Boston Harbor was once a national embarrassment, blackened by the smothering amounts of sewage and sludge dumped into it every day. To rescue the “dirtiest harbor in America,” the region’s wastewater treatment system had to be completely overhauled—a staggeringly complicated and ambitious project. It worked. Today, Boston owns the cleanest urban harbor in the nation, an environmental triumph. But it couldn’t have happened without the daring work of a team of divers who were asked to undertake an unimaginably risky mission. This talk will explore the true story of what happened, as well as the implications are for divers asked to tackle the toughest challenges of their profession. On a bright summer day 15 years ago, five divers were sent, essentially, to the moon, except in their case it was to the end of an oxygen-starved, pitch-black, nearly ten-mile-long tunnel built hundreds of feet below the floor of the ocean. Because the tunnel’s endpoint stretched farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench, it was too remote for the divers to bring in enough bottled air. Instead, they were given an experimental breathing supply mixing liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen in the tunnel. Five divers went in, but not all of them came out alive. In this talk, the author of the new book about the project, TRAPPED UNDER THE SEA, will discuss this gripping story with divers who had firsthand knowledge of the job. Acclaimed author Dennis Lehane calls TRAPPED UNDER THE SEA, “Extraordinary. Bears comparison with THE PERFECT STORM. And Robert Kurson, author of the bestselling SHADOW DIVERS, says: “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 beneat h the surface of our everyday lives.”