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The family of a Jamaica Plain woman crushed to death in the 2006 Big Dig ceiling collapse will collect more than $28 million ... A spokesman for the Turnpike, Mac Daniel, said, "The tunnel collapse in 2006 was the result of a colossal failure of oversight by past administrations..." Investigations of the collapse showed that a string of failures - and, in some instances what authorities said was negligence - caused the collapse ... Concrete panels weighing 26 tons fell from the ceiling after the failure of bolts that had been secured with epoxy. The National Transportation Safety Board faulted,...

Last week also brought the story of Albert Arroyo, a Boston firefighter who applied for disability retirement in March on the grounds that he was left "totally and permanently disabled" after tripping on a staircase in March. He went on injured leave and continued to collect his full salary, tax free. But Arroyo's "total and permanent disability," it appears, wasn't very disabling. In May he entered a men's bodybuilding competition, and finished eighth. When the fire commissioner learned of Arroyo's bodybuilding prowess, he shifted him from injured leave to regular sick leave. (On Friday, Arroyo was ordered to return to...

"Friends, red-necks, suckers, and fellow hicks," he would say, . . . "That's what you are. And me - I'm one, too . . . Oh, I'm a sucker, for I fell for that sweet-talking fellow in the fine automobile . . . But I'm standing here on my own hind legs, for even a dog can learn to do that, give him time. I learned. It took me a time but I learned, and here I am on my own hind legs." And he would lean at them. And demand, "Are you, are you on your hind legs? Have...

Surprise! The $ 2.4 B Big Dig in Boston is now up to $ 22 B plus! And the federal reimbursement is down from 85% to 27%, leaving MA taxpayers with an unpayable bill due by 2038. If you like MA, you'll LOVE the U.S. under Barack Obama.

BOSTON–Contractors will pay more than $450 million (dollar figures U.S.) to settle the state's lawsuit over a fatal tunnel collapse and to cover leaks and design flaws in the Big Dig, officials said Wednesday. Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, the consortium that oversaw design and construction of the country's costliest public works project, has agreed to pay $407 million, U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan said in announcing the deal. Several smaller companies will pay about $51 million collectively. "The citizens of Massachusetts entrusted Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff to act as their eyes and ears on the Central Artery Project," Sullivan said. "They grossly failed to meet...

IN 2003, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony supposedly signaling the end of the "Big Dig"--the nearly two-decade-long project to ease Boston traffic by routing the city's major thoroughfares underground and underwater via a series of tunnels--Massachusetts Turnpike Authority (MTA) chairman Matthew Amorello, the project's supervisor, insisted that the Dig rivaled "anything in the history of the world built by men." Maybe. It's no doubt true that the largest public works project in the nation's history has grown corpulent on federal largesse, soaring from an estimated price tag of $2.2 billion in 1983 to somewhere near $15 billion today. And $15 billion...

When the clock runs out on 2007, Boston will quietly mark the end of one of the most tumultuous eras in the city's history: The Big Dig, the nation's most complex and costliest highway project, will officially come to an end. After a history marked by engineering triumphs, tunnels leaks, epic traffic jams, last year's death of a motorist crushed by falling concrete panels and a price tag that soared from $2.6 billion to a staggering $14.8 billion, there's little appetite for celebration. Civil and criminal cases stemming from the July 2006 tunnel ceiling collapse continue, though on Monday the...

With a $2.1 million sale price, the “Big Dig” House is a lot more expensive than neighboring residences in Lexington. But what buyers don’t understand is that you can’t compare the house made of recycled material from the infamous Big Dig highway project with a Colonial selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars less, says real estate agent Carole deJong. “There has been some objection to the price,” said deJong, of William Raveis Exceptional Properties. “The fact is that isn’t a four-bedroom Colonial. This is a one-of-a-kind house.” That may be an understatement. Steel beams and concrete slabs that held...

About 500 leaks in Big Dig tunnels are awaiting repair, and that number doesn't include leaks being handled by the project's contractors, according to state officials who warn that future leaks are inevitable. Project manager Michael Lewis also told the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority board Tuesday that the leak-repair program is "effective," and should be viewed separately from new evidence indicating water continues to leak steadily into the Interstate 93 Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr. tunnel. The board did not address an independent engineering firm's analysis that water continues to leak steadily into the O'Neill tunnel - a section of Interstate...

