Neil Swidey was at a neighborhood birthday party seven years ago when a lawyer friend told him about an unusual lawsuit. The litigation stemmed from a 1999 accident in which commercial divers had been sent on a risky mission to unplug a 10-mile unlit tunnel deep beneath Boston Harbor — a key step in the cleanup of the once-filthy waterway. Swidey, a reporter at The Boston Globe Magazine, had never heard of the incident, partly because it was subsumed by media coverage of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fatal plane crash, which took place around the same time. In 2009 Swidey wrote a two-part story in the Globe Magazine reconstructing the accident, but afterward he remained interested in the larger questions raised by the incident — specifically in how organizations manage risky projects, and how decisions can go tragically wrong. “If you look around at all the infrastructure that makes modern life possible — the tunnels and towers — that’s all done on the backs of blue collar workers who assume the lion’s share of the risks,” Swidey says. His book on the Harbor Tunnel disaster, “Trapped Under the Sea,” comes out in February. He spoke with HBR about the broader genre of “disaster lit” and what it teaches about decision-making.