The Big Dig

Ian Coss: When did you first realize there was something weird going on with the concrete that was going into the big dig?

Dan Johnston: Mix 4 0 4, 2 9 1. I remember doing the work, on it, and I didn't like it.

MUSIC: Enter

Dan Johnston: It was setting up too quick and I remember talking with, uh, The boss. I said, well, you know, what's going on here? You know, this stuff is just tightening up very quick, setting up quick. And he said, it's that new mix we decided to use. And I'm thinking, oh no, this is not gonna go well.

MUSIC: Transition

NARR: Dan Johnston was a quality control technician for Aggregate Industries, the largest supplier of concrete for the Big Dig. But I have to say, he’s not what I would have pictured. Johnston has long hair, down past his shoulder blades. The shelves in his living room are filled with Steven King, classic Sci-Fi, with the books propped up by statues of dragons and gargoyles. I might expect to find him at a Magic the Gathering tournament, more than I would a concrete plant.

Dan Johnston: I ended up in construction first through the trades painting. That was the worst carpenter you ever run into. Scare the hell out of the nails. You never could hit it twice. So, uh, I ended up, meeting some friends who they were in the testing business, testing materials for construction. I had a friend who was working for this company said, come on down.

NARR: This was in 1997, just as the Big Dig was entering its peak construction years.

Dan Johnston: Essentially, you look at all the ingredients,

NARR: And Johnston's job was to check the concrete.

Dan Johnston: Stones, sand, water, cement, fly ash

NARR: ...put it through a whole battery of tests:

Dan Johnston: Slump test. An air entrainment test, yield, temperature.

NARR: In theory, all the concrete going into the ground would pass these tests, and that meant the concrete would last.

MUSIC: Out

NARR: In theory.

Ian Coss: Could you give me a sense of the quantity of concrete that was going into the big dig?

Dan Johnston: Yes I got a pretty good number for ya. That truckload that you look at has 11 yards of concrete, essentially a sidewalk that goes the length of a football field, including the end zones. So that's one truckload. Uh, we had a hundred drivers. So a hundred of those going out every hour almost?

Ian Coss: And those trucks are just going back to the plant, back to the job site, back to the plant, back to the job site. All day. Nonstop.

Dan Johnston: We had guys, uh, they were laughing. They were in the 40, 40 club that's 40 hours regular, 40 hours overtime.

Ian Coss: Um, a week,

Dan Johnston: a week, every week. So that's, that's a lot.

NARR: In total, Aggregate Industries billed the Big Dig for 135,000 truckloads of concrete.

Dan Johnston: What I told the feds was that I couldn't swear under oath that even one truckload was batched as it should have been. Not one, not one.

MUSIC: Theme

NARR: From GBH News this is The Big Dig, a study in American Infrastructure. I'm Ian Coss.

All along, we knew the Big Dig was expensive. We know there were some slip-ups, that there was some wasted money, but we could still hope that at least the money was being spent on a job well done, built to last. It wasn't until the tunnels were virtually complete, that their flaws became clear – causing disruption, distrust, and in one case, a needless death. At that point, the question of responsibility over the project took on a whole new meaning.

This is Part Eight: I Want Justice For What Happened.

Pre-RollARCHIVAL: Nevermind the light. Today, there was a ribbon at the end of the new I 93 Northbound Tunnel. 1, 2, 3, go. Yay.

NARR: A ribbon cutting is really a magical thing, like alchemy. If it's done right, all the frustration turns to relief. Talk of cost turns to talk of benefits. The entire narrative turns a corner.

ARCHIVAL: All you folks out there in the hardhat that made today a reality

NARR: And in 2003, the Big Dig stood on the threshold of just such a magical moment.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian Coss: And it really was like, like you flipped a switch and there was one last car that went over and then there was a first car that went down?

Mike Lewis: Exactly right.

NARR: Mike Lewis, the Dig's project director, was there that day, when the rusted, crumbling, elevated Central Artery carried its final car.

Mike Lewis: When you do that shift of traffic for the first time in 50 years, there is no traffic on I 93 above the city.

NARR: I want to recall for a moment -- if we still can -- the idealism and vision that launched this whole story. Fred Salvucci walking under the elevated artery, eyeing the space between the columns, imagining what the city would be like if it weren't there. That moment feels like a lifetime ago, buried now beneath layers and layers of crusted over outrage over this project. It's amazing to think that a vision can survive that much fury -- so many hand-offs, so many careless drops -- and yet still become reality...

Mike Lewis: It was a cold December morning, crystal clear Bluebird day. I remember walking down the elevated artery in the north end. It And it was silent because the traffic was gone. And it was this first time that I really got the feeling like, this is why we did this: it was that silence.

MUSIC: Transition

NARR: For once, the naysayers had nothing. The tunnel worked. The city above was quiet. A passing driver shouted out the window: "Good job boys!"

By the summer of 2004, the elevated structure was gone completely -- a fading scar from a decades old wound. The Red Sox were on the way to breaking their decades-long curse and winning the World Series. The Democratic National Convention even came to town that summer, and it was held right next to where that rusted crumbling highway once divided the city.

