I don’t think the two of you mean the same thing by “safe.” Any design can be made safer, usually by making it more expensive. So you’re always “sacrificing safety for economics.” The goal is to design to a point so that the tradeoff is at an acceptable level. For civil engineering projects, that level is (supposed to be) pretty safe, but it could still be made safer if the tightwad taxpayers didn’t mind a 90% tax rate.
Engineering is always a game of trade-offs, and cost vs. safety is always one of them. Some people don’t like to admit this, saying things like “cost is no object” and “you can’t put a value on human life! if [expensive redesign] saves just one life, it’s worth it!” but these are not useful engineering guidelines. In engineering, cost is always an object, and there are probably more cost-effective ways of saving just one life than whatever the proposed redesign was–even assuming the redesign doesn’t have its own (different but just as dangerous) flaws.
Yeah, that’s pretty much my point. Certainly all design must meet established safety standards (and usually exceeds them) but there is no way to make something 100% infailable in every single occurance and still usable.
I’m not willing to judge the engineering yet. Even though there may have been other ways to accomplish the same task, the engineers used their best judgement that this was the most optimal solution for the design problems they were attempting to solve.
In engineering school, it’s impressed upon you that you are ultimately responsible for the public safety and the engineers I know take this seriously. I’m more inclined to initially believe that the concrete suppliers (who have already been investigated for substandard concrete) would be the ones responsible. But I’m reserving judgement until we have more information.
I am. A ceiling that squashes people after aging about a year is beyond the pale. I don’t see how this can be assessed as anything but a gigantic fuckup.
One local news broadcast this evening reported that the number of ceiling hangers found to be suspect is now up from 60 (yesterday’s report) to over 240.
The latest news on this: a ‘reliable source’ has stated that several of the state’s computers (with tunnel engineering files on the hard drives0 were found to have unreadible hard drives. The drive may have been sabotaged.
ralph124c
Someone sabotaged the state’s computers? Evil-doings? Here in Massachusetts? I am shocked. :eek:
Incidentally, the Boston Globe had an article about epoxy application being one of the causes of failure. Here is a graphic of the procedure: epoxy
It seems to me that with so many detailed steps involved (cleaning the bored hole, precisely applying the epoxy, installing the bolt so that the epoxy mixes properly, waiting the right amount of time for the epoxy to “cure”) the epoxy (or the installation) is a good candidate for the failure.
Yes, it is still very early in the investigation, and not all the facts are in, but I was just wondering what others think of this.
Romny now has control of the investigation, which would have been handled by the Turnpike Authority. Whether he’s grandstanding or not, it’s an obviously good idea, as the M.T.A. simply can’t be relied upon to investigate its own failures, should they be responsible in whole or in part.
wolf_meister, I agree. The procedure is by no means foolproof, and when it fails, you’ve got a three-ton concrete panel waiting to descend onto the cars below.
Yesterday, after some deliberation and a couple conversations with the missus, I emailed my boss and asked if I could shift my work hours back an hour, so I could get out from under this heinous traffic fiasco. So, I left at 6:45 this morning to get to the office by 7:30. I didn’t expect to make it on time, and I actually intended to leave at 6:30 but the goddamned racoons broke into the rubbermaid enclosure I keep the rubbish in, and I had to clean up my yard (sons-o-bitches).*
Anyways, I didn’t get to the office till 8:15. Damn. I’ll get out of the house on-time tomorrow - 6:30. We’ll see if I can get in by 7:30. On the bright side, I’ll be leaving the office at 4:00 now, instead of 5:00. Under better circumstances than we’re currently facing here in the Boston area, I can do the commute off-peak in 45-60 minutes, so leaving at 4 will mean I’ll be home before 5:00. During the peak, my commute typically takes about 90 minutes, but last week it was 120-150 minutes (each way), so I was gone from home from 7:30 to 7:30. That sucked.
How was your Boston-area commute this morning?