WASHINGTON, July 10 — The ceiling collapsed in one of Boston’s Big Dig tunnels a year ago, killing one woman, because builders used the wrong epoxy to hold the anchor bolts in place, the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday. “We’re talking about the wrong glue here, in effect,” said Kitty Higgins, one of the five members of the board, which said that the epoxy selected dried quickly but lost strength weeks later. A continuing theme of the board’s meeting Tuesday was how small a detail led to the accident. “It’s kind of ironic in a $14 billion project,” said...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The fatal Big Dig tunnel collapse in Boston could have been avoided if authorities had considered that the epoxy securing tons of ceiling panels could slowly pull away, federal investigators concluded Tuesday. The National Transportation Safety Board approved a report saying the likely cause of the accident that killed a woman was ''use of an epoxy anchor adhesive with poor creep resistance'' that could not sustain long-term loads. -- SNIP -- ''Although the epoxy used in the tunnel had acceptable short term strength, it was incapable of supporting much lower loads over an extended period of time,''...

Taxpayers who have already suffered through waste, fraud, delays and even a tragic accident from the budget-busting Big Dig are now getting a new kick in the pants: a bill as high as $333 million that has even Gov. Deval Patrick "fed up." In financial documents to be released today, the Patrick administration will formally disclose that costs have ballooned to at least $14.798 billion and may increase by another $160 million, pending the outcome of negotiations with contractors, sources confirmed. The cost correction comes as Patrick tries to exert more control over the project and the Turnpike Authority, whose...

Remember the public debate last year over whether the state should raise the gasoline tax or tolls to pay for the rotten roads around here? Well, the debate’s over. There’s been a compromise. We’re going to raise both the tolls and the gasoline tax. Or so says the Mass. Transportation Finance Commission. They haven’t officially come out and said they want higher gas taxes and tolls. First they’re going to have the traditional “public hearings.” Of course it’s all a complete bag job. Just look at the tell-tale phrases in the news stories about the “shocking” conditions of the state’s...

5 Solid Reasons not to be!

Police in Boston were by far the city's top earners last year, with 25 Police Department employees earning more than $200,000, nearly four times the number who made that amount in 2005, according to city payroll figures released to the Globe. Of the 125 highest paid city employees last year, all but one -- Superintendent of Schools Michael G. Contompasis, who made $221,574 -- were police officers, the records show. Police have long been big earners in Boston, where a powerful union and private detail work have helped boost pay. But in 2006, the amounts were higher than in recent...

Construction engineer John Tsikouras suspected that the salesmen were not telling him the whole story. The men from Newman Associates, a bolt distribution company, approached him in August 1999 and said they wanted his professional advice about a tunnel ceiling that was part of Boston's Big Dig. But Tsikouras said their questions seemed intended to get the Rhode Island engineer's approval rather than his expertise. Would it be safe to hang the concrete ceiling from 7.5-inch-long bolts? No, Tsikouras said. What if the bolts were 5 inches long instead? "I can ask my mother that one," he replied: Even less...

BOSTON - The state attorney general said Monday that he will sue the companies that worked on a Big Dig highway tunnel, claiming their negligence led to the ceiling collapse that killed a woman in July. Attorney General Tom Reilly said he would seek unspecified damages for repairs, loss of tunnel use and toll revenue, and other economic factors in a lawsuit to be filed Tuesday in Suffolk Superior Court. Reilly said that 15 firms involved in the management, design, construction or oversight of the Interstate 90 tunnel would be named in the negligence lawsuit, but that only one -...

Mike Dukakis was a good governor. And if you don’t believe me, just ask Deval Patrick. Here’s the exchange from the final televised debate Wednesday night. Kerry Healey: “I’d like to ask you, do you think Dukakis was a good governor, and why?” Deval: “I think that Mike Dukakis was a good governor in many ways, and we had challenges then.” We sure did, Deval, and the biggest challenge of all, at least to us taxpayers, was named M. Stanley Dukakis. Sure, Deval’s lead in the polls is most likely insurmountable, and tossing a bouquet to the henpecked wimp Mike...

BOSTON, MA, United States (UPI) -- Highway inspectors never properly checked the fatally flawed ceiling of Boston`s Big Dig tunnel that killed a woman this summer, it was reported Saturday. The day after the July 10 ceiling collapse on the Interstate 90 connector, the head of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority said the agency inspected the tunnel`s ceiling just before the tunnel opened to motorists in January 2003.