ARCHIVAL: In the end, that's what this election is about.

NARR: A young senator from Illinois got up on stage and dared us to believe in our government.

ARCHIVAL: Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?

NARR: If ever there was a year to break curses and shed cynicism, to change tired narratives, this was it. And then...

ARCHIVAL: Just when we thought it was safe to start saying nice things about the Big Dig. There comes news that the Big Dig is full of leaks

NARR: in September of 2004, water started gushing through the tunnel walls of the brand new Central Artery -- three hundred gallons a minute. Traffic backed up for over five miles, and even several hours after it started, no one could find where the water was coming from. Officials could be seen actually tasting the water, to at least figure out if it was salty or not. Later that night, as cars continued to creep past this ominous pool covering a whole lane, the source was finally found:

ARCHIVAL: a massive leak was found in one of the slurry walls.

NARR: an eight inch hole in something called, a slurry wall.

I want to take a little engineering aside here, because the slurry wall is actually what made the entire Big Dig possible. And now it was also making it questionable.

So if you've ever dug a hole anywhere, you know it's hard to just go straight down without the dirt on the sides caving in. And if the soil is loose or wet, it's even worse, right? So now imagine excavating the pathway for a tunnel that's the width of a highway, up to a hundred feet deep and surrounded by skyscrapers. There's just no way to keep it all from caving in, unless you can put a solid wall in the ground before you start excavating. Before.

Ian Coss: Could we talk about the slurry wall method?

Maureen McCaffrey: Slurry wall is fun.

NARR: You may recall Maureen McCaffrey from a couple episodes ago -- she was a project engineer on one of the big downtown tunnel contracts – all of which used slurry walls.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: Here’s how it works: first a giant milling machine digs a rectangular trench.

NARR: So the first step is to start digging a trench about three feet wide, at the edge of where the tunnel will go.

Maureen McCaffrey: And at the same time, we pump slurry.

NARR: So as each bucketful of dirt comes out, it's replaced by slurry – a soupy clay mixture.

Ian Coss: What's the consistency of slurry? Could you give us an everyday comparison?

Maureen McCaffrey: Ooh, that's a good one. Hmm. I'm thinking, if you took a really heavy cake batter and you threw in about three times as much flour you could maybe match a little bit what slurry would be like.

NARR: It has to be stiff enough to actually hold back the earth as you dig that trench straight down a hundred feet. But the slurry never hardens – it stays soft enough that you can pump it back out when you’re done.

ARCHIVAL: How deep are we now? 93 feet now, we’re going about 106…

NARR: I actually find this process a little eerie, because when you look at videos of these things being dug at ground level it just looks like a little muddy ditch. But if you stepped in that ditch, you would slowly sink down over twelve stories into the ground.

Maureen McCaffrey: A hundred or 120 feet down where at, depending on where you were on the site.

NARR: Don’t worry, that never happened.

ARCHIVAL: Finally, concrete is poured and the slurry is pumped out…

Maureen McCaffrey: And now we're ready to put concrete in.

NARR: Now that slurry filled trench becomes a concrete wall.

Maureen McCaffrey: We drop in a rebar cage, really carefully. And then a concrete pump truck would be pumping concrete into that giant trench at the same time that we have a pump sucking out that ben night slurry.

NARR: Again there's a delicate exchange of material -- concrete in, slurry out -- so that something thick and heavy is filling that trench at all times.

Maureen McCaffrey: Of course, the concrete is heavier, so it's going to the bottom and you're pushing out the slurry coming up the top and just pump, pump, pump, pump concrete until you're all the way to the top. And poof. Magic, that's just one panel on just one project.

NARR: The whole Big Dig had about five miles worth of these slurry walls, more than any other project in North America.

Maureen McCaffrey: So eight foot increments you can imagine it took a considerable amount of time.

MUSIC: Out

NARR: Pouring slurry walls is a high stakes game. The walls have to be straight, the reinforcing steel has to be straight. And everything has to be done quickly, because the longer that trench is open and filled with cake batter, the more chances there are for complications.

Jim Bruno: the trickiness is if the holes cave in.

NARR: Jim Bruno was a project manager on one of the other downtown tunnel contracts. And the reason he was worried about cave-ins, is that if clumps of dirt get mixed into the slurry, then you end up with clumps of dirt in your concrete wall.

Ian Coss: So I'm trying to, if you are like, you know, 60 or 75 feet down, you've got sections of, you know, the steel already laid in there, and then it caves in. You're taking all that out to fix the cave in.

Jim Bruno: You gotta start making – you make decisions, if you were to have a cave in while the steel's going down. Uh, you know, you're faced with trying to pull it back out or go in and now your, your concrete is mixed up with dirt, which is unacceptable. So,

Ian Coss: Do you remember any especially tough calls where it's like, Boy, really. We should probably go down and dig that out. But that's gonna be Wow. A big setback.

Jim Bruno: We, um, There were a f a few tough calls, but, uh, again, at the end of the day, everything worked out

MUSIC: Transition.

