"The Big Dig" season 1
Oct. 23rd, 2025 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoe1.
Ian : Noam Chomsky was lecturing at MIT, Joan Baez was singing protest anthems in Harvard Square. Women’s Liberation, the Vietnam War – it was pretty fertile ground for an activist movement,
Ian : And I want to stress just how radical this was. For years, states around the country had been telling residents: trust us, we know what’s best, we have the experts. Now, here were those same experts saying: no, the state is wrong. Eventually Salvucci's group got a name: Urban Planning Aid.
Ian : That meant that Salvucci and another organizer named Jim Morey, had only a few minutes to brief him on the details of the issue.
Fred Salvucci: So he's just come off of a plane and he's bleary-eyed and he's bounding up the steps two at a time.
Ian : Galbrieth, by the way, was six feet, eight inches tall.
Fred Salvucci: Jim Morey is about five, six, and he's running to keep up with Galbraith, and I'm two steps behind him and talk about the elevator talk, Morey briefs Galbraith in the space that it takes this giant to go two steps a time from the ground floor to the second floor of the Wursthaus. So, uh, Galbraith says,, I think I got it.
Ian : The meeting begins and a professor from MIT speaks first:
Fred Salvucci: He basically said, look, I've been living here for a while now and we keep trying to elect more progressive school committees and more progressive city councils. And every year, those people that is the blue collar population, get the majority and we have lousy education and the lousy government. And maybe just maybe if this highway knocks out, 2,500 dwelling units and associated voters, maybe we'll win the next election.
Fred Salvucci: At which point Galbraith picks up his arm, which seems to almost reach the other side of the room points, a finger and says only our moral imbecile would articulate such a cynical argument. We're living in a country that's being torn apart by race in a city that's being torn apart by racial strife and somehow through some magic that none of us in this room was smart enough to understand. There's an integrated neighborhood here in Cambridge, where people are getting along reasonably well and they're low income people and minorities and, how on earth could we ever think of destroying this precious resource. And he just carries the day.
Karilyn Crockett: So Volpe gets whisked away and quickly his second in command becomes governor.
Ian : All of a sudden, the activists' allies in Washington had been replaced by their foe in Massachusetts. And their foe in Massachusetts had been replaced by...a question mark.
Ian : The question mark's name was Francis Sargent.
Ian : A week later, Governor Sargent did something very unusual for any politician. He said: "We were wrong."
Ian : That day, he ordered a freeze on all active highway construction in Greater Boston. None of the activists I interviewed talked about that day as a major victory in itself. It was only a freeze, pending more study – but at least the destruction of homes had finally stopped.
Ian : With that speech, Sargent removed almost 25 miles of highway from the interstate system. The first time any state or governor had done so.
Ian : What if the city could go further than just stopping highways? What if it could tear them down, put them underground, and stitch the city back together? This would be better than learning from the past, it would be correcting the past.
Alan Altshuler: That actually became the origin of the big dig.
2
Ian: Thirty four ramps in the span of about four miles. Thirty four ramps in four miles! There was literally more ramp than highway. (the Central Artery)
Ian: And on those lunchtime walks he started looking around, and realizing just how much space there was underneath the structure of the Artery. Maybe enough to actually dig a tunnel while you keep the elevated highway up and running. Meaning, traffic would never have to stop.
Ian: So now we have our two rival projects: the underground Artery and the Third Harbor Tunnel. They represented opposite philosophies of transportation -- the red rose and the white rose if you will. One tunnel was all about serving car traffic – even if it destroyed some homes in the process – while the other tunnel was all about restoring the city’s fabric, and protecting residents from the impact of cars.
Renee Loth: So there's a little bit of, you know, amateur psychology that somebody could do about how Ed King felt about his own roots that he wanted to basically destroy the neighborhood and, create this, vision he had of a transportation Mecca.
Ian: Apparently someone had just walked into the store, claiming to be with the Community News. They said there was an error with the issue and had to take all the copies.
