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Big Dig - One of Engineering's Greatest Mistakes?
Enggirl1 writes "Design News discusses Boston's Big Dig and begs the question - is it one of engineering's greatest failures? The article reveals that forums and blogs are popping up all over the Internet as vehicles for engineers and contractors to discuss, under the guise of anonymity, their skepticism, thoughts and reactions to one of the biggest infrastructure failures in the news today." From the article: "One blogger, whose profile notes that he is an ICC Reinforced Concrete Special Inspector and an ICC Pre-stressed Concrete Special Inspector, among other specialties, says he has nearly 20 years of experience performing both placement and post-placement inspections of rebar, post-tensioning systems, concrete, masonry, etc. He says if structural engineers who specify epoxy for dowels and the like believe that the work is being done correctly then they live in a world unfamiliar to him."
One of the main problems the team had on the Boston Dig project was that some genius decided to hire the same contractors for both the construction and the inspection of the tunnel. Consequently, the inspector gets put in an awkward position, for if he finds anything wrong, he can either...
A) blow the whistle, cost the company extra money, and then get fired for "undisclosed reasons"
B) look the other way like a good little puppet of the company, get paid, and never have to really deal with the consequences face to face
Seriously, whoever thought that it was a good idea to hire the same company for both construction and inspection is a little naive. Would you let McDonald's do the FDA testing on their own food?
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I believe that the question should be phrased differently. I would like to ask whether or not it is one of quality assurance's biggest mistakes. I routinely find work that was planned well and thought out well only to have a half way job done by whoever was checking work done by the lowest bidder to cut costs.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
that goverment officials are not spending their own money. That is why these big projects fail. They are more concerned with giving out the contracts to their campaign contributors and getting jobs for their union buddies than actually making things work. I think the model to follow is that of the DARPA grand challenge. The prize was $10 million as opposed to billions and the good to humanity (in the form of huge advancements in AI) were far greater in my opinion. Our government really needs to modernize the way they do business it is now the 21st century.
No Sigs!
And you can see by the idiotic punctuation style what side the writer's on. Just because people use "would of" all the time doesn't make it correct. It just makes you look like a retard.
I'd hesitate to use Wikipedia as any sort of language guide.
Haida Manga
You hit the nail right on its head. This is really more a story about government out of control, than it is about poor engineering.
So what exactly is an engineer supposed to do? Add another factor of 4 or so tolerance to the design or something? Make the design even more expensive than it already is?? It already has to account for variations in materials strength, weather, overloading, safety factors, etc.
The more the engineer attempts to account for such things, the worse the actual implementation will get, as the contractors in question do even more shoddy, substandard work in order to make as much money as possible at the expense of the customer. After all, it's already accounted for in the design, right?
No. The engineer should design the structure to the best of his abilities to meet the stated requirements. It's not his problem if the builders can't get their shit together.
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One thing that has yet to be explained is why the engineers elected to suspend these massive concrete tiles from the cieling. Seriously, why did they need to be so thick and heavy? Or made of concrete for that matter? It just seems unnecessarily Damoclesian to have these slabs dangling from the roof of the tunnel.
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Now, as far as I kow, the big dig needed to happen, because Bostons traffic situation was essentially untenable. It was a daring solution, and one that was difficult, but at its core, it was probably the best idea to run with.
Really? Is there something magic about traffic in Boston that is different from every other big city?
If a city doesn't have traffic problems, it's because it's a city in decline - no one wants to go there (ie Detroit).
If you want to move more people more rapidly, the answer is better public transit, not more roads. More roads will lead to more traffic.
Although to be fair, public transit in Boston is much better than many US cities. Especially that it goes to the airport.
But in this case as in many, that responsibility wasn't backed by the authority the engineer needed to properly carry out that responsibility.
Ethics gets the short shift at every level of education, at least in America. I've graduated from High School, got an Associates Degree, not once took an ethics class. A little bit of ethics has to seep into classes, though and they hope maybe parents have some clue and just leave it at that. There's really not much of it though.
So is jaywalking.
Practically everything built 5 thousand years ago has since fallen down. Only structures which were massively overengineered (possibly because the people building them didn't know what they were doing) are still standing.
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Well, the "public" doesn't get up and work on it, they contract this the works out to the lowest bidder.
You do the math.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
It sounds like the panels needed to have a low Q (ability to absorb energy while flexing in this case) to prevent vibration problems when used in a simple mechanical design. Concrete would be the obvious material but the high mass has now been shown to be a big problem given how it was anchored.
The panels themselves are needed seperate from the structural surface they are mounted on to provide an area for air circulation.