ARCHIVAL: Good evening, day two of those State House Transportation Committee hearings on the Big Dig. As House and Senate members seek to find out how serious those leaks in the I 93 tunnel are and who should pay for the repairs

NARR: In the fall of 2004, just weeks after that eight inch hole opened up in one of the downtown slurry walls, a man named Jeffrey Cohen moved up to Boston.

Jeff Cohen: I was reading newspaper articles about a leak in the tunnel.

NARR: Where he was starting a new job as Assistant US Attorney.

Jeff Cohen: So when I got into the office, I basically, first day I was there, said hey, why aren't we doing a big dig case?

NARR: There had been investigations of the Big Dig before, but not by the US Attorney's office. And these federal prosecutors carried a different kind of heft. There were charges they could bring that no state prosecutor could. In particular, they could work with something called the False Claims Act.

Jeff Cohen: It's a very powerful federal statute

NARR: Which basically allows someone like Jeff Cohen to prosecute anyone who knowingly bills the government for shoddy or fraudulent work. There’s a whole section at the Department of Justice that specializes in this one kind of case.

Jeff Cohen: And that's happened to be where I came from.

NARR: Now, here he was just down the street from the biggest public works project the federal government had ever funded, and it's full of leaks. Seemed like there had to be a false claim in there somewhere.

MUSIC: Enter

NARR: In order to make that case, Cohen was paired up with another federal prosecutor.

Fred Wyshak: my name is Fred Wyshak. I, was an assistant US attorney

NARR: But where Cohen specialized in these false claims, Wyshak had a background in organized crime -- big time organized crime.

Fred Wyshak: I mean, you gotta realize Whitey Bulger was…

NARR: In fact, Wyshak had spent the past fifteen years building a case against the infamous Boston mobster, Whitey Bulger and his Winter Hill Gang.

Fred Wyshak: We had corrupt FBI agents who were trying to derail the case.

NARR: For a time, Wyshak had state troopers outside his house for protection.

Ian Coss: Were you ready for a fresh case?

Fred Wyshak: I'm always ready,

MUSIC: Post

NARR: I imagine Cohen and Wyshak kind of like a buddy cop duo -- the small, bookish claims attorney pouring over documents, and the stocky, square-jawed mafia prosecutor ready to go do battle in the courtroom.

And in many ways, they were the perfect pair for the case. I mean, what is corporate fraud but organized crime with a lot more paperwork?

MUSIC: Out

NARR: And that's exactly where they started: with the paperwork.

Fred Wyshak: these documents were put in boxes, kept in a warehouse that looks like miles long. and literally we had agents, uh, going through these boxes for months to find relevant documents

NARR: As Cohen and Wyshak started working through these documents, they found evidence of imperfections: concrete pours that were not up to spec, stuff in the slurry that should not be there -- all documented by Bechtel-Parsons and the other contractors.

Jeff Cohen: Beyond just like a mistake here and there, there was a lot of things outta specification.

ARCHIVAL: Tonight on Greater Boston, more bumps in the road as big dig questions keep coming.

NARR: You have to remember, these slurry walls had been poured years ago at this point, they were one of the first steps in building the tunnel. Now it's 2004, and we're just finding out there were issues all along.

ARCHIVAL: The 1999 document clearly reads slurry does not meet specs.

NARR: Cue the outrage.

ARCHIVAL: Whoever is responsible for these failures will be held accountable. And in this case, that likely means Bechtel-Parsons…

MUSIC: Transition

NARR: As the leaks investigation built momentum and drew more attention -- the investigators got a new source of information: whistleblowers inside the project, including several from the concrete supplier we heard about at the top: Aggregate Industries.

MUSIC: Out

NARR: The tip came in the form of a code: 10-9. Take a look into the 10-9 concrete. Again, Assistant US Attorney Jeffrey Cohen.

Jeff Cohen: And I can explain that if you want me to, but it's, it's comp, it's complicated. May be counterintuitive, but sometimes concrete trucks leave with some concrete still on their truck.

Ian Coss: Mm-hmm.

Jeff Cohen: If you order 10 yards of concrete for your swimming pool, they might only pour six, but you have to buy it in a truckload. Right. So there's four left over. That four that's left over was the key to the whole case.

NARR: Because old concrete is a problem.

Jeff Cohen: Concrete is a chemical reaction, right. You add water to cement and aggregate and it makes concrete. And that chemical reaction happens in about 90 minutes. So concrete that's over 90 minutes starts going bad.

NARR: Which is why concrete suppliers are supposed to throw away that old, leftover concrete mix. But Dan Johnston, the quality control technician at Aggregate, remembers when new instructions came down from leadership…

Dan Johnston: we're not gonna do that anymore.

MUSIC: Enter

NARR: Each yard of leftover concrete was worth about $80. That adds up. So at some point in the mid-1990s, Aggregate Industries came up with a new system.