Renee Loth: And I said, no, you know, we did not have this error that we did not order the papers to be recalled. And we did have evidence that, uh, the fellow who was taking the papers and throwing them into the back of his, um, station wagon had an Ed King bumper sticker
Ian: Each issue of the paper cost $350 to print, and they did not have another $350 lying around.
Ian: Reynolds was calling from a payphone, and when he said he could see the alignment, he meant a path for the harbor tunnel, a way to go from downtown Boston straight to Logan airport.
Fred Salvucci: He said, it's, it's totally clean. This thing can be built without taking a single building,
3.
Ian: It's kind of hard to imagine the McConnell of today bucking his own party and president, but the practice of earmarking was not just for Democrats, and some Republicans felt that in this case, Reagan had simply picked the wrong fight.
Mary Jeka: Bob Byrd, who was the master parliamentarian.
Ian: This is the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia...
Mary Jeka: Switched his vote to sustain the veto. And I, at first I was, you know, I was still young. I was like, why, what is he doing that for?
Jim Burnley: And the reason he did that was because you had to be on the winning side if you were gonna make a motion to reconsider.
Ian: With that, the Big Dig became the last major project funded under the Interstate Program – the end of an era.
4.
Ian: The basic challenge was that when the new Central Artery got to the northern edge of Boston, it would have to do three things all at once. It had to come up from underground, cross the Charles River, and then intersect with a pair of important roads that ran on either side of that river -- Rt1 and Storrow Drive. So Salvucci and the team started working through different combinations of ramps, loops, bridges and tunnels that could link all these pieces together.
Ian: Scheme Z. For Salvucci, Scheme Z offered a solution to the Artery's original sin: all those on and off ramps that were too close together. But it came at a price. To untangle that mess, some drivers would have to cross the river twice – over bridges that were right next to each other.
Ian: The same month Nixon gave that speech, he signed into law a bill that would forever change the way we build infrastructure: The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. It is the cornerstone of all American environmental law.
Leah Brooks: What really drives cost is the consequences of failing to write an environmental impact statement in a way that's consistent with the federal statute. If you don't or somebody thinks you haven't, um, NEPA gives private citizens the right to sue.
Leah Brooks: And I do think that in a lot of the academic literature and in a lot of the popular discussion, people take citizen input as an unalloyed good. And I think this project has led me to the conclusion that participation has costs as well as benefits. Like, I wish it were, the participation was costless, um, and that we had the infinite ability to listen to people and hear all voices at all stages of the project. But I don't think it is.
Ian: As any duck boat tour worth its feathers will tell you…once, this whole area between Boston and Cambridge was a vast tidal basin surrounded by salt marshes.
Ian: The irony here is pretty wonderfully dense. You've got Salvucci in the odd position of defending a highway monstrosity, in the name of a larger project that's all about tearing down a highway monstrosity. Now he's being fought by activists who argue that the Charles River should be protected as a public park, but they're funded and supported by a vindictive parking lot owner whose ultimate goal is to block the creation of a public park.
Peter Howe: One of the stories I did was I superimposed scheme Z on Boston common and realized this is basically the size of Boston common.
Ian: But he was fighting an uphill battle. I mean it was called "Scheme Z." It sounded like an evil plot out of a James Bond movie. Its defining feature was the "double cross." Everything about this was a PR disaster.
Ian: But he was fighting an uphill battle. I mean it was called "Scheme Z." It sounded like an evil plot out of a James Bond movie. Its defining feature was the "double cross." Everything about this was a PR disaster.
Ian: Dukakis presided over most of this remarkable period.
Fred Salvucci: Do not, please do not reopen the environmental process. It's been murdered to get it nailed down. A month later, they reopened the environmental process.
Ian: Because of that little opening left by John DeVillars, the Scheme Z debate ultimately dragged on for another three years, with the lawsuits dragging on for years after that.
... By one estimate, every month of delay added $18 million dollars to the cost of the project, from inflation alone.
