The Blue Death Read online

  After almost four hours of diving, as he strained to force one of the last bags into place, it broke. His foot slipped and in an instant the torrent of water pulled his entire leg into the hole. As it did the ball shifted slightly. He immediately tried to stand, but could not overcome the tremendous force as 15 billion gallons of water pushed toward the opening. He threw himself against the ball, but even his formidable strength was no match for its overwhelming mass. Up above John Dobson strained to detect the slightest pull on the line, unaware that his partner was trapped in the cold, dark, silent world below.

  The people of Jersey City had known for almost twenty years they had a problem. The Passaic River had been pristine in 1854 when the city first began to draw upon it as a source of drinking water. In the years since, Passaic, Patterson, and other communities upstream from them had grown from small villages into busy towns and small cities. They had added sewers that sent an ever-growing stream of infectious wastewater into the river with relentless efficiency. The growth of industry had added sludge acids from the gasworks, washings from the silk and cotton mills, and the effluent from hundreds of small factories into the river. As a final insult, the Jersey City water works sent its own wastewater into the Passaic River at a point just above its intake pipe, the final ingredient for the vile stew that would fill the water pipes of the unfortunate city. Concerns about waterborne disease in Jersey City were so widespread that the Spanish government singled it out, placing a quarantine on all ships sailing from its harbor in 1893. By 1894 a New York Times reporter could state with little risk of hyperbole that the people of Jersey City “are thoroughly satisfied that they have the worst drinking water anywhere in the United States.”

  Where could they find pure water? Jersey City could have chosen to filter the Passaic, but the ability of the evolving technology to purify such foul water was uncertain and, far more important, filters were expensive to build and operate. So Jersey City scoured the lands around it in search of a water supply. There were several options to choose from and a massive contract to award once the choice was made. Political intrigue and cries of corruption plagued the process from its inception.

  With the scent of money in the water, contractors circled like sharks. After six contentious rounds of bidding, in a strange, New Jersey-esque turn of events, the final round produced only one bid. Patrick H. Flynn, the lone bidder, proposed to dam the Rockaway River and build a twenty-one-mile-long conduit to bring water to the city. He had bid in previous rounds, but this time, as the sole bidder, his price had risen by $400,000. Despite cries of foul and legal challenges, the mayor awarded him the contract.

  The awarding of the contract did not end the controversy. Even before the precise location of the dam had been determined, problems and conflicts haunted the construction of the Jersey City Reservoir. By the time the first spade of earth was turned in 1899, the plan had been challenged four times in court.

  Still the project moved forward. Even without a dam site, workers began to quarry stone for its face. As they began to pull the huge blocks of granite from the bedrock of New Jersey, a stone broke loose. The foreman screamed out a warning and six men scrambled to safety. James Antonio, a forty-three-year-old immigrant from Naples, was hard at work when, hearing the commotion, he raised his head. At that instant the rolling stone, which would otherwise have passed over him, caught his head and slammed into a second stone just behind him. His head disappeared in an instant so horrible that the hardened quarrymen turned away, unable to watch. After four months in Boonton, Antonio died with a silver watch and $116 in his pocket, almost half of it in Italian lire.

  The dam would continue to keep New Jersey’s lawyers and doctors busy. Flynn, who immediately turned the project over to a subcontractor, had defaulted on his contract. Mark Fagan, the new mayor bent on ridding the city of corruption, brought in a new contractor, but problems persisted. Lawyers were busy preparing a new round of lawsuits as the dam approached completion. By the time of Bill Hoar’s dive, more than twenty workers had been seriously injured and eight men had died.

  Time and experience had etched John Dobson’s face and hunched his shoulders, further shrinking his short, stocky frame. Even he was not sure how many years he had lived. During those many hard years, he had felt the cold breath of danger many times. As he leaned over Bill Hoar’s lines, he thought he felt it again. His partner had been down for two hours after suggesting he would be done quickly. Then four tugs on the line brought him a moment of relief and he began to pull. He had pulled up just two feet of line when the rope stopped short. Dobson felt a sudden signal to slacken the line and then a signal to pull again. Dobson’s fears returned in a dreadful rush. Something was wrong, but he had no idea what.