Dan Johnston: So someone would call up to the plant and say, okay, look, I'm ten nine, meaning I have excess mix. So the guy’d stick his face in the back of the truck and just guess how much was in there. Uh, looks like three yards. Then dispatch would say, okay, uh, go to Dorchester and top it off.

NARR: Just top of the old mix with some new mix, then send it back to the job site.

Ian Coss: And you could just listen along to this whole process.

Dan Johnston: Oh yeah. Uh, because we had the CB radios anyone tuned into that frequency would know.

NARR: Johnston would hear that same exchange constantly.

Dan Johnston: I'm ten nine three. I'm ten nine, 11, maybe the whole truckload. And it would always be the same. Go to this plant, top it off, go to that plant, top it off, jump the line get a new ticket.

Jeff Cohen: So they have to create an actually fake delivery ticket.

NARR: Again, Assistant US Attorney Jeffrey Cohen.

Jeff Cohen: That says this is 10 yards of concrete that was just made, and hand it to the big dig inspectors.

NARR: Which took some real effort, by the way, because that ticket dispensing machine is not just a printer; it's like part of the concrete dispensing machine.

Jeff Cohen: Little do they know that four of it was for your pool at a totally different specification and now is three hours old.

Ian Coss: Right.

MUSIC: Post

NARR: There was one last trick that the concrete truck drivers would have to pull in order to pass off the old mix: So you may remember one of those many tests that Dan Johnston was supposed to do was something called the slump test.

Dan Johnston: slump test is basically the inverted bucket that every child plays with at the beach. And you pull it up and depending on how much it settles from the top, that's a slump.

NARR: Now this old concrete mix that had been sitting in the truck for a while might not pass the slump test, because it's too rigid -- it doesn't slump enough. So you gotta loosen it up.

MUSIC: Out

Jeff Cohen: The way you make old concrete look new is you keep adding water to it.

Dan Johnston: So they were told, you know, pull over and check your load before you get to the job. And they'd pull over, check the slump, and then they'd throw a switch at the back throwing 60 to 90 gallons of water into his load.

NARR: The inspector at the job site could then do their own slump test, and the concrete would pass.

Dan Johnston: But it would never pass the test of time. Never.

NARR: Dan Johnston obviously knew about this fraud as it was taking place, even if he never personally falsified any documents, or broke any laws. For Johnston the breaking point came when one of his superiors asked him to dispose of a pile of documents.

Dan Johnston: Get rid of it, dump it, you know, this was all documentation, a huge box.

NARR: Johnston said sure, I'll take care of it.

Dan Johnston: It was in the back of my pickup truck, a hundred pounds worth. And I had to go to Dorchester for something. So I pulled up in the plant, and I remember a bunch of the drivers eyeballing that huge box of, of paperwork. And what are you gonna do with that?

NARR: He told them the truth, but the drivers seemed suspicious…

Dan Johnston: Uh, why don't you just put it in the dumpster there. I said, And I'm looking at them, I'm looking at the box, it's like, yeah, I gotta take care of, uh, something else as well. Just get rid of it all at once. And instead, I took it home.

NARR: Ultimately, Dan Johnston became one of several whistleblowers from within the company that came forward and helped the federal prosecutors – Wyshak and Cohen – build their case.

Fred Wyshak: And we were able to get search warrants.

NARR: In the summer of 2005, state troopers raided the Aggregate offices in three separate locations.

Fred Wyshak: We seized all their batch records.

NARR: And amazingly, the company had documented its own fraud.

Jeff Cohen: I was certainly surprised when I saw the driver's logs. Mm-hmm. And they had the code ten nine on them because once you have that code, you can actually count the hours and minutes until it gets poured on the big dig and which contract on the big dig.

NARR: All the way down to which panel of slurry wall the old concrete went into.

Jeff Cohen: And we can then look, does that slurry wall have a leak?

Ian Coss: And did they line up?

Jeff Cohen: They did.

NARR: I want to be very clear here: there is no conclusive evidence I have found that backs up what Cohen is arguing: that the 10-9 concrete caused the tunnel leaks. And there were many public officials at the time who specifically rejected that claim. I mean there were hundreds of thousands of loads of concrete being poured into this project, from multiple suppliers, and the attorneys could only prove that a small fraction of those were compromised in some way. So it’s hard to know what their effect was.

But in a sense, it doesn’t really matter. Because between the tunnel leaks and the Aggregate scandal, it was becoming clear that somehow, a ball had been dropped here.

Ian Coss: And who is responsible for that?

Jeff Cohen: Well, I think that's a $64,000 question

NARR: There were the contractors, subcontractors, the suppliers -- all the people out doing the work.

Jeff Cohen: And then there was Bechtel Parsons Brinkerhoff that was watching the work.

NARR: So Cohen and Wyshak began building a case against Bechtel-Parsons itself -- the 800lb gorilla of the entire project, led by one of the most legendary construction firms in American history. And if there was any doubt about the strength of that case…

ARCHIVAL: Tonight on Greater Boston. Tons of concrete fall from a ceiling in one of Boston's big dig tunnels

NARR: …that doubt evaporated in a single tragic moment.