Ian: And when you look at the Big Dig that way, it starts to look a little different. It looks to me like a strange survivor, a creature out of its time, a moonshot of a project in an era of waning ambition, that somehow managed to drag itself to the starting line – all bruised and stuck with arrows, but still alive. No wonder it was the most expensive public works project in America. So many of the other projects that might have been more ambitious and more expensive, never made it off the drawing board. But this one did.
5.
Ian: Salvucci realized from the beginning that the state was entering into a paradox.
Fred Salvucci: You can't do the project without Bechtel Parsons. They’re the ones that have done this stuff so you are where you are, but you know that they know way more than you, so how are you gonna manage them?
Peter Zuk: There was a certain amount of, uh, joyousness about the, uh, opening the Ted Williams tunnel, which was unfettered by, you know, I shouldn't say unfettered. There was always controversy. There was controversy every day at the project, but it felt like an event that was, uh, everybody was happy.
Ian Coss: Maybe the last time in the project that everyone was happy at once.
* Peter Zuk: There are six phases of a project. Have you heard this yet? you heard?
Peter Zuk: There’s euphoria, fear, resignation, the search of the guilty, the punishing of the innocent and praise and glory to the uninvolved.
Ian: In fact, this whole channel is like a little museum of bridges designed to open and close for ships.
Mike Bertoulin: That’s a weighted bascule.
Ian: A bridge that lifts, a bridge that rotates, a bridge that retracts.
Ian: So it would have to be a tunnel to get past the Fort Point Channel – but not just any tunnel. Because there were obstacles underground as well -- including an old subway line that ran right beneath the channel.
Peter Howe: Essentially you had to thread many lanes of highway under eight railroad tracks under the Fort Point Channel over the Red Line, not take out the water intake to the Gillette razor factory that employed 3000 people in this incredibly narrowly confined available right away.
Charlie Sennott: That is what you call a story, right? So that's a two year delay due to a failure of Bechtel's assessments of the soils that exist in these muddy blue clay that sits there at the bottom of the Fort Point Channel.
Mike Bertoulin: So we doing something called deep soil mixing.
Ian: First, some of the project staff went to Japan to study techniques for using giant mixing bits to strengthen the soil...
Mike Bertoulin: That technology worked really well until we got close to the railroad tracks. We hit all kinds of obstructions and we ended up solving that problem with soil freezing.
Ian: This was the second big change: they froze the ground solid. This is truly wild. It took a refrigeration unit big enough to cool the Empire State Building in July, running for several months straight, to make this happen. It worked by sending a liquid brine chilled to minus 30 degrees, through pipes running 60 feet under the ground. Once that muddy clay had all turned to ice, they could dig out a highway-sized tunnel just five feet below the railroad tracks. Five feet. And like Bertoulin said before, the trains never stopped running.
* They would have to be built on site, next to the channel itself, in what's called a casting basin. Basically a big dry dock, like what they use to build ships.
Mike Bertoulin: It would hold an aircraft carrier. It's roughly a thousand foot long and, uh, roughly 300 foot wide.
Ian: That meant: no vibrations, no dust. They had to dig a pit big enough to hold an aircraft carrier, without shaking the factory right next door.
* The tunnel tubes made their journey by cover of darkness, creeping out of the basin like giant submarines. It took nine hours for them to cross into the channel, pulled by diesel-powered winches. The water was glassy and calm, and just as the sun rose, the tubes touched down in their final resting place -- within 3/8th of an inch of what the designs called for.
6.
Andy Paven: I think unfortunately, Jim Kerasiotes made the price, the yardstick for measuring success.
NARR: Andy Paven, the Big Dig spokesperson, was always wary of this strategy, of putting so much public emphasis on a fixed number.
NARR: Shannon O'Brien became the first woman in Massachusetts history to be elected to statewide office on her own ticket. And yes, state treasurer is not one of the more high profile offices, but O'Brien would get more than her share of attention.
NARR: In the months after his departure, Kerasiotes was proven right about one thing: once you open the door for cost increases, more would come. His initial announcement in February brought the total estimate to 12.2 billion. By April it was 13.5, by October 14.1, closing in on the final price tag of 14.8 billion.
