"Something is wrong here" says Patrick Kineavy,
director of Physical Infrastructure Maintenance for the MBTA, the transit
agency known as the T in Boston, as he descends deeper into the thick
black of the tunnel. He's looking for the cause of the
blaring sound, the alarm that signals something is not right in the area known as "Boylston Under", the abandoned section of tube under
the Boston Common once retrofitted to serve as a bomb shelter during the height
of the Cold War. Kineavy isn't sure
what's going on, but his anxiety is growing.
He was just supposed to be giving a tour of this part of the concrete circuitry that zig-zags under the streets of the city. But the unexpected warning requires him to
shift modes. Safety of the T system is
his job after all.
This scene is part of Boston Under: After Dark, a film made
by Edward Peters and Peter Olejnik, two guys who spend their days behind desks
at the state's Department of Revenue.
Last March, they decided that the T's workers' tale needed to be
told after reading about a writer who
spent a whole night underground. "The story really intrigued us as filmmakers because of the
potential for an interesting visual look at these tunnels -- and people who
work at night in them. The MBTA tunnels were a completely foreign world
to us and we figured there were many other residents who were unaware as
well" said Edward via email. They both decided to look into it further.
As they dug deeper into this infrastructure maze,
they found that you can't talk about the T without talking about the people who
make the T run. "As filming
progressed, we began meeting and interviewing workers and documenting the
oftentimes dangerous work and quickly realized there were some very interesting
characters and compelling stories at the MBTA --in particular, the chasm
between public perception about the MBTA and the reality of having to maintain
a very old system" Edward continued.
The impersonal and sometimes jostling experience of riding
public transit dissolves in the interviews of the people that
operate and repair all of the massive machines that move us around each
morning. There is the female welder talking about
the burns she gets from her equipment. There is the woman who drove the Green Line for years describing cars that cut
her off regularly, endangering the lives of her passengers as
well as them. In an opening scene, a supervisor responds to an
emergency on Commonwealth Avenue at 2 a.m. A piece of track has a dangerous
crack in it and needs fixing by the time the T resumes service in three hours. Without repair, a train might derail.
These are the stories of the
people not seen, the "third shift" of night workers who fan out every
evening to keep this oldest subway system in North American running. "These folks that work on Boston's heavy
rail after hours really do rely on each other ...and we had the opportunity to
see this dynamic" said Peter in an email.
The other story here is of the two behind the
camera, Edward Peters and
Peter Olejnik. Government workers by day, they transform into filmmakers by night. In Edward's accounting, "the project was
largely done on our own time - starting work at 11 pm and wrapping up with the
crews at 5 am. After that, a quick breakfast -- and lots of coffee!! -- and
back to the studio to upload the footage, take a quick nap and back to our day
jobs."
Their dedication expresses another aspect of public
service. What it means, what it really means, to be responsible for
moving almost half a billion people every year in one of America's oldest and
most important cities is often forgotten, because no one has bothered to tell that story. To express clearly what people often dismiss as background noise is a gift. It also reminds just
how much we receive in excellence and professionalism from all our public sector.
Patrick Kineavy is ok. He has located the cause of the alarm. It's a broken pump that's not draining
the floor of the tunnel. He calls in the repair crews and
they begin work right away.