  He called for help and workers rowed out to the raft to pull with him. As the team of sinewy construction workers pulled, the rope again went tight and Hoar once again signaled for them to stop. Soon it became clear that brute force was not enough. Dobson had to find help for his partner, just seventy feet away but lost in another world. His only hope was to get another diver. The closest one was hours away in New York City.

  When the telegram for help reached the office of John S. Bundick, the diving contractor in Manhattan, the call went to William Oleson. As soon as he received word that his friend of seven years was in trouble, Olesen assembled his equipment and rushed to the ferry terminal. He made it across the Hudson just in time to miss the train to Boonton. Desperate, he explained his plight to the stationmaster who arranged for a locomotive and a single car to rush him to Boonton. Riding on a spur line that had been built to bring equipment and supplies to the construction site, Olesen arrived just two hours after the message was sent.

  It was seven o’clock. Evening was falling. Olesen found Dobson on a raft crowded with the strongest workers from the dam site, along with the pump and its ceaseless operators. Their collective weight had sunk them waist deep in cold water as they struggled to free Hoar from his underwater prison.

  William Hoar was not sure how long he had been down. Under normal circumstances a diver could expect to work for four hours at that depth, but time kept above the surface had ceased to exist. A cold, black vice had squeezed his universe down to the ball, the pipe, and his body. The remorseless ticking of his physiological clocks marked the only time that mattered. The infinite cold crept through his suit, past the layer of wool and into his flesh, driving his body temperature down. The pain in his leg surged through his body. Even the twin vultures of thirst and hunger had started to circle. He had been working hard with nothing to eat since morning. Even if cold, pain, thirst, hunger, or their combined effects did not take him, even if he could make his way to the surface, the nitrogen that lay hidden in his blood might well turn to deadly gas bubbles as he rose, killing him with the bends as the pressure dropped.

  Hours passed in the surreal horror. Other than the steady waves of his breathing and the occasional distorted echoes of sounds from the surface, the silence was absolute. He pulled regularly on the lifeline to let Dobson know he was all right. In every sense the lines provided his only link to life.

  Then he thought he heard something. Sounds scuttled through the darkness. Was his imagination playing tricks on him? Suddenly he felt a hand and then a mask pressed up tight against his. A voice echoed through his helmet. The words were muffled. “Bill, are you okay? What happened?”

  It sounded like Oleson. Oleson was one of the best divers in the business. Hoar’s confidence rose. Shouting so he could be heard, he explained that his foot was caught in the current. Oleson could feel its tremendous force as he bent down, hoping to remove the sandbags around Hoar’s foot.

  Oleson worked quickly. By the time he had been able to assemble a new raft and get down to Hoar, it was well past nine P.M., more than eight hours after Hoar’s initial descent. He broke open the sandbags and the sand disappeared down the sluiceway, but Hoar remained pinned by the ball and the current. Then a sudden, horrifying rush of icy, black
current grabbed Oleson’s hand and sucked it into the gaping maw of the pipe.

  In an instant Oleson found himself next to Hoar, his hand caught between the ball and the steel rim of the sluiceway. The rescuer had become fellow victim. He pulled at his hand with all his strength. After a long moment of terror, he felt a searing pain as his hand popped out of the trap. He fell backward holding his bleeding hand above him.

  Oleson returned to the surface to consider his options. They were few and poor. On the other side of the dam, workers had tried to plug the sluiceway. If they succeeded, the water would rise, the current would stop, and Hoar could escape. Despite their efforts, however, water continued to roar through the pipe. Oleson could also try to move the ball. It might be possible with a proper harness and a team of horses on the shore, but the sudden rush of water would be almost certain to take hold of Hoar, pull him down the pipe, and crush him against the broken gate. Oleson even considered an underwater amputation, but did not believe his friend would reach the surface alive with a severed limb. It seemed that his only option was to drag the poor man to freedom.

