Trapped Under the Sea
One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles into the Darkness
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Narrated by:
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David H. Lawrence XVII
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By:
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Neil Swidey
About this listen
The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job - with deadly results.
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.”
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; not all of them came out alive.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death.
An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the audiobook - which Dennis Lehane calls "extraordinary" and compares with The Perfect Storm - is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk - how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred - and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe.
Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel - behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible - lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice.
©2014 Neil Swidey (P)2014 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"A harrowing account of how commercial divers risk their lives to improve ours. After reading Neil Swidey’s Trapped Under the Sea, you will never look at a bridge or tunnel in the same way."
—Men's Journal
"Neil Swidey's detail-rich account of this unlikely disaster is a stirring tribute to the men, how they lived, and how they died."
—Mother Jones
" Trapped Under the Sea is extraordinary. It bears comparison with The Perfect Storm in its brilliant evocation of everyday, working class men thrust into a harrowing, at times heroic confrontation with death and disaster."
— Dennis Lehane, author of Live By Night and Shutter Island
"This book will take you on a journey into a fascinating but little-known world—it’s the anatomy of a tragedy, a dramatic tale with a cast of vividly drawn characters, superbly written and researched."
— Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil Action and The Lost Painting
" Trapped Under the Sea is a heartbreaking tale of real-life bravery, real-life bungling, and real-life tragedy. Neil Swidey is a terrific storyteller."
— Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe
"Thrilling and beautifully told, Trapped Under the Sea delivers us into a dangerous and mysterious world, a place that speaks to our darkest fears and where heroes work, as Swidey so masterfully shows us, just beneath the surface of our everyday lives."
— Robert Kurson, author of Shadow Divers
"A fascinating, sympathetic, and suspenseful look at a doomed, high-risk engineering job, the working class men who dared to undertake it, and its ripple effect on the survivors. Claustrophobic and compelling."
— Chuck Hogan, author of Devils in Exile and The Town
"A marvel of masterful reporting and suspenseful writing. Neil Swidey has delivered a gripping, action-filled account of the human costs deep inside a feat of modern engineering. He has a remarkable knack for bringing to life indelible characters and making readers hold our breath as these brave men enter the claustrophobic world of their undersea lives."
— Mitchell Zuckoff, author of Frozen in Time and Lost in Shangri-La
" Trapped Under the Sea offers vital insights into how organizations work—or fail to work—and how very smart people can make very bad decisions. Neil Swidey’s riveting account of the Deer Island disaster should be essential reading for anyone in a position of leadership. I couldn’t put it down."
— Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management and author of Teaming
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Story
Chris and Chrissy Rouse, an experienced father-and-son scuba diving team, hoped to achieve widespread recognition for their outstanding but controversial diving skills. Obsessed and ambitious, they sought to solve the secrets of a mysterious, undocumented World War II German U-boat that lay under 230 feet of water, only a half day's mission from New York Harbor. In doing so they paid the ultimate price in their quest for fame.
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This book is terrible
- By Will O. on 08-21-18
By: Bernie Chowdhury
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Sealab
- America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor
- By: Ben Hellwarth
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Sealab is the underwater Right Stuff: the compelling story of how a U.S. Navy program sought to develop the marine equivalent of the space station - and forever changed man's relationship to the sea. While NASA was trying to put a man on the moon, the U.S. Navy launched a series of daring experiments to prove that divers could live and work from a sea-floor base.
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An excellent story of adventure and discovery.
- By R. Smith on 08-11-15
By: Ben Hellwarth
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Why Planes Crash
- An Accident Investigator's Fight for Safe Skies
- By: David Soucie, Ozzie Cheek
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Boarding an airplane strikes at least a small sense of fear into most people. Even though we all have heard that the odds of being struck by lightning are greater than the odds of perishing in a plane crash, it still doesn't feel that way. Airplane crashes might be rare, but they do happen, and they’re usually fatal. David Soucie insists that most of these deaths could be prevented. He’s worked as a pilot, a mechanic, an FAA inspector, and an aviation executive. He’s seen death up close and personal - deaths of colleagues and friends that might have been prevented if he had approved certain safety measures in the aircrafts they were handling.
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Me, Me, Me
- By WakeNCAgent on 09-13-19
By: David Soucie, and others
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Captain Phil Harris
- The Legendary Crab Fisherman, Our Hero, Our Dad
- By: Josh Harris, Jake Harris, Steve Springer, and others
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Prior to his untimely death, in 2010, Captain Phil Harris was a star of Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch, the hit show that follows the exhilarating lives of Alaskan crab fishermen as they brave the vicious Bering Sea. He led his crew through hurricane-force winds and four-story-high waves, hauling in millions of pounds of crab and raking in millions of dollars. Phil worked hard, but he played even harder....
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Almost cried again!
