Let me just say, this thing is a mess! I work for a company that was contacted about fixing some of the leaking problems. Some guys I work with went to investigate the problem And I kid you not, a current soluion to some of the leakage problems is plugging a styrofoam cup at the end of leaky pipes. The guys that went to see about fixing some leaks said a big part of the problem is the crappy union labor. http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/03/15/big.dig.ap/index.html BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- The independent engineering specialist who led an investigation into leaks at the $14.6 billion Big Dig project says he can no longer vouch for the safety of its tunnels. "I am now unable to express an opinion as to the safety of the I-93 portion of the Central Artery," Jack K. Lemley wrote in the March 9 letter to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, a copy of which was obtained by The Boston Globe. The project -- formally called the Central Artery and Third Harbor Tunnel project -- buried Interstate 93 underneath downtown Boston and connected the Massachusetts Turnpike to Logan International Airport. Lemley told lawmakers in November that there was no public safety risk to people driving through the tunnels. In the latest letter, he said new information has surfaced that more than 40 large sections of tunnel wall contain construction defects and that fireproofing material has been damaged by leaks. He also wrote that project officials have blocked him from obtaining records and data related to the new problems. Lemley added that his change in position also was driven by the apparent lack of any formal plan by Big Dig officials to address the leak problems. Matthew Amorello, chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, which oversees the $14.6 billion project, had yet to see the letter, a spokesman told the Globe in Tuesday's editions. "We believe the tunnels are perfectly safe," spokesman Doug Hanchett said. "If we ever had a reasonable inkling otherwise, we'd close the tunnels. Public safety is always our number one concern."
Yet another reason why unions are outdated, and abused. Unions need to go into the crapper where they belong.
Whenever I go to Boston on business, I always insert an extra hour into my schedule for the trip from Logan to my hotel. If there were no Big Dig construction traffic, it would be a 10-15 minute drive.
holy crap. this is a monumentally large project. federally funded. now the engineers are saying they can't vouch for the safety of the tunnels??? i drove through these tunnels when i was there a couple of summers back. i couldn't vouch for my own safety in there either...scary!!
no, i couldn't tell anything like that. just scary to drive in there. it's tight and closed in. you get the sense that there is no room for error in there. and the exits are on both sides of the tunnels. so if you don't know for sure if you're exiting left or right, you're left to watch the signs. but the lanes are very narrow and it's not easy to move over because there's a lot of traffic. it's not an easy city to navigate. i stayed in the financial district and had to go out to a deposition in a little town just out of Boston. driving there actually made me appreciate driving in Houston, if you can believe that!
There are two things - #1 The project was of a type that had never been done before. Any time new theoretical engineering ideas are put into place one should be concerned. Think about all the delays and initial problems with the Chunnel, and the way that all of Frank Lloyd Wright's signature structure, Fallingwater, has been unstable from the beginning, and the leaning tower of Pisa taught architects to worry about the quality of soil they were building on, or all the people that died building the Golden Gate Bridge. #2 More importantly, the contractor on the project, Bechtel was apparently extremely inept, and the finished design is way outside of reasonable variations in construction. The designs are off by several feet in many places. Furthermore this somewhat related article from the Las Vegas Sun describes how supposedly Bechtel was aware of the problems early on, but didn't try to correct them or notify anybody. Also, the project was necessary - a major highway through Boston had to be expanded and there were no easy ways to do it without damaging some of America's earliest historical landmarks. The project required a novel solution. It was perhaps a bit too ambitious, and definitely poorly executed.
Whoa... Because someone who works with someone who heard someone else say the problem is the union labor on this project, then all unions are bad and must go away? Crappy workers are just that...crappy workers. Human nature dictates whether an individual will do a good job, not whether he belongs to a union. As a lifelong union member, I take pride in the work I do...and if I see a fellow employee not doing his job, I take the time to help him do it right. If after that he still refuses to work safely and properly, then he will get disciplined, union or no union. Crappy union labor? Tell it to the 23 families whose loved ones were killed in the Phillips explosion in 1989, caused by non union contract workers.
The flaw in your logic is that unions protect crappy workers from being crappy ex-workers. Unions give protection to poor performers and raise costs to taxpayers and business owners by overinflating salaries of those whose skills deserve much less. Without the fear of losing your job, your motivation decreases, leading to shoddy performance. This is not an isolated incident of unions failing. It's rampant.
I'm fully aware of all of the union's in the Houston area. Chances are that I worked with your Local at some point. I just feel it is an outdated system that has become corrupted. As a person who used to work exclusively with local charter's, I noticed a lot of corruption and deception towards the union's own from time-to-time. And in the NorthEast, where union's have a strangle-hold on competitors, I feel it gives union worker's the aura of being to do minimal as possible work output.
How can you know this without ever working as a union member? I have seen a number of workers fired for ineptitude on the job, and the union cannot do a thing about it. If you f*** up, you will get in trouble, simple as that. Nobody protects workers who don't do their job.
From what I can tell, the problem in this case has absolutely nothing to do with unions, but rather worksite managers who didn't properly supervise or correct problems. That the initial reaction to big dig problems is "anti-union" is interesting. Unions are quite a bit like civil rights issues. People think that civil rights were solved in the 60's by MLK and labor abuse ended with Cesar Chavez, so now these things just don't happen anymore. These issues are like mosquitoes, or computer viruses. They never go away, you just control them. Unions in the 70's & early 80's were probably too unrealistic and confrontational, but those were the tactics used to get reasonable working conditions in the first place. Most unions have become much more responsive to the way that the bottom line affects their workers. If you want to see why unions are important, look at residents at hospitals. The Supreme Court ruled that they aren't eligible to form unions, so hospitals continue to work them 80 hours a week, and pay them $25,000/yr to do the work of a $200,000/yr doctor. Not that they should be making $200,000/yr, but they should make at least as much as nurses and be able to get enough sleep so that when they attend you they are fully conscious.
I work under union for 5 years and what Trade_Jorge said is correct. The only union members I've ever seen fired were because of stealing or killing (manslaughter). I've never seen a poor performer fired - never - and I've seen some rediculously poor performers. I've also heard some stories from other union members where they didn't turn out a product all night because they were mad at management. Their $30+ hour jobs were shipped overseas shortly there after.