ARCHIVAL: Raising concerns about the safety and leadership of the Big Dig project.

Mid-RollARCHIVAL: It's cool, cloudy and rainy as Mass Turnpike Chairman Matt Amorello, and I start out for a driving tour of the big. All right, we're on our way

NARR: In January of 2006, exit 20B to Albany St opened to traffic. It was the final piece of the Big Dig to be completed, and the last of the many ribbon cuttings.

ARCHIVAL: you're gonna want to go to the Waterfront District, so you want to get into the, uh, I'm driving

NARR: After a year and a half of work and periodic closures – the tunnel leaks were now under control, and traffic was flowing once again.

ARCHIVAL: I wanna see. I can do it without your help

Ian Coss: so, I mean, 2006 in some ways is right when the project is formally wrapping up.

Mike Lewis: Well, I I mean, it was beyond that Ian, there was almost a celebratory feeling.

NARR: Mike Lewis again, the Big Dig's final project director.

Mike Lewis: We did it after all of that, after all of the challenges we did it,

ARCHIVAL: We hop on the pike and within minutes we're back at WGBH 21 miles and no traffic later.

Mike Lewis: People are going to finally see that the pain was worth it. And I can no longer say that on July 11th.

MUSIC: Transition

Mike Lewis: So, July 10th, 2006 went home and at 11, a little after 11, I was in bed. I got a call from our emergency management and it was a somber voice. And they said, there's been an accident in the tunnel, and I knew that everything had changed. I said, I'll be, I'll be right in.

NARR: A series of concrete panels, weighing some 26 tons, had suddenly lost their grip on the ceiling of the tunnel, swinging down like a giant trap door, just as a 1991 Buick passed underneath.

NARR: In that Buick was a recently married couple: Angel and Milena Del Valle.

Ian Coss: Could you tell me what Milena was like? Do you have any memories that you still think about?

Lisa De Paz: Of course.

NARR: I spoke with the pastor from their church -- Lisa De Paz.

Lisa De Paz: My memories about Milena is that always, always she was with a smile in her face.

MUSIC: Transition

Lisa De Paz: I remember once, when I was driving, we saw a little duck. You know, uh, a chick

Ian Coss: Uh huh.

Lisa De Paz: and she was like, Oh, my God. Oh, my God. She's lost. She's lost. And I said, Well, maybe her mom is close by. No, stop. Stop. She made me stop. And I start following the little duck , just to be sure that she would be okay with her mom so that was her personality, you know, giving to others.

NARR: Milena had come to Boston from Costa Rica. She was undocumented at the time, and her plan was to work and send money back to her kids. It was supposed to be temporary, but then she met Angel, who worked behind the meat counter at a Latin American grocery store. Angel was also new to the city, and also had family to support back home, in Puerto Rico. The two fell in love. They married in 2005 at Lisa's church.

At that point, the plan changed. Milena wanted to become a citizen, to make a home here, and eventually bring her kids here.

Lisa De Paz: So she started working and saving money to bring, the youngest son to here. just to, to have a better life for them, and it was cut off suddenly.

Ian Coss: Wow. And that's when the accident happened.

Lisa De Paz: Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

NARR: On the night of July 10th, Milena and Angel were driving to the airport to pick up family. The car was just a few yards from leaving the tunnel. If they had maybe one more second, they would have been out in the clear.

Mike Lewis: And I got to the tunnel. Um, and the state police had it closed off, and I saw the panel, um, and you couldn't, even from that view, I don't even think I could see that there was a car under there.

NARR: Angel, on the driver's side, walked away with only minor injuries, because the panels were swinging from the right-hand side of the tunnel. Milena, in the passenger seat, was killed.

ARCHIVAL: Good morning. This is very, this is a very sad day in the Commonwealth

NARR: Governor Mitt Romney announced the news the next day.

ARCHIVAL: What happened last night, of course, is unacceptable and on a very different matter. Let me turn to the issue of the management of the turnpike authority

NARR: And very quickly, the ceiling collapse turned political, with the governor and the Turnpike Authority sparring over who was responsible...

ARCHIVAL: Time for change at that authority.

NARR: ...who had control of the project, who decided if the road was safe to reopen. In many ways, it was a repeat of the Turnpike Revolt from the last episode -- the same old dynamics with new characters. So I'm going to leave that piece to the side. I want to focus instead on what this moment meant for the investigation into Bechtel-Parsons Brinkerhoff.

If you've been keeping track, Bechtel-Parsons has been facing accusations from one corner or another for the last three episodes. There was the Fort Point Channel, with its pudding-like soil that no one adequately tested. Then there were Mihos and Levy going after Bechtel for a refund, blaming them for the out of control costs. But none of these accusations ever seemed to stick, or at least, they didn't produce a substantive outcome. The company was still there: silent, untouchable.

It took the life of Milena Del Valle to finally change that dynamic.

Martha Coakley: It had been hard to focus before

NARR: Martha Coakley became the state's Attorney General the year of the ceiling collapse.