*The rubbermaid enclosure locks, but I’d crammed too much trash into it and the side panel came out of it’s channel at the bottom. That’s all the racoons needed, and they pulled the front door and side wall off the thing, and pulled a bunch of our delicious party-trash out and scattered it all over hell and creation. Or at least part of it. Just what I wanted to deal wit hthis morning.
Yeah, I heard the train stations are bearing some of this as well. When I was job-hunting last summer, I spent a couple months looking exclusively in Boston, and planned on taking the train to work - there are commuter rail stations on both of the towns abutting my town. Alas, nothing panned out, I was running out of time, so I took a job in Waltham. No PT to speak of, unless I want to tak a bus and make 15 transfers over three hours. Blah.
Its looking like the epoxy coating 9on the threded bolts that hold the tie rods to the ceiling) were either misapplied or missing epoxy altogether. If the contractor that did this work (Modern Continental) has the lobor records from 1999, they can identify who was doing the work-and those bastards ought to have rtheir heads handed to them. Of coursem, the unions will obstruct the investigation-but SOMEBODY bears responsibility for this.
Sure. That would be Bechtel, who had the responsibility for overseeing the construction’s quality.
But it won’t happen - they’re too big a campaign contributor to too many pols, Romney included, that it’s just a lot easier to go after the Authority head who took over after that work was done.
I believe Bechtel received about $2 billion from the Big Dig mostly from consulting work and allgedly overseeing the entire project. (Well I guess 2 billion doesn’t go as far as it used to).
And as Elvis L1ves pointed out, Bechtel is a huge and powerful multi-national corporation. (Among other things, they built the Hoover Dam). And just as Dick Cheney is associated with Halliburton, Bechtel has had its employees go into government work. (Reagan’s Secretary of State George Schultz was a former President of Bechtel). So, it is going to be very diffcult to investigate and/or pin any blame on that company.
Well, I’m a bike messenger, and among my company’s clients are the law firm representing the contractors and the law firm representing the state. This could be as sweet as when I worked for a company that had the law firm representing the Archdiocese of Boston as a client (I even got to be on TV on every local news station for that). I just wish I knew what was in the package I delivered Friday evening addressed to Matt Amorello, with no return address, and the similar one a coworker delivered a bit later, from the same place, addressed to Mitt Romney. Something tells me that no one is really paying to get good news to Matt Amorello on an ASAP basis.
As far as traffic goes, I’m amazed to see every morning that Western Ave. in Cambridge is entirely congested with people presumably heading for the Pike at the Allston tolls. This is a couple miles outside of downtown Boston. And the number of police required for the traffic details along several of the major surface detours during morning and evening rush hours (not to mention the other construction projects going on every two blocks or so downtown) seems fairly staggering. I really can’t imagine how this could really go on like this for months. And as a bicyclist, it doesn’t really affect me nearly as much as it does most people.
I swear, if I was sitting in stop and go traffic for two hours per day, burning $3/gallon gas, I’d probably shoot someone.
Yeah, two of 'em are closed - the Ted Williams tunnell, and the other I90 tunnel going (I think) underneath South Boston. I think people are avoiding driving through Boston at all, though. I know I will - I was taking that route home every day for the last 6 months or so.
the problem might be with the epoxy, not the anchor bolts. Epoxy has to be mixed on the site , so the two components react chemically and make a strong glue. So it may be the fault of the construction workers and how they mixed the glue.
The smelly brown stuff is starting to hit the fan. Apparently, the on-site safety officer for the Big Dig told his superiors back in 1999 that he didn’t think the tunnel was safe. They ignored him. Link.
Well, that’s exactly the problem - everybody has known about this stuff for years. It just took some innocent persons death to break the inertia ignoring it. And I think just about any Bostonian you ask will express this sentiment: It’s going to get worse before it gets better. I wouldn’t be surprised if they closed down the entire Big Dig and were forced to route traffic around Boston forever. Plus, to build those tunnels, the dug beneath many buildings downtown. I recall a report that some buildings had already begun sinking, since the bedrock foundations beneath them had been compromised. Thankfully, the number of deaths from all the buildings falling down will be minimized, since it will by then have become impossible to get into or out of the city.