7.
NARR: The answer lies in the long shadow of a man named Robert Moses...
NARR: The magic of it all is these bonds were not issued by the state, or by the city. They were issued by a quasi-governmental body, known as a public authority.
Jim Aloisi: And so it becomes a very powerful tool in the hands of someone who knows how to use that tool, because you're basically autonomous.
NARR: Using Mass Pike toll money to build the Big Dig was touchy, because again, these tolls were like a tax, just for the people who happened to use this one road.
NARR: The woman who would rise to challenge the renegade board was named Jane Swift. And she was not exactly popular...
NARR: As Lieutenant Governor, Swift's public image had been defined by two controversies. First, there was 'babygate.'
NARR: In some ways, the case was sweeping: who had ultimate authority over the Big Dig? But it was argued on very specific terms. Were these two board members acting misfeasantly or malfeasantly when they voted to delay the toll increase by six months.
NARR: Jane Swift was so politically damaged by the whole toll issue, that a wealthy businessman who didn't even live in the state of Massachusetts, decided to jump into the governor's race. That would be Mitt Romney. It was later revealed that Christy Mihos had personally – and covertly – commissioned a poll on Romney’s behalf that helped convince Romney.
NARR: Then, in the summer of 2002, just after Mihos and Levy reclaimed their seats, the state legislature passed a bill expanding the Turnpike Board to five members, meaning the renegades were no longer a majority. Swift appointed the two new members. With that the Turnpike Revolt was over. The toll increase went into effect, Bechtel-Parsons stayed on the job, the Big Dig got built.
8.
NARR: an eight inch hole in something called, a slurry wall.
I want to take a little engineering aside here, because the slurry wall is actually what made the entire Big Dig possible. And now it was also making it questionable.
So if you've ever dug a hole anywhere, you know it's hard to just go straight down without the dirt on the sides caving in. And if the soil is loose or wet, it's even worse, right? So now imagine excavating the pathway for a tunnel that's the width of a highway, up to a hundred feet deep and surrounded by skyscrapers. There's just no way to keep it all from caving in, unless you can put a solid wall in the ground before you start excavating.
* NARR: It has to be stiff enough to actually hold back the earth as you dig that trench straight down a hundred feet. But the slurry never hardens – it stays soft enough that you can pump it back out when you’re done...
NARR: Again there's a delicate exchange of material -- concrete in, slurry out -- so that something thick and heavy is filling that trench at all times.
* NARR: I imagine Cohen and Wyshak kind of like a buddy cop duo -- the small, bookish claims attorney pouring over documents, and the stocky, square-jawed mafia prosecutor ready to go do battle in the courtroom.
And in many ways, they were the perfect pair for the case. I mean, what is corporate fraud but organized crime with a lot more paperwork?
Ian Coss: Yeah. What does that tell us about public life and, you know, accountability? That it takes a tragic death in order to actually clarify and focus, attention and scrutiny on something like this.
Martha Coakley: I, I think it's the nature of human beings to, um, you know, wait until something really bad happens.
NARR: Part of the problem was that there were just so many Bechtel staff who had managed various parts of this project at various times.
Fred Wyshak: Betel would rotate people in and out like you were in the army
9.
in the late 1920s. ‘Boondoggling’ referred to a common handicraft, the kind where you weave together strips of different colored leather to make bracelets, key-chains, or in this case, little ornaments for your boy scout uniform. But the word 'boondoogle' gained a new meaning in 1935; that’s when it appeared on the front page of the New York Times. In all caps, the paper declared that $3 million dollars of federal relief money was being spent teaching arts and crafts to the unemployed. Right below that headline, was the ominous phrase: “Boondoggles Made.”
NARR: In the 1950s and 60s, when Boston was building its downtown highways, one of the neighborhoods in their path was Chinatown.
god sends to Francis, no, no, the church that you have to build is not a church of stones. You have to build a church in the hearts and the minds of the people. That's the only church that matters and will last.
