No Escape

His co-workers were trapped belowground with water rising. Safety rules said: Don’t go back.

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Dreaded Sound

Ten stories beneath a street in Fall River, Massachusetts, tunnel workers heard a loud whoosh of air and a clatter of rocks and debris. A second later, a Niagara-like roar of black water poured into the sewer-overflow tunnel they were excavating. I'm dead, thought Hoip "Ali" Swaby, 41, the father of two young boys. Trapped with him were co-workers Kenneth Schofield, a veteran heavy-equipment operator, and John Kanash, who grabbed the two-way radio at his belt. "Get the cage down here!" Kanash yelled, but then his radio went dead.

At the first rush of water, Swaby ran to check the sump pump and found it already underwater. In no time, the torrent rose to the men's knees; as it reached their shoulders, the tunnel's lights flickered off.

The three were trapped in a 16-foot-wide shaft with water raging down from an old sewer main 80 feet above them. Wearing heavy rubber rain suits and boots, it would have been almost impossible for even a strong swimmer to stay afloat for long in the frigid water -- and Swaby couldn't swim at all. The rock walls at that level were sheer. Above the rock, closer to the surface, the rain had turned the earthen walls into mud.

God, take care of my wife and kids, Swaby prayed. Separated from the others, the Jamaica-born workman flattened himself against one side of the shaft.

On the surface, crane operator Mike Salvador was preparing to lift an excavating machine out of the hole when he heard desperate cries. It was six o'clock on a darkening mid-October evening, and he couldn't see more than 20 feet down. Thinking someone had been hurt or that a machine had caught fire, he swung the crane's hoist and hooked a "man cage," roughly the size of a phone booth, to lift the workers out. He lowered it, using a mark that had been spray-painted on the cable's upper end to judge when the cage reached the proper level.

Belowground, water was filling the shaft at a rate of more than 10,000 gallons a minute.

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Officer candidate school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was tough. During an inspection, a fellow soldier received 30 demerits for a single penny found within his area. Ten demerits were for "valuables insecure," ten because the penny wasn't shined, and ten because Abraham Lincoln needed a shave.

-- Jack Howell

“ The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it. ”

— P. B. Medawar

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