Ian Coss: Yeah. What does that tell us about public life and, you know, accountability? That it takes a tragic death in order to actually clarify and focus, attention and scrutiny on something like this.

Martha Coakley: I, I think it's the nature of human beings to, um, you know, wait until something really bad happens.

NARR: The ceiling collapse is especially tragic, because it was so preventable, beginning with the panels themselves.

Jim Bruno: Those panels, they were about eight feet by 40 feet by four inch thick concrete. So it was pretty heavy.

NARR: Jim Bruno was one of the contractors who installed those panels, which were essentially like the drop ceiling that you'd see in an office building. A ceiling hanging from the actual ceiling, creating a space for air to circulate.

Jim Bruno: And we actually, at the beginning of the project said, Hey, these are real heavy. Can we, can we use light something? Light a piece of metal or something? But, um, the owner said, if you go to something much lighter like that, it's a redesign, which is time. And you know, just, it's just too much of a change.

NARR: The panels were way heavier than they needed to be.

Jim Bruno: So we put these things up.

Ian Coss: Sorry, when you say the owner, who are you, who's making that call?

Jim Bruno: Bechtel Parson Bechtel Parsons.

NARR: But even still, those heavy panels could have been installed safely. Each one was hung by metal rods that were bolted into the tunnel's actual roof, and held in place with epoxy.

Jim Bruno: they were epoxied into the concrete ceiling from above

NARR: Basically, super strong glue -- and it worked.

Jim Bruno: You go put up 10 of these hangers. You load test a couple. Yeah. They're holding, they're great. They meet the load. Check mark, hang it. Go on. So we thought we were good.

NARR: The fatal flaw was in the epoxy itself.

Jim Bruno: The epoxy had creep to it

NARR: Over time, it deformed and fractured, losing its grip on that metal rod holding up the ceiling.

Jim Bruno: And, um, one of 'em creeped out.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: Good evening inspectors and investigators say they have identified more trouble spots in the Big Dig I 90 connector tunnel

NARR: After the ceiling collapse, the tunnel was closed for months, while the public waited anxiously for answers.

ARCHIVAL: detours, frayed nerves, and longer commutes.

NARR: I have a family member who commuted through the Big Dig tunnel downtown; she told me: that was the first time she started looking around and noticing where all the emergency exit doors were. It was that kind of moment.

ARCHIVAL: It's like peeling an onion. And there's just more and more and more inside

NARR: And as the investigations produced results, they put the blame on a lot of different people.

ARCHIVAL: the usual suspects,

NARR: The designers, the contractors, the suppliers – including the manufacturer of that epoxy holding up the ceiling. s.

ARCHIVAL: problems with the bolt fastening system were reported as far back as

NARR: But also on the Turnpike Authority, which could have inspected this ceiling earlier and more often.

ARCHIVAL: a lot of blame has come down on Bechtel

NARR: And of course, on Bechtel Parsons.

ARCHIVAL: Bechtel Parsons. Bechtel, Bechtel needs to know that there's gonna be a totally independent review of this.

MUSIC: Out

NARR: So I do want to be clear: the ceiling collapse was not all on Bechtel-Parsons. But for the Assistant US Attorneys, Jeffrey Cohen and Fred Wyshak, who were already building a case around the tunnel leaks and concrete fraud, it fit the pattern -- a pattern they'd been seeing for years.

ARCHIVAL: hundreds of leaks in the big dig tunnel system

NARR: In each case, there were warning signs...

ARCHIVAL: The 1999 document clearly reads

NARR: there were opportunities to correct the problem,

ARCHIVAL: There was a report, which indicated

NARR: And yet, the problems continued.

Jeff Cohen: It became clear. To the joint venture, Bechtel Parsons Brinckerhoff, that, We had them in our sites that there was potentially gonna be a criminal case against them.

NARR: The reckoning had finally come. Bechtel's day in court. There was just one problem.

Fred Wyshak: We didn't have one witness from Betel Parsons Brinkerhoff, who would actually say, we knowingly, processed false claims to the United States.

NARR: Just like their case against the concrete supplier, the Bechtel Parsons Brinkerhoff case would hinge on false claims: proving the company had billed for work that was not done as promised. Again, Fred Wyshak.

Fred Wyshak: But it was very difficult to hold any, uh, individuals at B P B, criminally liable.

Ian Coss: So that phalanx just never broke. There wa was never a single person who kind of flipped?

Fred Wyshak: yeah. Not inside B P B.

Ian Coss: Did that surprise you? I mean, you had broken through the Winter Hill Gang, of course. Did this feel like, a criminal organization on a whole other level of sophistication or something.

Fred Wyshak: Uh, you know, uh, I think that's the difference between prosecuting white collar criminals and prosecuting, violent criminals. Uh, A lot of white collar criminals, I mean, they go through this whole psychological rationalization process. Um, in their heart of hearts, I don't know what they believe, but at least, outwardly, uh they won't admit wrongdoing.

NARR: Part of the problem was that there were just so many Bechtel staff who had managed various parts of this project at various times.

Fred Wyshak: Betel would rotate people in and out like you were in the army

NARR: There were constantly new engineers, new managers...

