Tom Duffy chews on his fourth coffee stirrer of the hour as he monitors the readings from 10 enormous strand jacks on screen. The straw's predecessors lay in a pile at his feet, and a room full of colleagues keeps watch on the pile's growth to judge how the risky process is going.
"You can tell how well the lift is coming along by counting the number of straws he's chewed up," says one of Duffy's teammates, Bruce Bennett.