The Big Figleaf

One of the better underreported infrastructure stories in recent years is the construction of the freeway tunnel in Boston, Massachusetts, commonly referred to as "The Big Dig". There has been much news about the death of a woman last year due to a sudden and catastrophic failure of a bolt holding up a concrete ceiling slab, but little of the culture that led to this event.

This is a potentially huge story that could bring about fundamental changes in the way large Engineering projects get built. This project of massive scope has been so poorly managed that the Program Managers, a consortium of Bechtel and Parsons-Brinkerhoff appear to be willing to spend "somewhere north of $300 million to settle all disputes and avoid litigation.

Let's deconstruct that for a moment. The total project cost was to date is just short of $12 billion. Aside: this is a couple of orders of magnitude above its original estimate. On budget not. A program manager should cost no more than 5% of project cost. However the oligarchs have done an excellent job of getting more than that in recent years so, just for laughs let's say they were paid 10%, I have no idea what the real number is. Ten percent of a lot of money is a lot of money, in this case about $1.2 billion. Getting a 10% profit on program manager contracts is tantamount to highway robbery, given how low the risk is, but it's also the high end of the norm. So Bechtel and P-B may have seen a profit of over $100 million. That's probably best case speculation. So they are willing to give all their profits at least twice over to avoid the publicity that would come from a full on trial. And, incidentally, this does not include any amount they are paying to buy off the family of the woman who was killed.

My.

So we can be pretty sure that there's much they just as soon wouldn't want aired. The information I have received over the years regarding the Big Dig, the "word on the street" as it were, said that the project was built with little regard for the quality of the work or the cost. Everything had to be done as quickly as possible so that a thin fiction of staying on schedule could be maintained. Other scuttlebutt includes plenty of work sub-contracted to incompetents based on their political connections or relations with executives at Bechtel or P-B. I really have no way of "knowing" that this is the case in a strict legal sense, but from my years of experience I'd bet a lot on it being so. Program managers, particularly the big firms, are little more than public relations firms, their employees are scolded at every turn to be "team players" meaning they are not to question things.

A typical person running a program managers' operations will be short on engineering skills but long on his ability to abuse employees and charm politicians. So keep an eye on the proceedings at the Big Dig. See how much they pay to keep their pefidity hidden.