spokesman for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
But OSHA records show that Kiewit Atkinson Kenny has had 134 violations and paid almost $200,000 in fines on the project since it began work on the tunnel. Chavez noted, however, that the number of violations is not unusual, or particularly troubling, given the massive scope of the project.
The deaths of the two workers Wednesday were the fourth and fifth fatalities on the project, which began in 1991.
In 1995, an engineer was crushed to death inside the tunnel. In June 1992, a drill operator died after being thrown from a drilling platform. Two weeks after that, a laborer was killed when a crane dropped a concrete panel on him.
However, Sterling, the Kiewit spokeswoman, said the company is ``proud of its safety record.''
Yesterday, investigators and MWRA officials began to reconstruct what may have occurred as the team labored below the floor of Massachusetts Bay in the tunnel, which narrows to about 7 feet high and 12 feet wide at its furthest point.
At 8:30 a.m Wednesday, surface workers lowered Juse and the other four construction divers, two Humvees loaded with emergency oxygen equipment, and a trailer containing four huge oxygen and nitrogen tanks -- the main air supply -- 400 feet down to the beginning of the tunnel. At the bottom, the Humvees were facing in opposite directions so that workers can go back and forth easily in the tight confines of the tunnel's outer reaches.
The men got into in the Humvee facing outbound and began their two-hour, nine-mile drive, pulling the oxygen supply and the other Humvee on the trailer.
About nine miles out, the Humvee stopped and three workers climbed out to begin their trek to the work site.
Juse and his partner remained inside the Humvee, monitoring the oxygen levels of their three comrades. Though several feet of water cover the tunnel floor near the entrance, where the three men were working was dry.
The MWRA yesterday declined to release the names of the three workers, saying they were being closely questioned as witnesses by investigators.
In the tunnel, the five men, each wearing a full-face oxygen mask with a glass front, were attached by half-inch thick air supply hoses to the main oxygen source at the Humvee.
The two men in the Humvee had hoses directly attached to the primary tanks. The supply of oxygen for the other three flowed from the same primary tanks through a single hose to an air supply cart where three other hoses were attached -- one for each of the men.
All five men also wore ``pony'' emergency air packs the size of footballs on their belts, easily accessible by reattaching their hoses if the main air supply fell short. The workers in the Humvee also had access to backpack-sized Ocenco air tanks, which can provide up to four hours of oxygen.
Finally, there were also high-pressure tanks strapped to the roof one of the Humvees, Wallace said.
Every half hour or so, the three men outside the Humvee and the two inside it radioed one another, as part of required safety procedures; the men inside the Humvee also used a mine telephone -- one of many built into the length of the tunnel -- to keep in regular contact with the workers on the surface.
It was at 1:40 p.m. that the crisis began.
The three workers unplugging the safety caps made their routine radio call to the two divers inside the Humvee, but got no response. Within minutes, the surface workers also tried to contact the Humvee without luck.
The three men underground notified the surface team by radio of their concerns, dropped their tools, and ran back to the Humvee. It took them 10 minutes to reach the vehicle and they found Juse and the other diver unconscious.
MWRA's Wallace said he did not know what the three divers may have done to try to revive the dying men, who were in full cardiac arrest. He said they placed the divers in the other Humvee and took off, in their haste leaving the other vehicle behind. It took two hours to reach the main shaft, where emergency workers waited.
At about 3:40 p.m., the stricken workers, raised to the surface, were airlifted to local hospitals.
One was pronounced dead at Boston Medical Center; the other at Massachusetts General Hospital. The other three men were taken by ambulance to Mass. General where they were held for several hours for observation and released.