All language is inherently arbitrary. There's no real reason why "dog" should correspond to the animal that you and I think it means, it's just something we've agreed upon (probably unconsciously) as part of learning the language. If we could get together everyone who speaks English tomorrow and decide to pick a different word for "dog," then the new word we'd pick would be the 'correct' one. Or at least it would be 'correct' insofar as there is a correct term.
Language only has value if everyone understands and agrees what certain otherwise-meaningless utterances represent. So if you decide to use a different definition of a particular term than the one everyone else uses, it's not a question of who's "right" and "wrong," it's a matter of who's going to be understood by the most people among the intended audience.
More to the point, in the case of "begging the question," there are two meanings at work: one which is commonly used in the vernacular, and another rather specialized meaning, used within the realm of philosophical discussion. The 'correct' definition of the term depends on the context of its use. This really isn't that hard to understand -- there are many, many words and phrases which are similar: they have both commonly-understood meanings, and different or more particular meanings when used in technical contexts. That doesn't mean that the vernacular meaning is "more wrong" or "less correct" than the technical one, just that the phrase has two distinct meanings.
I think this discussion comes up here on Slashdot a lot, because there seem to be a lot of people around here who seem to be incapable of understanding that in natural language, it's quite possible for the same utterance or visual symbol to have a variety of meanings depending on the context it's being used in, and this context may be somewhat subtle. While these nuances may make understanding a little more difficult than some hypothetical Newspeak-ish, precisely defined language, it's the fuzziness that gives natural language its flexibility and descriptive power. Stop trying to pigeonhole it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You create a false dichotomy, because there are many American construction workers who can't read the instructions for assembly.
Quality isn't an illegal immigration issue. Doesn't matter if it's a Mexican illegal or American just off the farm, if they don't have the skills its the problem with the construction company. They didn't do a sufficient job of ensuring their laborers had the skills and ensure the quality of work. Illegal immigrants are just a pool of labor, the impact they have is on the value of labor in certain industries. Those who make hiring decisions are the ones responsible for sacrificing service and quality for price.
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As Yoda might have said, "Break me a fscking give!" --
The big dig constitutes several of the most ambitious and complex infrastructure projects imaginable. They had to freeze the ground in the back bay by piping supercooled fluid through it while digging in that part. They have completely re-routed one of the largest transportation networks in the world without closing the old one (other than a few hours at a time at night or weekends). As the last phases are completed -- the cleanup of the old site -- Boston becomes one of the most beautiful cities in the world. What used to be a hideous elevated six lane highway becomes a walking park with small shops, museums, and playgrounds that connects the entire downtown area from Haymarket and Fanuel Hall past the New England Aquarium, all the way to South Station.
It was typically corrupt on a scale only an eastern (or European) city could manage, it was over budget and time on an epic scale -- but did anyone really expect otherwise? Someone really screwed up on these bolts. They'll get fixed, the lawsuits will settle, and in the meant time this project will be the pride of Boston for many years to come.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
"If you have no English skills, the probability of a screw-up is very high."
There's hardly a need to go to such complicated explanations. It's enough that the instructions are tedious, and that the 'right' way to do it is more time consuming than the 'fast' way to do it. Combine time consuming work with tight schedules and penalties for failing deadlines, and guess what you get...
To paraphrase on of the engineers in the linked article; if the engineers on the project actually thought epoxied bolts are installed as per the instruction they live in a different reality.
"the probability of a screw-up is very high."
The probability of a screw up is _always_ very high. Things break. That's why it's a good engineering practice to design for graceful modes of failure.
Several points I think you got wrong.
First, it's not a city project. It's a Federal highway project.
Secondly while there are a large number of illegals in the construction industry, this has nothing to do with the project. The project wasn't done with day laborers and cheap fly-by-night contractors. It was done 100% union labor with major engineering firms directing.
Finally, it's too early to call the project a failure. The fatality was the result of a single bad design element, after all. From a traffic standpoint, the artery works far better than I expected. The question is, what other design elements are faulty? The waterproofing issues I think were ones that the engineers doing the actual grunt work ere expecting, although politics forced management to take an excessively hopeful view. The bolt failure that killed the unfortunate worman is a bigger concern. It's not so major a concern in itself, because the design in question was used only on one section of the project, a connector tunnel to funnel turnpike to airport traffic off the main artery. Furthermore, it is likely that this will be resolved; it will be expensive, but no in the overall context of the project.
The concern is that this raises questions about the management process that directed the project's engineering. Are there other design elements which had similar faults?