This is the Christy Mihos commercial that has been in the news around Boston. Produced by Bill Hillsman of Northwoods Ads in MN it's caused quite a ruckus here in Massachusetts. The commercial depicts Independent candidate for Governor Christy Mihos asking Big Dig engineers and politicians why the Big Dig is billions of dollars over budget. The bechtel engineers and politicians do what they do best.

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Talk to Sen. Ted Kennedy Thu Sep 28, 1:51 PM ET This was a last-minute addition to the Talk to Power schedule, so the time for questions and comments is shorter than usual. Sen. Kennedy will be fielding your comments over the next 24 hours and responding, via an interview with host Judy Woodruff, on Friday morning. Thanks in advance to Yahoo! users for your thoughts, and to Sen. Kennedy for agreeing to participate. The question of immigration and immigration reform is likely to loom large in this forum, as it has with previous Talk to Power guests. Sen. Kennedy,...

Attorney General Tom Reilly is seeking a special grand jury to grill more than a dozen key witnesses in the Big Dig manslaughter probe, moving swiftly after documents revealed widespread knowledge of ceiling problems in the tunnel where Milena Del Valle was killed, a law enforcment source said. The grand jury, expected to be convened Oct. 3, will hear evidence for six months as investigators seek criminal indictments against officials involved in construction of the I-90 Seaport Connector Tunnel. Several key officials have already retained lawyers, the source said. “Nothing we have seen to date takes us off the path...

BOSTON -- The family of a woman who was killed in a Big Dig tunnel when concrete ceiling panels fell onto her car spoke out about the wrongful death lawsuit they filed. Milena Del Valle's family accused the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and a number of design firms of negligence. Del Valle was killed on July 10 as she and her husband, Angel Del Valle, drove through the Interstate 90 connector tunnel. "That night, on July 10, we were going to the airport, and we were on the way to pick up my brother and his wife from Puerto Rico, and...

Quite surprisingly, what may turn out to be the world's most fitting epigram in our time was uttered by none other than the official spokesman of the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority, Ghazi Hamad. According to the Jerusalem Post yesterday, Mr. Hamad told his fellow Palestinians to dismiss Israel's responsibility for the growing state of anarchy and lawlessness in the Gaza Strip. He said it was time for the Palestinians to embark on a soul-searching process to see where they erred. "We're always afraid to talk about our mistakes. We're used to blaming our mistakes on others. What is the relationship between...

As far as the Mass. Turnpike goes, it’s “Fat Matt Who?” When it comes to turning someone into a non-person, the old Soviet Union had nothing on the modern Pike. All up and down the hack highway, Fat Matt’s name (and it was everywhere) has been either painted over or covered up with a piece of adhesive plastic. You’ll find more Pilgrim hats with Indian arrows through them on the Pike than signs with Fat Matt’s name. When you’re out, you’re out. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to pry Fat Matt’s hacks out of the public...

You can't Big Dig yourself out of a hole. On the ride from Logan Airport, we descend into a long spacious tunnel into downtown Boston. "Welcome to the Big Dig," my cabby announces. "Keep your head down, these are the tunnels you've been reading about where the ceiling falls down on you." He was referring to the highly publicized and tragic death several weeks ago of a woman crushed by a 2.5-ton slab of ceiling concrete in the newly opened (and now closed) Ted Williams Tunnel. My cabby seemed deflated and cynical by this ongoing multibillion-dollar transportation fiasco, and he's...

-Material from Boston's tunnel project becomes the ultimate recycling project.- LEXINGTON, Mass. — It's over budget, Paul Pedini says of his Big Dig house, but at least it doesn't leak. Pedini wants the home, built using steel and concrete salvaged from Boston's $14.6 billion highway construction project, to be a prototype for recycling. "These materials are as good as you can get," said Pedini, a 51-year-old civil engineer who spent a decade working on the Big Dig. "We were being paid money to junk this stuff. There's something inherently illogical about it." Instead of dumping top-shelf materials, he says, recycle...

An explosive memo warning of a potential tunnel-ceiling collapse was “fabricated,” says a key Big Dig contractor, casting a long shadow over the Boston Globe, which first published it last week. Officials at Modern Continental say virtually every claim made by safety inspector John Keaveney in the Globe’s July 26 story and in the alleged May 17, 1999, memo is refuted by the company’s internal documents. The alleged 1999 memo warned of a collapse in the Interstate 90 Seaport connector tunnel, the same tunnel where a Jamaica Plain woman was killed July 10 when a section of the concrete ceiling...