Ian : Noam Chomsky was lecturing at MIT, Joan Baez was singing protest anthems in Harvard Square. Women’s Liberation, the Vietnam War – it was pretty fertile ground for an activist movement,
Ian : And I want to stress just how radical this was. For years, states around the country had been telling residents: trust us, we know what’s best, we have the experts. Now, here were those same experts saying: no, the state is wrong. Eventually Salvucci's group got a name: Urban Planning Aid.
Ian : That meant that Salvucci and another organizer named Jim Morey, had only a few minutes to brief him on the details of the issue.
Fred Salvucci: So he's just come off of a plane and he's bleary-eyed and he's bounding up the steps two at a time.
Ian : Galbrieth, by the way, was six feet, eight inches tall.
Fred Salvucci: Jim Morey is about five, six, and he's running to keep up with Galbraith, and I'm two steps behind him and talk about the elevator talk, Morey briefs Galbraith in the space that it takes this giant to go two steps a time from the ground floor to the second floor of the Wursthaus. So, uh, Galbraith says,, I think I got it.
Ian : The meeting begins and a professor from MIT speaks first:
Fred Salvucci: He basically said, look, I've been living here for a while now and we keep trying to elect more progressive school committees and more progressive city councils. And every year, those people that is the blue collar population, get the majority and we have lousy education and the lousy government. And maybe just maybe if this highway knocks out, 2,500 dwelling units and associated voters, maybe we'll win the next election.
Fred Salvucci: At which point Galbraith picks up his arm, which seems to almost reach the other side of the room points, a finger and says only our moral imbecile would articulate such a cynical argument. We're living in a country that's being torn apart by race in a city that's being torn apart by racial strife and somehow through some magic that none of us in this room was smart enough to understand. There's an integrated neighborhood here in Cambridge, where people are getting along reasonably well and they're low income people and minorities and, how on earth could we ever think of destroying this precious resource. And he just carries the day.
Karilyn Crockett: So Volpe gets whisked away and quickly his second in command becomes governor.
Ian : All of a sudden, the activists' allies in Washington had been replaced by their foe in Massachusetts. And their foe in Massachusetts had been replaced by...a question mark.
Ian : The question mark's name was Francis Sargent.
Ian : A week later, Governor Sargent did something very unusual for any politician. He said: "We were wrong."
Ian : That day, he ordered a freeze on all active highway construction in Greater Boston. None of the activists I interviewed talked about that day as a major victory in itself. It was only a freeze, pending more study – but at least the destruction of homes had finally stopped.
Ian : With that speech, Sargent removed almost 25 miles of highway from the interstate system. The first time any state or governor had done so.
Ian : What if the city could go further than just stopping highways? What if it could tear them down, put them underground, and stitch the city back together? This would be better than learning from the past, it would be correcting the past.
Alan Altshuler: That actually became the origin of the big dig.
2
Ian: Thirty four ramps in the span of about four miles. Thirty four ramps in four miles! There was literally more ramp than highway. (the Central Artery)
Ian: And on those lunchtime walks he started looking around, and realizing just how much space there was underneath the structure of the Artery. Maybe enough to actually dig a tunnel while you keep the elevated highway up and running. Meaning, traffic would never have to stop.
Ian: So now we have our two rival projects: the underground Artery and the Third Harbor Tunnel. They represented opposite philosophies of transportation -- the red rose and the white rose if you will. One tunnel was all about serving car traffic – even if it destroyed some homes in the process – while the other tunnel was all about restoring the city’s fabric, and protecting residents from the impact of cars.
Renee Loth: So there's a little bit of, you know, amateur psychology that somebody could do about how Ed King felt about his own roots that he wanted to basically destroy the neighborhood and, create this, vision he had of a transportation Mecca.
Ian: Apparently someone had just walked into the store, claiming to be with the Community News. They said there was an error with the issue and had to take all the copies.