There's no question the fatality was a result of bad engineering. You don't put a design element in that requires perfect craftsmanship to install, and that kills somebody if it fails. The bolts in question fail on both counts. First of all you have a situation where workers are supposed to drill in a uncomfortable and dirty environment. Then they're supposed to clean the hole very carefully so they're expoxying the bolt to rock, not milliions of dust particles. And the workers are supposed to do this overhead. And in an almighty rush. Even the best and most conscientious workers cannot be trusted to do this at better than 99% perfection, and 99.99% perfection wouldn't be enough.
The second problem is that you don't design things that fail in ways that kill people. Civil engineers do this all the time: when this beam fails, the floor should sag not collapse. The bolt that failed held up a concrete panel. The panel was a nonstructural component that was there to create an air return plenum. The plenum was needed because you'd poison any motorist who had a break down or was stuck down there in a traffic jam. The dividing element had to meet a number of safety requirements, the most important had to do with fire. That's why you couldn't use a lightweight panel. But the design should have resulted in a visible but non-fatal failure on failiure of any single element, not a cascade of bolts pulling out of the ceiling. And you have to plan that if one bolt is bad, all the bolts around them are bad too. Remember that worker who's drilling overhead holes and supposedly cleaning them perfectly before applying the nasty and finicky expoxy mixture. Imagine he's had a bad day. If he fails on one bolt, you have to assume he fails on a series of them, maybe all the bolts he did on that shift.
So, this was one piece of bad design. The fact that it was in a non-structural element probably explains, if not excuses the bad design. You don't make mistakes on things like girder design because everyone is thinking about the possibility that bridge will collapse or the tunnel implode. It's a small, easily overlooked design element that, it turns out, given the right circumstances can kill somebody.
We computer guys understand this phenomenon well. It's an error that comes from complexity. This incident may become the Therac 25 error of the civil engineering world. If the right engineer had been assigned to look at this at the right time, it wouldn't have happened. The fact that the right engineer was never tasked with checking the design was a management error. It was a rush job.
For this reason, I expect there are other flaws of this sort in the project: small details that weren't got right.
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The Big Dig was also plagued by graft and corruption.
Technically, this is not correct.
At least by the standard of "indictable offense".
The story is this: the original central artery was inadequately engineered from a traffic standpoint, as well as being put in a just plain stupid place. Boston is a historically maritime city; the artery sliced off the waterfront into a thin ribbon of land backed up against a ugly, dirty eleveated highway. San Franscisco is fortunate to escape this fate becuase of it's geography; imagine a huge elevated highway cutting off the Fisherman's wharf area, leaving a strip barely 100m wide in places.
The Boston Central Artery also cut off the North End from the rest of Boston. The turnpike connector to the artery was driven through neighborhood of Brighton, destroying a massive swath of the neighborhood and cutting it into pieces. At the same time there was a massive "urban renewal" project destroyed the historic West End neighborhood -- just the kind of neighborhood we now recognize as human scaled and economically vital. The pedestrian friendly brick neighborhood was razed to create a maze of giant concrete builings, the kind that look inviting as architect's models but turns out to be an icy, windswept urban wasteland.
These disruption of these massive engineering projects created a new generation of Democratic political activists. It may also be responsible for the neutering of Republican party in a state in one of its historical strongholds.
Which leads to the old artery's engineering inadequacy. It had been designed as part of a network of highways, which were now politically impossible to build. It was never designed to work without a proper bypass. The artery therefore created massive traffic jams, with their associated (but hard to measure) productivity costs and of course pollution. One section of eleveated highway feeding the artery was built because under the contracts it was cheaper to build than cancel, and then planners tried to keep it closed, because it simply would not work. However the political stink this raised made them reverse the decision, which resulted in daily traffic jams that were miles long.
Now we finally get to the issue of venality, if not corruption.
With the state Democratic party through the congressional delegation playing a major role in the Democratically dominated US House and Senate, activists who cut their teeth fighting the bypass set about fixing the problem of the ugly, dirty, stupidly sited Central Artery.
It turned out that days of the Democratic control of Congress were numbered. But the Republican Congress, which loved to rail against the Big Dig as a massive and wasteful pork barrel project, proved powerless to rein it in. Why couldn't a Republican congress exert control over a funding a huge project in the heartland of their political enemies? Simple: the lions share of contracts went to engineering firms with deep Republican connections.
This is not to blame the Republicans for the mess, which would not be fair. The genesis of the problem goes back to the late 40s. But mainly you could blame Tip O'Neil, the speaker at the time Federal funds were approved for the project. Tip was often depicted in Republican political ads as fat, out of touch, and a bit stupid. He was fat, but he was neither out of touch nor stupid. He had power and he knew how to use it and the money it controlled to get things done. It wasn't just Republicans who got a payoff. It was everybody in sight. Unions. Neighborhood activits. Minority businesses. The project's finances were carefullly engineered so that everybody had a friend with a fat slice of artery money coming to them.