- By The Girls on 09-12-16
By: Josh Harris, and others
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Shadow Divers
- The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
- By: Robert Kurson
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 15 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1991, acting on a tip from a local fisherman, two scuba divers discovered a sunken German U-boat, complete with its crew of 60 men, not too far off the New Jersey coast. The divers, realizing the momentousness of their discovery, began probing the mystery. Over the next six years, they became expert and well-traveled researchers, taught themselves German, hunted for clues in Germany, and constructed theories corrective of the history books, all in an effort to identify this sunken U-boat and its crew.
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GRIPPING!
- By Douglas on 07-03-04
By: Robert Kurson
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Full Body Burden
- Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
- By: Kristen Iversen
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter, Kristen Iversen
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.
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A story that no one else wanted to tell.
- By Carol on 01-28-13
By: Kristen Iversen
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The Boys in the Cave
- Deep Inside the Impossible Rescue in Thailand
- By: Matt Gutman
- Narrated by: Matt Gutman
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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From award-winning ABC News Chief National Correspondent Matt Gutman, and written using exclusive interviews and information comes the definitive account of the dramatic story that gripped the world: the miracle rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped in a flooded cave miles underground for nearly three weeks - a pulse-pounding account by a reporter who was there every step of their journey out.
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Wanted much more about what happened inside
- By Scott T. Hards on 12-22-18
By: Matt Gutman
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Rust
- The Longest War
- By: Jonathan Waldman
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 13 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In Rust journalist Jonathan Waldman travels from Key West, Florida, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to meet the colorful and often reclusive people concerned with corrosion. He sneaks into an abandoned steelworks with a brave artist and nearly gets kicked out of Can School. Across the Arctic he follows a massive high-tech robot, hunting for rust in the Alaska pipeline.
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Almost too geeky for geeks
- By Norman B. Bernstein on 03-26-15
By: Jonathan Waldman
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Report from Ground Zero
- By: Dennis Smith
- Narrated by: Eric Conger, Jeff David, Don Leslie
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Abridged
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Immediately after two hijacked jets struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Dennis Smith volunteered in the rescue effort. Having spent his career as both a respected writer and a member of one of the city's busiest firehouses, Smith became determined to use his unique background to tell the story of the disaster and its aftermath with the empathy and understanding that only an insider could bring to it. In this audio memoir, he has collected astonishing first-person testimony.
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Intersting choice of narrator
- By Sara Roltgen on 09-24-18
By: Dennis Smith
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Deep Descent
- Adventure and Death Diving the Andrea Doria
- By: Kevin F. McMurray
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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On a foggy July evening in 1956, the Italian cruise liner Andrea Doria, bound for New York, was struck broadside by another vessel. In eleven hours, she would sink nearly 250 feet to the murky Atlantic Ocean floor. Thanks to a daring rescue operation, only 51 of more than 1,700 people died in the tragedy. But the Andrea Doria is still taking lives. Considered the Mt. Everest of diving, the Andrea Doria is the ultimate deepwater wreck challenge.
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A must read for every deep diver
- By DocYinYang on 10-20-19
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Until the Sea Shall Free Them
- By: Robert Frump
- Narrated by: Luke Smith
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The men on the SS Marine Electric sailed into a storm in February 1983 not knowing that they would make history - at a great cost in lives. Just three men survived the wreck of the Marine Electric off the shores of Virginia and they found that their struggle had just begun once they got back to shore. Blamed for the wreck, they fought back and broke a code of silence that had covered up sloppy ship inspections for decades and revealed the flaws in old World War II rust buckets that were still at sea long past their functional lifetime.
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Interesting, but not a great listen
- By Eric on 02-22-13
By: Robert Frump
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Into the Raging Sea
- Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of the El Faro
- By: Rachel Slade
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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On October 1, 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barreled into the Bermuda Triangle and swallowed the container ship El Faro whole, resulting in the worst American shipping disaster in 35 years. No one could fathom how a vessel equipped with satellite communications and a sophisticated navigation system could suddenly vanish - until now. Relying on hundreds of exclusive interviews with family members and maritime experts, as well as the words of the crew members themselves - whose conversations were captured by the ship’s data recorder - journalist Rachel Slade unravels the mystery.
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This Book is Tragic for More Than Just its Story
- By John A. Tucker on 10-23-19
By: Rachel Slade
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Ingenious
- A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America
- By: Jason Fagone
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2007, the X Prize Foundation announced that it would give $10 million to anyone who could build a safe, mass-producible car that could travel one hundred miles on the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas. The challenge attracted more than one hundred teams from all over the world, including dozens of amateurs. Many designed their cars entirely from scratch, rejecting decades of thinking about what a car should look like.
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Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels.
- By Shamu from New York on 12-07-13
By: Jason Fagone
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33 Men
- Inside the Miraculous Survival and Dramatic Rescue of the Chilean Miners
- By: Jonathan Franklin
- Narrated by: Armando Valdez Kennedy
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Having had unparalleled access to the Chilean mine disaster, award-winning journalist Jonathan Franklin takes readers to the heart of a remarkable story of human endurance, survival, and historic heroism. 33 Men is the groundbreaking, authoritative account of the Chilean mine disaster, one of the longest human entrapments in history.