Renee Loth: And I said, no, you know, we did not have this error that we did not order the papers to be recalled. And we did have evidence that, uh, the fellow who was taking the papers and throwing them into the back of his, um, station wagon had an Ed King bumper sticker
Ian: Each issue of the paper cost $350 to print, and they did not have another $350 lying around.
Ian: Reynolds was calling from a payphone, and when he said he could see the alignment, he meant a path for the harbor tunnel, a way to go from downtown Boston straight to Logan airport.
Fred Salvucci: He said, it's, it's totally clean. This thing can be built without taking a single building,
3.
Ian: It's kind of hard to imagine the McConnell of today bucking his own party and president, but the practice of earmarking was not just for Democrats, and some Republicans felt that in this case, Reagan had simply picked the wrong fight.
Mary Jeka: Bob Byrd, who was the master parliamentarian.
Ian: This is the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia...
Mary Jeka: Switched his vote to sustain the veto. And I, at first I was, you know, I was still young. I was like, why, what is he doing that for?
Jim Burnley: And the reason he did that was because you had to be on the winning side if you were gonna make a motion to reconsider.
Ian: With that, the Big Dig became the last major project funded under the Interstate Program – the end of an era.
4.
Ian: The basic challenge was that when the new Central Artery got to the northern edge of Boston, it would have to do three things all at once. It had to come up from underground, cross the Charles River, and then intersect with a pair of important roads that ran on either side of that river -- Rt1 and Storrow Drive. So Salvucci and the team started working through different combinations of ramps, loops, bridges and tunnels that could link all these pieces together.
Ian: Scheme Z. For Salvucci, Scheme Z offered a solution to the Artery's original sin: all those on and off ramps that were too close together. But it came at a price. To untangle that mess, some drivers would have to cross the river twice – over bridges that were right next to each other.
Ian: The same month Nixon gave that speech, he signed into law a bill that would forever change the way we build infrastructure: The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. It is the cornerstone of all American environmental law.
Leah Brooks: What really drives cost is the consequences of failing to write an environmental impact statement in a way that's consistent with the federal statute. If you don't or somebody thinks you haven't, um, NEPA gives private citizens the right to sue.
Leah Brooks: And I do think that in a lot of the academic literature and in a lot of the popular discussion, people take citizen input as an unalloyed good. And I think this project has led me to the conclusion that participation has costs as well as benefits. Like, I wish it were, the participation was costless, um, and that we had the infinite ability to listen to people and hear all voices at all stages of the project. But I don't think it is.
Ian: As any duck boat tour worth its feathers will tell you…once, this whole area between Boston and Cambridge was a vast tidal basin surrounded by salt marshes.
Ian: The irony here is pretty wonderfully dense. You've got Salvucci in the odd position of defending a highway monstrosity, in the name of a larger project that's all about tearing down a highway monstrosity. Now he's being fought by activists who argue that the Charles River should be protected as a public park, but they're funded and supported by a vindictive parking lot owner whose ultimate goal is to block the creation of a public park.
Peter Howe: One of the stories I did was I superimposed scheme Z on Boston common and realized this is basically the size of Boston common.
Ian: But he was fighting an uphill battle. I mean it was called "Scheme Z." It sounded like an evil plot out of a James Bond movie. Its defining feature was the "double cross." Everything about this was a PR disaster.
Ian: But he was fighting an uphill battle. I mean it was called "Scheme Z." It sounded like an evil plot out of a James Bond movie. Its defining feature was the "double cross." Everything about this was a PR disaster.
Ian: Dukakis presided over most of this remarkable period.
Fred Salvucci: Do not, please do not reopen the environmental process. It's been murdered to get it nailed down. A month later, they reopened the environmental process.
Ian: Because of that little opening left by John DeVillars, the Scheme Z debate ultimately dragged on for another three years, with the lawsuits dragging on for years after that.
... By one estimate, every month of delay added $18 million dollars to the cost of the project, from inflation alone.