Memo to the Globe: From now on, stick to stories you know, or care, something about. Like gay marriage. Now the Boring Broadsheet has run what appears to be another very badly reported fake news story. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Is Dan Rather available for damage control? I can hear him now: “This story is true!” Mary Mapes could not be reached for comment. Memo to the Globe: This newspaper is no longer your competition. You are now going head to head with The Onion, and Scrappleface. We used to call the people who worked for...

LEXINGTON, Mass. (AP) -- It's over budget, Paul Pedini says of his Big Dig house, but at least "it doesn't leak." Pedini wants the home - built using steel and concrete salvaged from Boston's $14.6 billion highway construction project - to be a prototype for recycling.

BOSTON - Gov. Mitt Romney has apologized for referring to the troubled Big Dig construction project as a "tar baby" during a fundraiser with Iowa Republicans, saying he didn't know anyone would be offended by the term some consider a racial epithet. In a speech Saturday, Romney, a Republican considering a run for president in 2008, acknowledged he took a big political risk in taking control of the project after a fatal tunnel ceiling collapse, but said inaction would have been even worse. "The best thing politically would be to stay as far away from that tar baby as I...

BOSTON --Officials at a Big Dig construction company have been unable to locate a memo a safety officer said he wrote in 1999 warning his superiors that portions of a tunnel's ceiling could collapse, a newspaper reported Saturday...

online exclusive Fat Matt Amorello was a complete boob to the bitter end. Two weeks ago today, he had a deal on the table that would have paid him through the end of the 2007 fiscal year - $223,000. Here it is, exactly 14 days later. The bloated fool spent upwards of $1 million on white-shoed lawyers, and he ends up with a deal by which he leaves the payroll on Feb. 15, 4 1/2 months earlier than under the first deal. So Fat Matt is out $85,000 - and it cost him a million bucks to lose the money,...

Breaking news: Governor Romney finally gets the head of the Big Dig to resign.

We were all very disappointed. Matt Amorello, the $200,000 man - and then some - failed to show. However, the rest of us were packed in tight, more exquisitely-suited lawyers than reporters yesterday at the meticulously renovated $200-million-plus marble, mahogany and leather John Adams courthouse. Like the Big Dig, and so much else around here, the price tag of Adams’ renovation skyrocketed - from $96 million to $200 million - while other courthouses endured take-your-chances elevators, bad toilets and dirt floors. “It is somewhat frustrating to have that amount of money spent on” the John Adams “while we are basically...

Exclusive An ambulance racing to get a heart attack victim to the hospital was snagged in Big Dig tunnel gridlock, turning what should have been a four-minute trip into a desperate 24-minute ordeal that ended with the man’s death, public safety and transportation sources said. (snip) A police escort led the ambulance through the westbound Ted Williams Tunnel and onto surface streets through South Boston, a transportation source said. A public safety source said, however, that due to gridlock in the westbound side, the ambulance was led through the eastbound side of the I-90 Seaport connector tunnel, which was closed...

An ambulance racing to get a heart attack victim to the hospital was snagged in Big Dig tunnel gridlock, turning what should have been a four-minute trip into a desperate 24-minute ordeal that ended with the man’s death, public safety and transportation sources said. The victim - a 64-year-old man - was found by a state trooper at the limousine parking lot at Logan International Airport’s Terminal A suffering a heart attack about 3:52 p.m. yesterday.

BOSTON - The on-site safety officer for a Big Dig highway tunnel where a motorist was crushed by falling concrete warned his superiors in 1999 that the heavy ceiling panels might collapse because the bolts could not support them, The Boston Globe reported Wednesday. John Keaveney wrote in a two-page memo to a senior project manager for contractor Modern Continental Construction Co. that he could not “comprehend how this structure can withhold the test of time.” “Should any innocent State Worker or member of the Public be seriously injured or even worse killed as a result, I feel that this...

Big Dig officials noted six years ago that epoxy ceiling supports were failing in the tunnel section where a woman was crushed to death this month, but allowed the continued use of that superglue system to support 3-ton concrete slabs, documents obtained by the Herald reveal. A memo written after a January 10, 2000, meeting of project officials notes “an apparent failure of the epoxy” for ceiling anchors in the first 100 feet of the Interstate 90 Seaport connector tunnel. It was in an adjacent section where ceiling panels collapsed and killed Milena Del Valle, 38. The chilling notation was...

