This isn’t making me feel better – I’m driving my daughter to Emerson College in 5 weeks. I’m not look forward to coming into Boston with a van, even on a Saturday.
The sad fact is the slabs were secured in such a way that there was essentially no tolerace for failure. Nothing like this should be able to fail so completely because somebody goofed a little mixing ingredients. The ceiling was designed to be “good enough” by some misguided cost-cutting standard, and now a woman is dead. Blaming this on the grunts hopefully won’t happen in this case. I want heads rolling from high places, and the poor laborers who did what they were instructed to do left alone for a change.
Loopydude
I’d like to see those folks in high places get in trouble too. I’m not so much blaming the workers or the engineers as much as the people who had to give the approval to the final stages of the project as well as the contractors and the “consultatnts” such as Bechtel.
If the concrete supplied was substandard, wouldn’t that have affected how well a bolt could hold? What if the epoxy was substandard? Wow that would be horrendous if a company used a cheap epoxy in order to save a few bucks and created a problem that would probably take even more billions to fix and has already taken one life.
Just this morning in the Boston Globe I read that those huge circulation fans may not be properly secured either. This is really turning into a nightmare.
This is precisely what’s so monstrous about this whole tragedy. Bridges & tunnels are supposed to be designed with multiple redundant systems, so if the epoxy in one part turns out to be defective, another part of the structure (like, steel cables or something) carries the load until it can be fixed safely.
Tunnels are NOT supposed to collapse, barring disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, or decades of poor maintenance. When was the last time you heard of a structure that started to fail, and kill people, within months of its opening? IT DOESN’T HAPPEN. Although, when you mix engineering with politics…and with a corporate-controlled government, we can only expect more of this shit. :rolleyes:
again, this project has to be the most contracted in history. Each contractor who did anything HAD to sign, certifying that the job was completed per contract. A new issue has emerged-the MTA is refusing to release certain documentation-isn’t htis suspicious? Anyway, let’s leave it to the lawyers who drated the contracts…while we wait for more ceiling slabs to fall off. Due process rules!
That’s right. But the collapse of the roof panels so soon after opening of the tunnel to traffic is at least a prima facie case that the builders/designers/inspectors have a lot of explaining to do. I think the onus is on them to explain and not on the public to present more evidence.
I totally agree with you and I am very interested in getting more information. My point is that I’m not willing to assign blame until we get more information. There are a lot of steps in any building project (and the Big Dig was a massive undertaking of unforseen complexity) and there must have been multiple mis-steps to allow such a tragedy to happen.
Honestly? I think it was outright greed, corruption and arrogance, not “mis-steps”.
Ya know, I’m kinda leaning that way myself but what I meant was that it’s not like you can pay off one guy and cause a structure to fail. There have to be failures at multiple levels for this kinda thing to happen.
If the design is poor to begin with, it could itself be the failure, or overly sensitive to a small number of failures that a robust design could adequately absorb.
Indeed. I’m looking at that sentence I wrote, and I’d like to restate it…
I think it was systematic greed, corruption and arrogance.