Ian: And when you look at the Big Dig that way, it starts to look a little different. It looks to me like a strange survivor, a creature out of its time, a moonshot of a project in an era of waning ambition, that somehow managed to drag itself to the starting line – all bruised and stuck with arrows, but still alive. No wonder it was the most expensive public works project in America. So many of the other projects that might have been more ambitious and more expensive, never made it off the drawing board. But this one did.
5.
Ian: Salvucci realized from the beginning that the state was entering into a paradox.
Fred Salvucci: You can't do the project without Bechtel Parsons. They’re the ones that have done this stuff so you are where you are, but you know that they know way more than you, so how are you gonna manage them?
Peter Zuk: There was a certain amount of, uh, joyousness about the, uh, opening the Ted Williams tunnel, which was unfettered by, you know, I shouldn't say unfettered. There was always controversy. There was controversy every day at the project, but it felt like an event that was, uh, everybody was happy.
Ian Coss: Maybe the last time in the project that everyone was happy at once.
* Peter Zuk: There are six phases of a project. Have you heard this yet? you heard?
Peter Zuk: There’s euphoria, fear, resignation, the search of the guilty, the punishing of the innocent and praise and glory to the uninvolved.
Ian: In fact, this whole channel is like a little museum of bridges designed to open and close for ships.
Mike Bertoulin: That’s a weighted bascule.
Ian: A bridge that lifts, a bridge that rotates, a bridge that retracts.
Ian: So it would have to be a tunnel to get past the Fort Point Channel – but not just any tunnel. Because there were obstacles underground as well -- including an old subway line that ran right beneath the channel.
Peter Howe: Essentially you had to thread many lanes of highway under eight railroad tracks under the Fort Point Channel over the Red Line, not take out the water intake to the Gillette razor factory that employed 3000 people in this incredibly narrowly confined available right away.
Charlie Sennott: That is what you call a story, right? So that's a two year delay due to a failure of Bechtel's assessments of the soils that exist in these muddy blue clay that sits there at the bottom of the Fort Point Channel.
Mike Bertoulin: So we doing something called deep soil mixing.
Ian: First, some of the project staff went to Japan to study techniques for using giant mixing bits to strengthen the soil...
Mike Bertoulin: That technology worked really well until we got close to the railroad tracks. We hit all kinds of obstructions and we ended up solving that problem with soil freezing.
Ian: This was the second big change: they froze the ground solid. This is truly wild. It took a refrigeration unit big enough to cool the Empire State Building in July, running for several months straight, to make this happen. It worked by sending a liquid brine chilled to minus 30 degrees, through pipes running 60 feet under the ground. Once that muddy clay had all turned to ice, they could dig out a highway-sized tunnel just five feet below the railroad tracks. Five feet. And like Bertoulin said before, the trains never stopped running.
* They would have to be built on site, next to the channel itself, in what's called a casting basin. Basically a big dry dock, like what they use to build ships.
Mike Bertoulin: It would hold an aircraft carrier. It's roughly a thousand foot long and, uh, roughly 300 foot wide.
Ian: That meant: no vibrations, no dust. They had to dig a pit big enough to hold an aircraft carrier, without shaking the factory right next door.
* The tunnel tubes made their journey by cover of darkness, creeping out of the basin like giant submarines. It took nine hours for them to cross into the channel, pulled by diesel-powered winches. The water was glassy and calm, and just as the sun rose, the tubes touched down in their final resting place -- within 3/8th of an inch of what the designs called for.
6.
Andy Paven: I think unfortunately, Jim Kerasiotes made the price, the yardstick for measuring success.
NARR: Andy Paven, the Big Dig spokesperson, was always wary of this strategy, of putting so much public emphasis on a fixed number.
NARR: Shannon O'Brien became the first woman in Massachusetts history to be elected to statewide office on her own ticket. And yes, state treasurer is not one of the more high profile offices, but O'Brien would get more than her share of attention.
NARR: In the months after his departure, Kerasiotes was proven right about one thing: once you open the door for cost increases, more would come. His initial announcement in February brought the total estimate to 12.2 billion. By April it was 13.5, by October 14.1, closing in on the final price tag of 14.8 billion.