Now the funding is at its end, and everyone is calling abandon ship after the ship has sunk.
So that's the venality. Nobody could stop the project without hurting an important ally.
But to set against that, it's not clear that the project could have been done any other way. In
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Having moved around the country a bit I found that in LA the construction has a lot of Latinos, in Atlanta it is largely African-Americans, and in Boston (where I now live) it is largely White people. While I don't expect any illegal aliens from Mexico worked on the Big Dig, there is a very large (white) Brazilian population here and I wouldn't be able to tell if they are on construction sites or if it's Boston natives. In any case, this area is heavily unionized, and I expect the government insisted on "higher skilled" union workers.
Having said that, and being half-Mexican myself, you're a moron if you think that some low paid white trash who thinks he's underpaid is going to do a better job than a Latino worker happy for the chance to make some money. Your comments remind me of Governor Ronald Reagan's idiotic comment about Mexicans thriving in the fields (for which my dad never forgave him). In any event, it is more likely that Bechtel and the like had their heads up their a@@ (you'd think after the Big Dig the gov't would have known better than to hire them in Iraq), while Italian-American owned construction companies were probably cutting corners on jobs they got based on connections.
It was a series of engineering mistakes (which were affected by larger business concerns but remain engineering mistakes).
The initial design was structurally sound but unbuildable (it called for single steel rods supporting both walkways with a nut threaded 10meters or so onto the rod to support the upper walkway).
It was revised at construction time into a structually unsound but easy to build design.
A PE signed off on the revision, it was his failure, he could have said no. It was not a schedule or budget breaker.
BTW project managers might sign off on revisions but unless they are structural engineers they are'nt the only ones signing off. Structual engineers sign and stamp. That is where the buck always stops.
Engineering is the union of science, business and art. If the engineer does'nt have the ovaries/balls to say no to a bad technical call because of business reasons (s)he sould'nt hold a PE license. The fact it takes years to qualify just to take the PE test prevents stupid 22 year old recent college grads from being used as signers by unscrupulous businessmen.
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It's always a crapshoot, that's why its important for companies to assess their workers skills. There are educated workers who lack practical skills, there are workers with no education who have sufficient skills, there are workers who have done the same thing for so long they aren't flexible enough to get new skills.
My point was this isn't an illegal vs. legal worker issue. It's an issue with cost cutting impacting service and quality.
I agree. But the problem was lack of oversight and accountability during the project, not with the workers... who are just looking for a paycheck to survive.
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You're pretty clueless.
A public works project in Massachusetts isn't going to be hiring companies that employ illegal aliens... they usually mandate that you use union labor paid at the "prevailing wage" set by the union. Nobody is going to pay a illegal $75/hr to do masonry work in Boston.
Engineers are less regulated and are more likely to be at fault in this case. The government doesn't employ as many career engineers as they did in the past, and most design work is contracted out to politically connected firms for whom quality isn't a big priority. There's a long line of engineering failures of highway bridges in many states fueled by inspection & design work being contracted (and sub-contracted) out.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I know it's satisfying to point out a source for all our problems, but illegal immigrants are just an easy target to point at, and then make up reasons after the fact, aka scapegoats. If illegal immigrants are such a problem, then we should see a significant amount of our structures failing, at least in proportion to their 14% representation, if not higher. Since they're probably somewhat evenly distributed, then we should actually expect a lot more structures to fail, since there should be at least one or two illegals with their "grubby mitts" in the mix on just about every project. In reality we don't see anything near 15% of our ceilings collapsing, or 15% of bridges falling into the water.
Anyway, your union rep talking points might feel good, but anecdotes about farm boys and who you'd trust with your firstborn in a Home Depot parking lot do not a rational argument make.
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Virtually all public works projects are required to use union labor, and contracts are doled out by political patronage. It is absolutly impposible to get polical support for a project without support from the big labor unions. Most of the construction workers working on bug public projects earn more than your typical Slashdot software developer. Illegal immigrants are just not an issue in this kind of situation.
While a normal company, operating in a free market, there might be strong pressures to use the cheapest labor possible - This is a total and complete non-issue with projects like the Big Dig. Big public works projects are a love affair between big government, big buisness, and big labor, and the labor part isn't going to let illegal immigrants mess with the gravy train. Normal economics do not apply.
That being said, even if your fantasy was true and the Big Dig was being entirely staffed by people gathered on the streets of mexico city and secretly shipped in via cargo container... that was not the problem. There are more than enough native born white skinned morons in America to fuck things up big time without having to blame things on illegal immigrants.