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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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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
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.