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Excellent
- By James on 11-23-15
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Cold Zero
- Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team
- By: Christopher Whitcomb
- Narrated by: Christopher Whitcomb
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Abridged
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With the immediacy and force of a sniper's strike, Cold Zero is a blistering first-person account of life inside the FBI and its elite Hostage Rescue Team.
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Fact check
- By Rob on 12-18-06
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The Taking of K-129
- How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History
- By: Josh Dean
- Narrated by: Neil Hellegers
- Length: 15 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early hours of February 25, 1968, a Russian submarine armed with three nuclear ballistic missiles set sail from its base in Siberia on a routine combat patrol to Hawaii. Then it vanished. As the Soviet navy searched in vain for the lost vessel, a small, highly classified American operation using sophisticated deep-sea spy equipment found it - wrecked on the sea floor at a depth of 16,800 feet, far beyond the capabilities of any salvage that existed.
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One of the great stories in history
- By Ben Newman on 11-21-17
By: Josh Dean
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Auto Biography
- A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream
- By: Earl Swift
- Narrated by: Greg Itzin
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A brilliant blend of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The Orchid Thief, Earl Swift’s wise, funny, and captivating Auto Biography follows an outlaw-genius auto mechanic as he painstakingly attempts to restores a classic 1957 Chevy to its former glory - all while the FBI and local law enforcement close in.
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epic story of man and machine.
- By D.Streeter on 07-01-22
By: Earl Swift
What listeners say about Trapped Under the Sea
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- S. Shostak
- 10-09-18
Rivitting 16 hours flew by
I am a history fan. This was well researched and written. I am local to the story but lived away while this occurred. Very interesting. The end really pulls at the heartstrings.
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- Miriam
- 08-10-14
An Engineer's Prospective
I am a professional Civil Engineer for over 40 years. I had not been aware of the Deer Island incident described in this book. I found the detailed narrative about the characters and the agencies involved fascinating if not truly sad.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Jeff Curtis
- 02-13-22
Phenomenal story
This book was recommended to me by a friend and fellow SCUBA diver. His description was "unable to put it down" I tend to agree with his assessment. As a former law enforcement officer, it pains me to see blatant carelessness and gross negligence go unanswered. This book does a fantastic job of outlining the events and adding the "personal view" of the players involved. Great read!!!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kristan R Harrington
- 05-14-18
Fascinating, well-written account
I couldn’t put this book down. Listened to the audiobook - it’s 3 a.m. and I just finished. The narrator was easy to listen to. I feel I got to know the players intimately and the author does a great job describing everything in great detail so you have a clear picture in your mind of the tunnel and and all the various contraptions involved. I felt the claustrophobia....If you’re looking for a true story with an almost unimaginable situation, interesting people and heroism and one that will make you wonder how such a tragedy was let to happen, you’ll love this book.
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- John Manzi
- 06-05-23
Excellent read
An excellent mix of the history of the divers, the tunnel project, the failures, the investigation, and follow up
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- BVerité
- 02-22-14
Wow! This is unbelievably good audiobook.
I have a long list of finished books that I haven't reviewed. Despite the this backup, I had to stop everything to write about this book.
This true story is compelling beyond anything Ive read recently. Maybe it isn't the best book ever written, but it is one of the most addictive and fascinating true stories. It will stick with me for a long time to come. Well written and VERY WELL READ!! I didn't know what to expect when I got this, but the intensity of story and of the delivery by the narrator had me hooked withing the first few minutes. I also learned a great deal about commercial deep sea diving. It's unbelievable what these guys do!
The story is intense, tragic, but hopeful in the end.
I highly recommend this to anyone who likes climbing or other survival/expedition type books. I recommend it to anyone really.
There are a few silly metaphors that made me cringe a few times, so I can't say this author is going to win any great literary awards. But he has a fine style of writing that kept me on the edge of my seat and wanting to know more. It was very well written for the action, suspense and intensity. I didn't want it to end!!
Also for this particular story, there is no one better fit as narrator. I'm wasn't familiar with David Lawrence. But he gave an excellent performance!! I'll keep my eye out for both author and narrator in the future!
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18 people found this helpful
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- Thomas
- 02-17-15
Fascinating Story-Compelling Characters
Enjoyed the many facets of this story. Like watching a train about to crash with the aftermath of how it could happen and the suffering of all parties.
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2 people found this helpful
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- woodfoc
- 01-27-16
Sad Loss
enjoyed the book I work in the construction industry so this was very eye opening
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- Fern
- 10-26-21
interesting
alright. I was told to read this via my dad because hummers. it's incredibly technical at points, but if you make it through that, it's a really good story. I would recommend!
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1 person found this helpful
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- E
- 09-14-16
Fascinating, gripping!
Coming to know the real people behind the project made this documentary relatable. What would you do if you were 10 miles into a tunnel with diminishing air and no hope of rescue? What would you do if you were the boss of the project? Learning about how our engineers do what they do was invaluable. As a Bostonian, I can appreciate these events that unfolded right here, where I live.
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