How oversight failed in underground project

BOSTON — When excavation began in 1991, it was heralded as a jewel of engineering and vision, a network of tunnels that would burrow under Boston, eliminating traffic gridlock, reducing air pollution and fostering an economic rebirth in one of the nation's oldest cities.

Fifteen years and $14.6 billion later, the Big Dig is nearly complete. But one tunnel is being treated as a possible crime scene after a ceiling collapse killed a motorist. A contractor has been indicted on charges of supplying shoddy concrete. Many Bostonians shy away from their new tunnels, unsure if they are safe. And one of the tunnels remains closed to nearly all traffic.

After years of cost overruns and tunnel leaks, the project plunged this month into the deepest crisis in its history when the 12-ton section of ceiling panels broke loose, crushing a car and killing a woman inside. The death of Milena Del Valle, 38, has become a rallying cry here among politicians and the public to get to the root of the problems that have daunted the most daring and expensive highway project in the United States.

Yet according to officials, government documents and people who shaped the project over the years, the Big Dig has not gone awry because its flaws were unknown. It has gone awry in spite of repeated warnings about its cost and design.

"It was nothing but problem after problem, and no one was looking, no one cared," said A. Joseph DeNucci, Massachusetts' longtime state auditor, whose office has issued 20 critical reports about the Big Dig since 1993. "I get sick when I think about it."

There also were 13 reports during the project's first decade by the state inspector general, hearings in Congress and the Legislature, and financial reviews by the inspector general of the U.S. Transportation Department.

"This has been the most investigated project in our history," said James Aloisi, a former assistant state transportation secretary and general counsel to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.

The warnings were overshadowed, many officials now acknowledge, by zeal among politicians, business leaders, lobbyists and private contractors who had a stake in the project. That eagerness to move forward coincided with a political culture in which a series of Republican governors and the state's independent turnpike authority have trusted a private consultant to shepherd virtually every facet of the project, with relatively little government supervision.

"What was missing from the whole project was outside oversight," said Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, a Democrat.

The father of the dig

Before he became known as the father of the Big Dig, Frederick Salvucci was a community activist who despised the elevated Central Artery that carried traffic through downtown since the early 1950s. The highway, he said, was "ugly and socially disruptive" — rusty, clogged and dividing the city's core from the Italian North End and decaying waterfront.

When he became transportation secretary to Democratic Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1975, Salvucci began years of work to coax the local community and Washington, D.C., transportation officials to support an unprecedented idea: sinking the highway below the city, building a tunnel under Boston Harbor to Logan Airport without disturbing any neighborhoods, erecting a bridge across the Charles River, and placing parks where the old artery had run.

The price tag was $6 billion when federal officials agreed in 1990 to pay for most of the project. The cost today stands at $14.6 billion. The Big Dig has used enough concrete to build a sidewalk 3 feet wide from Boston to San Francisco and back three times, according to project statistics. At its peak, the project had 5,000 construction workers and cost $3 million a day.

From the outset, Salvucci worried that the state's public-works department was too weak to oversee work on such a scale. In the 1980s, he hired a private firm, Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, to oversee almost every aspect of the work, from conceptual design to construction inspections, with the idea that a small state team would supervise the firm.

The year construction began, Republican Gov. William Weld moved into the statehouse, possessing a faith in the private sector and a disdain for the state workers he derided as "walruses." Supervision waned.

"The commonwealth abdicated its responsibility to Bechtel," DeNucci said.

The federal government similarly was reducing its oversight of highway projects it funded. The year construction began on the Big Dig, a newly enacted federal law changed funding methods and eliminated detailed, periodic cost analyses by the Federal Highway Administration.

Warnings unheeded

Work had been under way for less than two years when DeNucci issued his first report. The project, it said, had wasted $23 million by building four temporary ramps across the Charles — and then demolishing them because they had gone up without community comment. After six more reports tracing waste and excess costs, DeNucci said in 1997, "The way this thing is going, it could exceed $15 billion."

But his warnings fell flat. The state highway commissioner excoriated DeNucci, saying, "I think he's talking about the wrong state." The Artery Business Committee, a group of local boosters, wrote a letter accusing him of working against the city, he said.

Robert Cerasoli, who was state inspector general from 1991 to 2001, was issuing warnings about design flaws. A 1998 report questioned whether the bolts were secure in the ceiling of the Ted Williams Tunnel. That tunnel is next to the one where this month's accident took place. Cerasoli said in an interview that the two tunnels share the same bolt system. But when his report came out, then-Gov. Paul Cellucci, a Republican, said he would "find it surprising" if safety was at risk.

In 2001, around the time Cerasoli wrote that Bechtel had told state officials seven years earlier that costs would far exceed the public estimates, Cellucci tried to eliminate the inspector general's office.

The following year, acting Republican Gov. Jane Swift fired two members of the turnpike authority board. Swift said they had opposed a toll increase necessary at the time. One of them, Christy Mihos, now running for governor as an independent, said the real cause was that they had been arguing that Bechtel should have less autonomy. After the two went to court and won back their seats, Mihos said, his comments at board meetings were excluded from the minutes.

"No accountability"?

Months later, Swift named Matthew Amorello as chairman of the independent turnpike authority. Amorello said in an interview last week that he found upon his arrival that "the project was kind of left operating by itself" and that he has created "more of a watchfulness over Bechtel. ... They answer to us."

After a leak gushed water into the Interstate 93 northbound tunnel in 2004, Amorello said, "I went down into the tunnel that afternoon, ordered complete inspection of the ... walls and said the responsible party is going to pay for any deficiencies we find, and that's what happened." Amorello's critics contend that he accepted the least expensive fix.

Amorello said that state highway officials review all project contracts and that "there's constant information flow."

Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, who is trying to force Amorello from his job, portrays him as secretive and uncooperative.

"That the largest public-works project in the country would have no accountability to any public official is nuts," Romney said.

A half-dozen state and federal investigations are under way into corruption, costs and construction methods. Noting those investigations, Bechtel officials refused to comment for this report.

No matter what is found now, Cerasoli, the former inspector general, said: "It'll never be made right. Too much money has been spent, and no one will be able to recapture the life that is lost."

Salvucci, who had the vision for the Big Dig, said: "The question is: Did we do the right project? Yes."

But as for how the project was constructed and managed, he said: "There is no defense for that. We've been building tunnels for 100 years, and they don't fall on your head."