Fred Wyshak: you got a six months tour of duty in Boston

NARR: to the point that it was hard to look at any one individual and say: you knew about this problem and you willfully ignored it.

Jeff Cohen: It's like grabbing sand because you can interview a hundred people and they would all just point to somebody else as who's responsible for that particular flaw.

NARR: So with no witnesses and no actual suspects, Wyshak and Cohen had just one option left: go after the company as a whole.

Fred Wyshak: If their piecemeal knowledge put together would have proven that they knew fraud was being committed, the corporation becomes liable.

NARR: No one would go to jail, but convicting the company of conspiracy and false claims could carry a multi-million dollar penalty. And perhaps even more troubling for Bechtel, these charges carried the possibility of debarment, meaning they would not be able to bid on any contracts with the federal government. For context, this is the company that built the new US Embassy in Baghdad after we invaded Iraq. The company that the Department of Energy hires to handle nuclear waste. Debarment would be a huge blow to their business.

Jeff Cohen: And that brought people to the table.

NARR: After years of resisting the state's efforts to claw money back…now, Bechtel wanted to settle -- civilly -- even if it cost them.

MUSIC: Enter

NARR: And in 2007, the bargaining table quickly took shape.

Fred Wyshak: they hired Williams and Conley

NARR: Bechtel brought in a high-powered DC firm to represent them.

Fred Wyshak: And the lawyer who actually led that team from Williams and Conley was Bill Clinton's personal lawyer. Wow. Yeah.

Ian Coss: That's some firepower.

Fred Wyshak: Yeah.

NARR: This lawyer not only represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment, he later represented Hillary Clinton when she was pursued during her presidential run for using a private email server.

Fred Wyshak: He would always show me his White House cufflinks.

NARR: Also at the table was the new Attorney General for the state, Martha Coakley, who was under real political pressure to hold Bechtel accountable.

Martha Coakley: I knew exactly what kind of forces they could marshal. But in the end, we had the law on our side.

NARR: And of course there was the buddy cop duo of Jeffrey Cohen, the false claims specialist, and Fred Wyshak, the mafia prosecutor.

Jeff Cohen: And I think that helped us because everybody in the room knew that Fred would just like to walk outta here and just go sort this out in the courtroom. Mm-hmm. Um, And that helps.

Ian Coss: You've got the guy who put away Whitey Bulger itching for a trial. Right?

Jeff Cohen: That sharpens the point for at least them. It was a big case. It was gonna be months long, but we were ready to go.

NARR: The question now was: how much was Bechtel willing to pay to avoid that trial, and would it be enough?

MUSIC: Out

NARR: I want to pause here to say that my co-producer and I made several efforts to interview Bechtel leadership and their representatives, including that lawyer with the White House cufflinks. None of them agreed to talk on the record. At one point I had a lengthy phone conversation with the company's Global Head of Communications, and she asked me directly: will this series be "negative?" I tried to answer honestly, that my goal was not to write the great exposee of Bechtel Corp, which has been done several times, my goal was to understand how this one project unfolded and learn some lessons from that. But all that came of it in the end was an extremely bland written statement about how the Big Dig was an engineering triumph.

It's really easy and tempting to make Bechtel the big bad villain of this whole story. But when I try to follow that feeling to an actual theory of the case, it doesn't really lead anywhere. I don't believe that Riley Bechtel, great-grandson of the founder, was sitting in his corner office plotting a grand fraud that left us in Boston with a leaky, dangerous tunnel.

The truth is probably much more mundane. People were put in positions they weren't qualified for. People took on new jobs and didn't know what their predecessors knew. People felt pressure to keep the project moving at all costs. They were biased, they were stubborn, careless, loyal to their colleagues, overly optimistic -- I mean, I don't want to explain away all the project's failings as simple human nature, but the point is: it doesn't take bad intentions for things to turn out badly.

In fact, many people have argued to me that nobody wanted this project to succeed more than Bechtel. They are not some fly by night operation that can just rip off the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and then melt away with their spoils. This is a storied company that values its reputation.

Unfortunately for me, and for us I suppose, Bechtel also knows that its reputation is bigger than one podcast. Bigger than one megaproject even. They know that the storm will blow over, and when it does, that the contracts will keep coming.

Fred Wyshak: Um, so we built a criminal case, um,

NARR: Ultimately, Wyshak and Cohen, the US Attorneys, they were just another storm for this company. It too, would blow over.

Fred Wyshak: and essentially the sense we were getting from Washington from Main Justice was that, debarment of Bechtel, was sort of a non-starter.

NARR: In DC, Bechtel was too big to fail essentially, too important to debar.

Ian Coss: To clarify one more time, no one ever told you you cannot indict Bechtel. It was just a decision you made based on the circumstances.

Fred Wyshak: I would say that that's probably accurate. You know, we would send our memos to Washington, and if you don't get the green light, it's a red light.

Ian Coss: I see.

Fred Wyshak: So it's, it's sort of, uh, backwards way of saying no. Right, right, right.

