A crane lowered diver Peter Murray about 30 feet through a wide rectangular shaft in the sidewalk outside the Chicago Board of Trade and into the gray flood water about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.
His job was to navigate a couple of doors and reach a 4-inch gap in a wall separating the Board of Trade subbasement from a flooded tunnel.
He never made it.
”The force was unbelievable,” Murray recalled a few minutes after surfacing. ”I was standing 2 feet away from the opening and I couldn`t get any closer.”
Murky water was exploding through the hole in the white cinder block at a rate Murray estimated was 1,100 gallons per minute. He worked up a sweat in his diving suit attempting to get closer but relinquished after a few minutes and was pulled back to the surface.
Murray was among a handful of divers used in efforts to find a solution to a ruptured tunnel below the Chicago River that is channeling hundreds of millions of gallons of water into buildings throughout the Loop.
Thanks to the Great Chicago Flood, the subterreanean corners of many bustling downtown buildings such as the Board of Trade are no longer the realm of footbound traffic. They are now the medium for the suspended animations of underwater divers.
While the CBOT dive posed certain risks, divers working to put a final seal on the ruptured freight tunnel at the Kinzie Street bridge were working under riskier conditions.
Near the breach, diver Jim Samoska of Lindahl Marine Contractors Inc. of Lockport descended into a Kinzie Street caisson Wednesday afternoon to make the first inspection of efforts to put a final plug on the leaking tunnel.
Samoska, a former Navy SEAL who at age 43 is the most senior member of Lindahl`s team of about a half-dozen divers, declined to meet with reporters, but contractors who spoke with Samoska after the inspection said efforts to seal the tunnel looked ”very, very good,” said John Kenny of Kenny Construction.
”This is holding at present,” Kenny said. ”I can`t tell you it`s going to hold forever, but it`s holding at present.”
Samoska found that the sandbags dumped down the shaft had nearly plugged the tunnel except for some water that was filtering through some gravel, Kenny said.
”It`s a dangerous process,” Kenny said.
Samoska, whose firm has gained much of its diving experience by repairing and cleaning water-intake tunnels at nuclear and coal-burning power plants and steel mills in Gary, began his 15- to 20-minute dive about 3 p.m.
Wearing a diving suit and a helmet with an air hose, Samoska found he had no visibility as he entered the flooded freight tunnel, Kenny said. The frigid waters inside the tunnel turned murky as Samoska stepped on the tunnel floor and stirred up a two-foot layer of silt, Kenny said.
”We can`t see what we`re doing down there,” Kenny said. ”The minute he steps, the whole thing clouds up.”
Engineers had been concerned about the current inside the tunnel. If the water was moving rapidly, engineers would have to revise their emergency repair plan because the current would suck divers into the tunnel.
But Samoska found a mild flow, about 2 or 3 knots, or 3 or 4 feet per second, and that meant the plan could proceed, officials said.
Board of Trade officials called Murray`s employer, Roger Chapman International Marine Systems of Milwaukee, on Tuesday morning to examine the gap that had been made to accommodate fiber-optic conduit from the abandoned tunnels. Murray said the idea was to inspect the gap, then somehow patch it and block the rush of water into the basement.
When Murray first got the call about the job, he thought it was going to be a simple job of patching up a couple of holes in the wall.
”Once we looked in and saw water flying all over the place, it was like
`Oh, boy!` ”
