Neil Swidey

Neil Swidey is the author of Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness, a No. 1 Boston Globe bestseller that was named one of the best books of 2014 by Amazon and Booklist. His first book, The Assist, was a Boston Globe bestseller that was named one of the best books of 2008 by The Washington Post. He was also a co-author of the New York Times bestselling Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy. A staff writer for The Boston Globe Magazine, Swidey teaches multimedia journalism at Tufts University and has served as an on-air contributing analyst for NBC News. His writing has won numerous national awards and has been featured in The Best American Science Writing, The Best American Crime Writing, and The Best American Political Writing.

A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.” And then, in the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in. Only three would make it out of the pitch-black, airless tunnel alive.

Swidey tells this powerful story in his Trapped Under the Sea lectures. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, he takes audiences deep into the lives of the five commercial divers at the heart of the story: DJ Gillis, Tim Nordeen, Donald “Hoss” Hosford, Dave Riggs and Billy Juse who collectively had decades of combined experience in tunnels, on bridges, offshore oil-rigs and salvage missions. Swidey also shows audiences the other players in the cleanup effort—the engineers, politicians, lawyers, project planners, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath.

With his lectures, Swidey raises an important question: What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects as designers and builders are emboldened by new technology? This is a question of human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe.