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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."
I have a relative who is a civil engineer that has done high-profile (space program, public construction, etc.) work for both the public and private sector.
From the sound of things, I'd guess it's not an engineering failure so much as a management failure. The things I know about public construction are scary. Like when an engineer can't finish a design under the schedule that management wants, management steps in after hours, "throws in numbers" and tosses together a design, then sends it out with the engineer's seal on it. Or when an engineer refuses to sign off on an incomplete or incorrect design, the manager brings in a new graduate because they're more "cooperative" (read: will sign anything to get a paycheck) and they go ahead and build it that way.
The cost and political pressure in public engineering projects often leads to engineers being the least powerful people that have input in the design (i.e. ass backward).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
So it has a few bugs to work out. So it was delayed.
It beat Duke Nukem Forever and even Vista. It's probably better quality too, and will last much longer.
Patch it up and it'll be fine.
I think you'll find most of the problems with the big dig do not stem from any one dumb engineer, but the huge amount of contractors that are awarded contracts by the corrupt locat and state governments. No where in the world have I seen contruction contractors living so well as in Boston.
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.
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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!
Rock bolts are a staple in the mining industry. There are darn few failures. Of course the rock bolts are specified by engineers who work for the mining company and installed by miners whose safety depends on them. You tend to do things better if your life depends on it.
In the case of the big dig, you have contractors who are trying to make the maximum possible amount of money. I also bet that there weren't enough government inspectors or that they weren't properly qualified. Cutting costs is just as dangerous in the government as greed is in the private sector. The Canadian province of Ontario laid off all their government water inspectors and a bunch of people died in the town of Walkerton. If you don't give folks the tools they need to do a job then you shouldn't be surprised if the job doesn't get done.
The concrete ceiling tiles were used to create a separate space for supplying air to the tunnel. This is typically how you would do it in a building. In the case of the Chunnel between England and France, they dug a separate tunnel for that purpose. People have wondered why the panels had to be made of concrete. Something lighter would have worked just as well and might have been cheaper and safer.
As a Boston resident I've been following this semi-closely, and it seems that the main problem is not so much the engineering itself, but the way in which the overall planning occurred. This project was started in the late 1980's, and was supposed to cost something like $3 billion and take a few years. Now it has taken more than 16 years and cost tens of billions of dollars.
It wasn't just a bad estimate - it was that they gradually expanded the scope of the project and added new goals once the project was underway. As a result it took longer and cost more money. Then came the double-whammy - because it took so much time, and occurred at a time when people were moving back into the city making overall traffic worse, they had to revise the project again to make it even more ambitious. Otherwise, when it was done the traffic would still be bad and people would wonder why they spent so much time on a project that didn't solve the problem. So the Big Dig has always been in a race with time, which paradoxically has caused them to take more time than they otherwise would.
Most of the problems that have happened with the Big Dig have been due not to poor engineering, but use of the wrong materials and deliberate corner-cutting by the contractors. The woman who was killed a couple of weeks ago when the ceiling fell on her car died not because of poor engineering, but because the ceiling part was held up with substandard materials. They actually realized that this was a problem and changed the materials, but not before that part was built, and they never went back and fixed it.
So the contractors cut corners to make more money than they otherwise would, sometimes illegally. But my theory is that the underlying reason why they were able to get away with it is that the ballooning costs (remember it expanded by a cost of something like 900% in money and 400% in time) made accounting that much more difficult.
Another thing I would add to my previous post is that the irony is that the traffic alleviated by the Big Dig will come back within 5-7 years. The bottleneck for the Central Artery is the part where it actually goes underneath a skyscraper (technically it does this twice, but the other part isn't as crowded). They can't make it any wider there because it would eliminate the foundation of the skyscraper enough that the whole thing could collapse. This limits the size of the entire Central Artery and will eventually force the city to develop ways for people to get in and out and around using completely different traffic patterns.
The one major improvement to traffic that the Big Dig accomplished was diverting traffic going to the Airport through a separate tunnel (the one that just had part of the roof collapse). That reduced traffic in the Central Artery by something like 50%. Ironically, that was also the least expensive part of the Big Dig.
The big dig is still open and operating. That's hardly a failure.
y _collapse
Even if it eventually is a failure, the Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse in Kansas City killed more people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkwa
If engineers signed off on the use of the epoxy for the panel supports then those engineers are at fault. Engineers don't hand off designs to construction crews and wipe their hands of it from then on. They have to approve changes in the design and do their own inspections of the construction to make sure it meets the design.
As usual with engineering disasters of this sort, the failure seems to have been caused by a confluence of lesser mistakes that would not have been tragic in isolation. The root causes, however, seem to be:
Anyone who has lived in Boston can tell you that this is only the latest in a string of cost overruns and management failures. The actual mode of failure (i.e. the bolts) and the immediate causes of that failure should not overshadow the idea that the contractors who screwed this one up should be held responsible. The ongoing investigations should reveal whether the contractors were merely incompetent or whether they willfully ignored problems like these and crossed their fingers that nothing would happen.
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The exact story is still being discovered but it seems that the original builder was replaced by someone cheaper who cut corners.
In itself bad enough but stories are starting to emerge that this kind of stuff has been going on all over. Not a real suprise, we have had a couple of incidents of collapsing balconies because of shoddy building but because this scandale is so public the stories off other scandals also gets more attention.
Then again it is nothing new. Every time there is a disaster like an earth quake anywhere in the world you will learn that some building collapsed because the builder did not follow regulations or even the blueprint.
Cost cutting is almost everytime the reason and who is to blame for that? Well us. We want our buildings build as cheaply and as fast as possible so we hire the guy with the lowest contract and then expect to get quality.
Nobody on the world would expect a ten dollar watch to have the same quality as a ten thousand dollar watch so why do we expect the guy who can do the job for a million to be as good as the one who wants two million?
The fact that a live was lost in this Boston incident is tragic. That it involved such a god awfull amount of money makes it however fortuanlly headline worthy. If we a truly upset about this we will demand more and better inspection of every building project and demand very stiff penalties for those who ignore regulations. Oh and we won't mind paying extra for it.
Did you hear just hear that massive sound of everyone taking a step back? Yup, we want the best but at the least cost. That is how it is supposed to work in a free market. Sadly it doesn't.
Shoddy building by the lowest bidder is nothing new. Just because this one involves a costly project that has already been controversial does not make it new. Shoddy building will go on as long as contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder.
But why doesn't it work to go for the lowest bid? Because it is an ongoing race. There is always another party who wants the contract who is just going to have to find some way to lower costs. At a given point there is no more fat to trim and you have to start cutting in essentials. Think of it as anorexia. When all the fat is gone you can only loose weight by reducing vital organs and tissues until finally you die. In losing weight you need to know the limit, the point were you simply cannot loose weight anymore. In lowering cost you also need to know that limit. Were any further cost savings are coming from critical areas like following the blueprint to the letter, proper inspection and using the right materials. It can be as simple a something as continueing work on days to hot/cold/humid for some materials to properly set. A great cost saving but a gigantic risk.
This woman paid the price for our penny pinching and the great joke? Now the costs are going to be much higher to us all then if the job had been done right by the non-lowest bidder in the first place. Yet how much do you want to bet that in a few years time the next boston city goverment contract will again go to the lowest bidder?
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Probably the biggest mistake that ever happened in China at Shaanxi where the people had riddled the Loess Plateau with Yaodongs (dwellings). The earthquake of 1556 killed over 800,000 people, many of whome were crushed when the Plateau collapsed onto dwellings. Makes the Big Dig's problem seem pretty small in comparison.
Posting anon here - I worked on the Big Dig (environmental) during peak construction (1997-2000) and I'm currently contracting with another MA state agency, and I don't want to ruffle any state feathers. I also want to write a book someday ;)
First a couple of general statements:
Now back to the facts - I have no knowledge of roof panel construction (I spent little time in that area), but I will note that working on the project during 1999 and 2000 was an interesting experience. Already at the point there was heavy pressure on project managers and contractors to reduce costs (this was before the national stories hit that led to the ouster of James Kerasiotes). It got to the point that office supplies were locked up - you had to get the office manager's permission to get a notebook or pens!
In any event, I wouldn't be surprised at all if cost pressures let to reduced safety factors, etc. The construction site was also the source of many stories about various screw-ups that I won't get into here (wait for my book!). There was of course several times that money was spent to shut people up (at least once against my direct recommendation), but the PTB felt it was needed for the project to move along smoothly. I suppose that it would have been better for B/PB to take the Vista approach, and wait for the tunnel to be "finished" but that wasn't going to happen because of the political pressures.
Now was the project a failure? I'll just say this - is used to take me 1.5 to 2 hours to drive from Braintree to Cambridge during midday traffic. I did the same trip a month or so ago during a Friday afternoon rush hour in abut 20-25 minutes.
One of the problems with the Big Dig ceilings is that some of the engineers that designed it have never actually built anything. These guys must not have ever gotten their hands dirty on an actual jobsite. Their the guys in ties, hard hats and a slight look of confusion on an actual site. The book says epoxy has the strength, it must, use it. When the accident occured and it first came out that the bolts were epoxied in place, my first thought was "what kind of idiot makes suspended ceilings out of concrete, then tries to epoxy them in place?" Epoxy is a wonder material, but this is just so obviously not a smart use for it. No, i'm not an engineer.
s /2006/07/28/bolt_system_graphic/
I've got a running bet with anyone that'll take it that the Big Dig is closed down in less time than it took to build the beast.
My wife is a news designer for the Boston Globe, she made this graphic to explain what happened, it's pretty cool. No complaints about it being in Flash, that's what she uses:
http://www.boston.com/news/traffic/bigdig/article
Enjoy,
Josh
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I have a hard time in believing that the screw-up happened in the actual design. A professional engineer knows that he can be sued for malpractice and can go to jail for signing off a design diagram that is faulty.
The second aspect of the construction is the actual assembly of the project. There could be a problem here. According to a reputable source, about 14% of the laborers in the construction industry are illegal aliens. In some segments (e.g., roofing workers), the percentage of illegal aliens can be as high as 29%.
Most illegal aliens are people who hail from Mexico and who cannot read, write, or speak English. Even if we assume that they are all honest, they can still make honest mistakes when they cannot comprehend English. The warnings on the construction material, the recommendations on the construction material and the construction equipment, the instructions for assembly, and the like are all likely to be written in English. If you have no English skills, the probability of a screw-up is very high.
Watering lawns, trimming hedges, picking fruits, etc. do not require knowledge of English to do well. From a quality perspective, an illegal alien can do good work on such absolutely no-skill-required jobs.
However, welding a joint on a drawbridge, properly fastening a bolt to hold up a concrete ceiling, etc. might require some ability to comprehend English and might even require some minimal skills that a high-school education would provide. Most illegal aliens from Mexico do not have a high-school education. On any project that involves public safety, an English-speaking, literate, educated worker is much more preferable than a non-English-speaking, illiterate, uneducated worker.
I'm a Kansas City native and have been in the very building that houses a plaque to those who died in the greatest U.S. engineering disaster of all time, the collapse of the skywalk in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. I'm also a student at the local community college and am studying architechtural design, so I've gotta a bit of an idea as to what goes on in the engineer's office on a day to day basis. This project, the "Big Dig" has all the characteristics of the 1982 Hyatt Skywalk failure: impossible deadlines, poor management, and overworked and stubborn engineers getting moved aside so newer more willing guys will sign off on the plan's. The problem with the Big Dig is that people who don't know a thing about structural engineering are dictating design, budget, and deadline's. And when their certified engineers run up Red Flags, they bring in the younger guys to solve the problem. And as others have stated, if the deadline isn't meet by the engineers, managment steps in and BS's it's way through the plan "shotguning" blank values to fill them. The only difference in the Big Dig and Hyatt failures is that they got caught because the structure failed and people were killed. And you know who gets blamed and takes the fallout for this kind of thing, engineers and public safety. In the Hyatt disaster, the cheif architect lost his liscense and job because his signature wasn't on the revisions that an ASSISTANT PROJECT MANAGER a.k.a. UNLISCENSED PROFESSIONAL, made to his design and he paid $12 million in fines because of it while the project managers were allowed a new contract to clean up the mess and rebuild a new skywalk. So the problem with big projects like the Big Dig and the Hyatt Regency Hotel isn't a lack of trained and certified engineers and architects, its a lack of control on the managements part to stay out of the engineers hair and leave them be so they can design a safe structure.
What are you talking about? Massachusetts has the best politicians money can buy!
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.
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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.
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Yeah, you can find a lot of illegals doing roofs, painting, gardening, light construction and so on.
But the Big Dig used almost 100% union labor. Good luck trying to join a union if you are in the US illegally.
I sat down with a group of engineers living in the Boston area (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, etc), and we discussed the Big Dig tragedy. The civl engineer insisted that the design itself would work, but it would require the the drilling be done properly, all holes then cleaned correctly, and then the epoxy set set correctly. He then went on to say that this apparently did not happen.
What was more interesting was the ensuing conversation. What was brought up was that if everyone knew that this project was going to be given to contractors who were likely to cut corners, would this have been the best design? Judging from the results of cut corners (the local boston news has been covering that some holes have no epoxy in them and other blatant implementation failures), this design was not "fool-proof" enough given who was implementing the project.
We then brought up our own personal experiences in our respective fields where the best design was not the cleanest design, but the design in which if some one implemented it wrong, there'd be no unforseen consequences (such as making a routing change in one branch office, only to black hole traffic destined for another office). I wonder how many people here have been faced with projects where one of the bigger criteria was to make the implementation "fool-proof".
My father was an architect for many years and he has many examples of going to inspect sites and finding that the construction crew had misunderstood or wilfully ignored the specifications for critical structural components: columns incorrectly constructed for the projected load, or a pile of roof components rusting in a corner of the site and clearly not installed in the almost-completed roof. Building workers are fairly hazy on the niceties of engineering and are on the kind of contracts that make it attractive to get as much money for doing as little work as possible; they do, generally, though, have a "comfort zone" of familiarity with traditional construction techniques which is why most regular construction projects don't fall down.
Anyone specifying a new or unusual process has to be aware of the fact that the typical construction worker won't believe it's important to follow the rules exactly, won't understand which parts of the process are most vital and won't be around at the end of the project to take any responsbility. If you have a design that depends on technology unfamiliar to the people who're responsible for implementing it, then you need tight supervision during the build and tight inspection afterwards. You often don't get either - the foremen are on bonuses to accelerate the construction phase and the people most qualified to inspect afterwards are the people who designed the structure in the first place.
Of course there are many projects which are simply not feasible using traditional construction, but for those that are, any apparent savings from using new technology can be negated by the costs of ensuring it's correctly applied.
I'd trust a kid "off the farm" to be able to do construction work before about anyone else the same age. You grow up building and repairing big structures, welding, operating equipment that costs as much as most folks houses, etc you appreciate how to do things properly. Any random 20 year old kid off a farm might easily have ten years experience in what would be considered adult professional work in most of the trades. He's grown up wiring at high voltages, working on very large and complex plumbing installations, doing all sorts of carpentry, cement work, equipment maintenance, etc. It's a pretty thorough and complex process to keep a large farm operating. And today's farm kids are using automated and computerized devices, all the way to GPS enabled equipment that uses robotic steering. maybe it is past time to put that "country bumpkin" meme to rest, it no longer applies.
With that said,back on subject, that entire big dig project has a long history of controversy and accusations of weirdness around it. I am (somewhat) surprised it has taken this long to start to fall apart.
As to the illegals versus legals and so on, it's a crapshoot. I have worked on jobs with illegals that were a menace,totally incompetent and dangerous to be around, hired merely because it was a body to throw at a job for cheap pay obviously. A few have been quite good from recollection, most are pretty common, some skills, but a lot of enthusiasm. They come from a culture of lower resources, recycling old junk more, cob jobbing as normal, etc. I think it is just too large a variable to really be able to quantify it adequately. What can't be denied though, is that hiring illegals in a general sense is a cost cutting measure so the boss class can skim a few more bucks off the project, and when that becomes the primary focus on a job, the job suffers. Jobs should cost what they cost, not the lowest crap possible then cut corners from that point. You get your "problems" then. When you have something as important as a big dig styled project, you shouldn't screw up. If it is deemed to be unaffordable to do correctly, don't do it.
If your new garage roof sags and leaks after a few years because you hired the local cut rate guy with his "crew" of casual pickups from the home depot parking lot..well, it's no big deal to anyone but you and not a major threat. Something like the big dig is a totally different situation.
It suprising how skilled some groups of people are without any training. I mean, individuals with inherent skill crop up everywhere, but groups, not so much. I read about how people who grew up on military bases often have an unusual penchant for engineering, because as children they tended to get themselves underfoot in places where vehicles and machines were repaired. They could screw around with parts, figure how things went together, and construct strange godless machines that crossed lines man was not meant to cross. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that farm kids had a knack for electrical and mechanical work, and I'll bet more than a few take to chemistry pretty fast -- farming is remarkably chemistry-based. The biology side of farming is a no-brainer of course. Another surprising one? The children of clergy -- many church groups got into networking quite early, using BBSes and early list servers to get information around. Plus, nearly every church minister has to be a part-time desktop publisher to make all of the church's bulletains and whatnot, so clergyman had computers before a lot of people. So you can find church-brats that developed unusual aptitudes for computer technology.
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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