  Despite his own wounds, Oleson worked through the night to free his friend. He brought down a block and tackle so that workers on the surface could apply more force in their effort to pull him loose. When that failed, he rigged a complex compound pulley system with one end connected to weights on the reservoir bottom. Workers on the surface pulled on the rope, but instead of moving Hoar, their combined force simply moved the weights. Oleson added more and more weight, but only succeeded in dragging a 350-pound anvil and a pile of sandbags through the mud. Hoar remained trapped. Somehow Hoar maintained his strength and his wits. Through it all he leaned up against the ball, moving to one side and then the other to assist in his rescue.

  Word of the crisis had reached Boonton and the crowd swelled. Many stayed through the night as Oleson dove down again and again into the pitch black. Ten times he descended. Ten times hope rose. But as the moonless night wore on, hope and the crowd slipped off into the gloom.

  By the time dawn crept across the reservoir, Oleson was nearing his breaking point. He descended one more time, taking with him the end of a massive rope, which he fastened to Hoar’s waist. Before leaving, he took his friend’s hand, squeezing it to reassure him. Hoar had weakened but managed to squeeze back. Oleson returned to the surface and collapsed. As a doctor attended to him, workers on the shore, nine hundred feet away, attached the other end of the rescue rope to a team of horses.

  The teamster called out, the horses pulled, and the rope drew taut. It inched shoreward. A final glimmer of optimism ascended and then collapsed as the rope went slack and the horses stumbled forward. Somewhere below the surface, the rope had snapped.

  The pull of the horses jerked Hoar up and his ankle exploded in pain. His suit tore away and he could feel cold water rush up his leg. He felt for an instant as if the force of the horses would rip him to pieces. Then it abruptly stopped, leaving him clinging to life by a thread. The hole in his suit had created a new peril. The air from above, from the men who had pumped life to him all night long, would escape through the hole in his suit if he fell over. If it did black, suffocating water would rush in, bringing certain death. Down to his last ounce of strength, he struggled to stay upright.

  At one P.M., twenty-four hours after Bill Hoar’s first descent, John Dobson let out a plaintive cry. He had been there each minute of those twenty-four hours, making sure the pump continued to run, waiting for a signal.

  “What is it?” called the workers on the dam.

  “I felt a tug on the line,” he replied.

  Dobson shook the line in response and was sure he felt Hoar shake the line three times. Perhaps the old man was just imagining things. Or perhaps, with his last bit of strength, Hoar was saying good-bye to an old friend.

  Two more days would pass before a diver could bring Hoar’s body to the surface. That was possible only after another diver who was also a mechanic had descended through another shaft in the dam to repair the broken gate. The sluiceway filled, horses pulled the ball to one side, and workers pulled Hoar’s remains up onto the raft. As the helmet was pulled off, surface air seeped in for the first time in almost one hundred hours, and the team of men who had pumped air to him constantly for four long days and nights ceased work. A doctor stood nearby, but the sight of his blood-suffused head confirmed everyone’s worst fears. The men who had gathered around him on the raft could see where the struggle had stripped the skin from his ankle and foot. The following Sunday, four divers carried Hoar’s casket down the steps of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Astoria, Queens.

  Hoar was just one of many casualties in the scramble for pure water. Massive engineering projects to redirect rivers, reshape watersheds, and create vast new lakes relied on new, untested methods and required vast numbers of workers. Workplace safety rules were almost unheard of. Hundreds of men died to slake the rapacious thirst of America’s growing cities. But it was not just individual workers who died. Entire towns perished in the quest for pure water.