7.
NARR: The answer lies in the long shadow of a man named Robert Moses...
NARR: The magic of it all is these bonds were not issued by the state, or by the city. They were issued by a quasi-governmental body, known as a public authority.
Jim Aloisi: And so it becomes a very powerful tool in the hands of someone who knows how to use that tool, because you're basically autonomous.
NARR: Using Mass Pike toll money to build the Big Dig was touchy, because again, these tolls were like a tax, just for the people who happened to use this one road.
NARR: The woman who would rise to challenge the renegade board was named Jane Swift. And she was not exactly popular...
NARR: As Lieutenant Governor, Swift's public image had been defined by two controversies. First, there was 'babygate.'
NARR: In some ways, the case was sweeping: who had ultimate authority over the Big Dig? But it was argued on very specific terms. Were these two board members acting misfeasantly or malfeasantly when they voted to delay the toll increase by six months.
NARR: Jane Swift was so politically damaged by the whole toll issue, that a wealthy businessman who didn't even live in the state of Massachusetts, decided to jump into the governor's race. That would be Mitt Romney. It was later revealed that Christy Mihos had personally – and covertly – commissioned a poll on Romney’s behalf that helped convince Romney.
NARR: Then, in the summer of 2002, just after Mihos and Levy reclaimed their seats, the state legislature passed a bill expanding the Turnpike Board to five members, meaning the renegades were no longer a majority. Swift appointed the two new members. With that the Turnpike Revolt was over. The toll increase went into effect, Bechtel-Parsons stayed on the job, the Big Dig got built.
8.
NARR: an eight inch hole in something called, a slurry wall.
I want to take a little engineering aside here, because the slurry wall is actually what made the entire Big Dig possible. And now it was also making it questionable.
So if you've ever dug a hole anywhere, you know it's hard to just go straight down without the dirt on the sides caving in. And if the soil is loose or wet, it's even worse, right? So now imagine excavating the pathway for a tunnel that's the width of a highway, up to a hundred feet deep and surrounded by skyscrapers. There's just no way to keep it all from caving in, unless you can put a solid wall in the ground before you start excavating.
* NARR: It has to be stiff enough to actually hold back the earth as you dig that trench straight down a hundred feet. But the slurry never hardens – it stays soft enough that you can pump it back out when you’re done...
NARR: Again there's a delicate exchange of material -- concrete in, slurry out -- so that something thick and heavy is filling that trench at all times.
* NARR: I imagine Cohen and Wyshak kind of like a buddy cop duo -- the small, bookish claims attorney pouring over documents, and the stocky, square-jawed mafia prosecutor ready to go do battle in the courtroom.
And in many ways, they were the perfect pair for the case. I mean, what is corporate fraud but organized crime with a lot more paperwork?
Ian Coss: Yeah. What does that tell us about public life and, you know, accountability? That it takes a tragic death in order to actually clarify and focus, attention and scrutiny on something like this.
Martha Coakley: I, I think it's the nature of human beings to, um, you know, wait until something really bad happens.
NARR: Part of the problem was that there were just so many Bechtel staff who had managed various parts of this project at various times.
Fred Wyshak: Betel would rotate people in and out like you were in the army
9.
in the late 1920s. ‘Boondoggling’ referred to a common handicraft, the kind where you weave together strips of different colored leather to make bracelets, key-chains, or in this case, little ornaments for your boy scout uniform. But the word 'boondoogle' gained a new meaning in 1935; that’s when it appeared on the front page of the New York Times. In all caps, the paper declared that $3 million dollars of federal relief money was being spent teaching arts and crafts to the unemployed. Right below that headline, was the ominous phrase: “Boondoggles Made.”
NARR: In the 1950s and 60s, when Boston was building its downtown highways, one of the neighborhoods in their path was Chinatown.
god sends to Francis, no, no, the church that you have to build is not a church of stones. You have to build a church in the hearts and the minds of the people. That's the only church that matters and will last.
