He was in all respects costumed as the epitome of the Hollywood dream of a heroic engineer-builder, ready to drive a canal through an isthmus or throw a dam across a raging river--the kind who'd build the dam while the river raged, instead of waiting until it was quiet, a few days later.
He appeared to be a heroic character.
The VSL approach applies information from several published value-of-life studies, which themselves examine tradeoffs of monetary compensation for small additional mortality risks, to determine a reasonable benefit of preventing premature mortality.