  The Jersey City Reservoir drowned the village of Old Boonton and part of Parsippany. Katonah * disappeared beneath the waters of New York City’s Croton Reservoir and when that growing metropolis exhausted the waters of Westchester, it stretched north to the Catskills, consuming the towns of West Hurley, Ashton, Glenford, Brown’s Station, Olivebridge, Brodhead, Shokan, West Shokan, and Boiceville beneath a huge reservoir almost ten times the size of Jersey City’s. Boston’s vast Quabbin Reservoir devoured four New England towns when it flooded the Swift River Valley. Even today one can still see the ghost of Dana, Massachusetts, staring up from beneath the waves.

  Each town fought back, but few had a chance against the large cities that laid claim to their land. The struggle of Old Boonton was only a minor skirmish in the story of the Jersey City Reservoir. Far greater controversies surrounded the great stone dam through its construction, but the most important one came long after the dam was complete. That story would change the history of drinking water.

  In the spring of 1904, the dam operators opened the valves that sent the water from the Rockaway River through twenty-three miles of cast-iron conduit to the taps of Jersey City. After the initial relief that the controversial project was complete and the vile waters of the Passaic no longer violated their faucets, a controversy began to brew. Proponents of the project had carefully ignored the fact that twenty thousand people lived in the Rockaway River watershed above the reservoir, many of them in the town of Dover. The rush of sewage that entered the reservoir during heavy rains made this studied ignorance difficult to maintain.

  Mark Fagan, the mayor of Jersey City, had come to power in the midst of the dam controversy by an unprecedented defeat of the local political machine. He had already taken on Patrick H. Flynn, the dam’s unctuous first contractor. He was not about to pay for a reservoir full of dirty water. The son of poor Irish immigrants, Flynn had been raised to view life as “one long fight for what’s right.”

  In October 1906, with the controversy at a bitter stalemate, an outbreak of typhoid claimed fifty-three lives in Jersey City in a single month, three times as many as in all of 1905. When the superintendent of the Bureau of Contagious Disease ventured up the Rockaway in search of the outbreak’s source, he found three cases in the town of Dover. When he went to the town hall, however, local officials refused to give him information about the cases. But those officials could not conceal the fact that Dover discharged its sewage into the Rockaway River.

  News of typhoid in Dover turned the controversy in Jersey City into a pitched battle. The contractor had powerful friends and they turned on Fagan, insinuating that the outbreak was a fabrication intended to further his position in the fight over the dam. Physicians appeared out of the woodwork to state that the water was untainted. Others suggested that the diagnosed cases of typhoid had been incorrectly identified. “Concerned citizens” appeared outside the city hall protesting the mayor’s ir
responsible actions and their negative impact on the city’s image. When the Board of Health prepared flyers for schoolchildren warning them of the typhoid risk, the city’s police chief, a stooge of the machine, served notice that he would arrest any board member who attempted to distribute them.

  Seasoned in the rough streets of Jersey City, Fagan feared no one, not even the machine. He refused to back down from a mere contractor. He insisted that the contractor solve the problem by treating the sewage from Dover and Rockaway. The contractor, in an effort to avoid that expense, looked for another solution. He found it in Chicago on the banks of Bubbly Creek.

  For most of Chicago, the remarkable reversal of the Chicago River carried off the problems that had faced its water supply. Rates of waterborne diseases dropped dramatically. But for one large segment of its population, the problems got worse.

  The reversal had failed to flush out Bubbly Creek. Instead it turned the small fork of the Chicago River into a nightmarish backwater. For people living close to the creek, this meant enduring a terrific stench. For livestock at Union Stockyards, which relied on the creek both as a repository for waste and a source of water, this meant endless waves of disease. The fact that this translated into huge financial losses and threatened the viability of the yards brought George Johnson to Bubbly Creek.

  Johnson was a consulting engineer and the owners of the stockyard charged him with the task of providing safe water for the livestock. Cost was, without question, an issue. Using the Chicago River would require a long pipeline, and Chicago’s sewers, which had once been downstream, were now upstream from the yards. Lake Michigan was simply too far away. That left Bubbly Creek as the only available water supply, but it was profoundly polluted. To purify enough water to supply the vast transient herds was far too costly. No conventional option seemed feasible.