Hey, Mike Dukakis, how can we miss you when you won’t go away? You and Kitty don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. It’s bad enough that you can’t get there from here anymore because of the Big Dig disaster. But now we must deal with the re-emergence of the man known as Pee Wee Dukakis from whatever rock, or concrete slab, he’s been hiding under all these years. You can’t open the paper, or turn on the TV, without seeing him, and always with the same lame rap. If only they’d listened to me . ....

When Boston's Big Dig was still on the drawing board, state and federal transportation officials picked an engineering powerhouse and a smaller, well-established firm to build the forbiddingly complex tangle of tunnels, ramps, bridges and highways. And then, critics say, the officials stepped back and let the two companies do their job with little or no oversight. In the weeks since 12 tons of ceiling panels from a Big Dig tunnel fell, crushing a woman to death in a car, critics say one of the key flaws in the project was the way it was managed.

Howie found a clip of Kerry saying "This tunnel will be a bargain--costs are infinitesimal". Comes back to haunt him!

Traffic was disrupted once again in a key Big Dig tunnel after inspectors found loose bolts in a ceiling panel the same sort of problem that is believed to have killed a motorist earlier this month. The $14.6 billion Big Dig project, the most expensive in U.S. history, buried much of the city's highway network in tunnels. It took over a decade to complete and has since been plagued by leaks, falling debris, cost overruns, delays and problems linked to faulty construction.

What a grand idea to name the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center after Mayor Thomas M. Menino. We could call it “the Mumbles.” Look, Cleveland has “the Jake.” Suddenly everyone is referring to the Ted Williams Tunnel o’ Death as “the Ted,” although given the recent killing of a woman in a car below sea level due to political corruption, perhaps a more appropriate handle would be “the Teddy.” Once the $800 million convention boondoggle is officially christened, “the Mumbles” would instantly enter the city’s lexicon: “Traffic is backed up all the way to the Mumbles.” “Hey Sully, did you...

Big Dig workers were so stumped by ceiling construction in the Ted Williams Tunnel they used duct tape to temporarily secure bolts now coming loose in hundreds of areas on the $14.6 billion project, state inspection records show. The records reveal massive confusion and disagreement over repeated failures of epoxy-bolt fasteners installed in the mid-1990s. Inspections noted that holes were drilled too deep, bolts were too short and epoxy was at times not mixed properly. In some cases, records show, workers scrambled to find a temporary way of keeping bolts from dropping out of the ceiling. “Bolts have falled (sic)...

BOSTON (AP) - Gov. Mitt Romney ordered an immediate shutdown of the Ted Williams Tunnel's eastbound lanes Thursday as the investigation continued into a deadly collapse of ceiling panels in a connecting tunnel. No reasons for the closure were immediately released. The governor has been overseeing the inspections of the Big Dig tunnels since shortly after the fatal accident July 10 that killed Milena Del Valle, 38, as she and her husband drove to the airport. The Ted Williams Tunnel was a key part of the city's massive Big Dig project and leads from Boston to Logan International Airport. The...

ALL POLITICS is local, Tip O'Neill famously said, and it surely doesn't get any more local than when a 6,000-pound slab from a project championed by the late House speaker falls on a 38-year-old newlywed from Jamaica Plain, crushing her to death as her husband drives her to the airport. O'Neill died in 1994, but the political culture he epitomized is alive and well and enshrined in the Big Dig, a slough of corruption, callousness, and cover-ups that had become a synonym for government mismanagement long before it killed Milena Del Valle on July 10. It would be going too...

Reports of an explosion causing road collapse and affecting subway underneath, Emam Khomeini Station area, Naser Khosro Square downtown Tehran. Reports of 3 people hurt so far. There was a previous explosion here 10yrs ago.

Crucial ramps closed after the deadly Big Dig tunnel ceiling collapse might begin to reopen within days as workers press ahead with repairs, while criminal investigators continue to scrutinize project officials who were allegedly aware of problems seven years ago. Gov. Mitt Romney, who earlier in the week said the tunnels could be closed for months, said workers are replacing faulty anchor bolts that led to last week’s tragedy with stronger hardware. He said an eastbound ramp from Interstate 93 south to the Ted Williams Tunnel could be open by next week and a westbound ramp may open in another...