By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 23, 2006; A03
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 ushering an economic rebirth into 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 crime scene after a ceiling collapse killed a motorist. A contractor stands indicted on charges of supplying shoddy concrete. One of the tunnels remains closed to traffic, and many Bostonians shy away from the others, unsure they are safe.
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 38-year-old woman inside. The death of Milena Del Valle has become a rallying cry here among politicians and the public to get to the root of the problems that have daunted the highway project.
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's longtime state auditor, whose office has since 1993 issued 20 critical reports about the Big Dig. "I get sick when I think about it."
In addition to the auditor's work, there were 13 negative reports during the project's first decade by the state inspector general. More recently, there have been hearings in Congress and the state legislature, and financial reviews by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
"This has been the most investigated project in our history," said James A. Aloisi Jr., 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 M. Menino (D).
Before he became known as the father of the Big Dig, Frederick P. Salvucci was a community activist who despised the elevated Central Artery, which since the early 1950s had carried traffic through downtown. The highway was, he said, "ugly and socially disruptive" -- rusty, clogged, and divorcing the city's core from the Italian North End and the decaying waterfront.
When he became transportation secretary in 1975 to Gov. Michael S. Dukakis (D), Salvucci began years of work to coax the local community and federal transportation officials to support an unprecedented idea: sinking the highway below the city, building a new tunnel under Boston Harbor to Logan Airport without disturbing any neighborhoods, erecting a new 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. At $14.6 billion today, the Big Dig is six times the price of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge project, itself one of the nation's costliest public works. The Big Dig has used enough concrete to build a sidewalk three 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 was spending $3 million a day.
From the outset, Salvucci worried that what was then the state's public works department was too weak to oversee work on such a scale. He hired in the 1980s a private firm, Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, to oversee almost every aspect of the project, from conceptual design to construction inspections, with the idea that a small, talented state team would supervise the firm.
The year construction began, Gov. William F. Weld (R) moved into the statehouse, possessing a faith in the private sector and a disdain for the state workers he derided as "walruses." Supervision waned. DeNucci, a prizefighter and a legislator before being elected state auditor in 1987, said: "The commonwealth abdicated its responsibility to Bechtel."
The federal government similarly was reducing its oversight of highway projects it funded. The year the Big Dig's construction began, a newly enacted federal law changed funding methods and eliminated detailed, periodic cost analyses by the Federal Highway Administration.
Work had been underway 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 consultation. After six more reports tracing waste and excess costs, DeNucci said in 1997, "the way this thing is going, it could exceed $15 billion."
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, at one point wrote a letter accusing DeNucci of working against the city, he said.
Meanwhile, Robert A. 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. But Gov. Paul Cellucci (R) said he would "find it surprising" if safety were at risk.
The tunnel is next to the one where this month's accident took place. Cerasoli said in an interview that the two tunnels used the same bolt system.
In 2001, around the time Cerasoli wrote that state officials had been told by Bechtel seven years earlier that costs would far exceed the public estimates, Cellucci tried to eliminate the inspector general's office.
The following year, acting Gov. Jane M. Swift (R) 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 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.
Months later, Swift named Matthew J. 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," adding: "They answer to us."
After a leak gushed water into the Interstate 93 northbound tunnel in 2004, Amorello recalled, "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 -- and not necessarily most effective -- fix.
Amorello said that state highway officials review all project contracts and that "there's constant information flow."
Gov. Mitt Romney (R), 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 in an interview.
Half a dozen state and federal investigations are looking into corruption, costs and construction methods.
Noting those investigations, Bechtel officials declined to comment.
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."