Ian Coss: And that meant to you it's time to settle.

Fred Wyshak: Right.

NARR: The very idea of a settlement with Becthel-Parsons was bound to be controversial. After everything that had happened, how could you just boil that down to a number and move on? It feels dirty, or at the very least, unsatisfying.

Shortly after the ceiling collapse, Angel Del Valle, the surviving driver, made a public statement. Through a translator, with a visible bruise still on his forehead, he said: "Many people may be thinking about money but at this point I don't care about it at all...That was my wife and that's all I care about...I want justice for what happened."

MUSIC: Enter

It's hard to know what that justice should look like, when the harm is concentrated in a single person, but the responsibility is spread across hundreds, maybe thousands of people. The tunnel ceiling was reinstalled, safely. The head of the Turnpike Authority did resign. The Del Valle family received a good amount of money through a series of settlements. Then, Bechtel offered the state their pound of flesh.

ARCHIVAL: Good afternoon everybody. attorney General, Martha Coley. I just want to introduce, um, who's here with me today.

NARR: The deal was announced on January 23rd, 2008.

ARCHIVAL: US attorney Jeff Cohen, assistant US Attorney, Fred Wyshak.

NARR: With all the many state and federal investigators crowded up on the stage together, like it was their highschool graduation or something.

MUSIC: Out

NARR: The actual meat of the settlement was announced by Cohen and Wyshak's boss, the US Attorney for the region.

ARCHIVAL: Today among other admissions, Bechtel Parsons Brinkerhoff acknowledges their role in the breach of the slurry wall…

NARR: That day, Bechtel-Parsons formally acknowledged their failures of oversight, including the faulty slurry walls, the collapsed ceiling panels, and the use of bad concrete.

ARCHIVAL: They grossly failed to meet their obligations and responsibilities.

NARR: But the real news that day was the number.

ARCHIVAL: A total of over $458 million will be covered by the United States in the Commonwealth, Massachusetts.

NARR: Almost half a billion dollars -- most of it from Bechtel itself -- which would be put in a special trust fund for maintaining and fixing the Big Dig facilities.

According to the US Attorney's Office, that amount was several times Bechtel's total profit on the Big Dig, meaning they were now losing money on the job. And if there were future catastrophic events like the ceiling collapse, the company could still be liable for those.

ARCHIVAL: and I know the question will come up and it's been under discussion, we consider the issue of debarment

NARR: However, Bechtel would not be debarred. Its leaders would not be dragged into court and forced to testify under oath. It would not bear the stain of being indicted, possibly even convicted. For a company that brings in billions of dollars a year and likes to keep a low profile, this settlement made a lot of sense.

Mary Connaughton: So ultimately they paid, um, but unfortunately it never went to trial.

NARR: There were critics of the deal -- including Mary Connaughton, a member of the Turnpike Authority board.

Mary Connaughton: Because the public could have learned so much.

NARR: She pointed out that a trial was our last best chance to truly understand what was going on inside that black box of Bechtel. To put it all out in the open: who knew what, when?

Mary Connaughton: But when you have a settlement, that all goes away. How do you value, you know, the, the, the loss of, a woman, the, the loss of public trust? How do you value that? And, um, is 458 million the right number? I don't think so.

NARR: Again, Jeffrey Cohen.

Jeff Cohen: There were some people who thought it was a giant number and understood. And then there were some who said we should be bringing criminal charges. And it was one of those situations where I agreed with both people.

ARCHIVAL: We have been ever mindful that Milena Del Valle lost her life in the tunnel on July 10th, 2006. We believe that today's global agreement is the best possible resolution, and I do not say perfect, but it is the best possible resolution at this time for the Commonwealth, for the federal government, and for others involved.

MUSIC: Transition

ARCHIVAL: I'm going to, um, turn the microphone over now to, um, Ted Doherty, who is to my right...

MUSIC: transition

Ian Coss: Did you hold a service for Milena at your church?

Lisa De Paz: Yeah, many people were involved. Even, I believe, the governor was there and what I remember is seeing people grieving, even for someone who they didn't know. Grieving because it was something that could be prevented. Grieving because it was something that shouldn't be happen.

Ian Coss: You remember what scripture you read at the service?

Lisa De Paz: We read a Psalm 23, you know, the Lord is my shepherd.

Ian Coss: sort of know it, but could you tell me?

Lisa De Paz: okay. Of course I can do that,

El senor is mi pastor...

NARR: Lisa De Paz still prays for Milena's family and children. She still prays that Milena's dreams for them will be fulfilled. And, she told me, she also prays for everyone who was involved in building the tunnel that took her friend's life. She knows those people made mistakes, but she is no longer interested in finger pointing. In a way, she she says, they are victims of this tragedy as well, and they deserve mercy.

MUSIC: transition

Ian Coss: Do you have a clear memory of a sort of cleaning out your desk moment last day? Schools out?

Mike Lewis: Yeah. Um,

NARR: Again, Mike Lewis, the Big Dig's final project director.

Mike Lewis: The last day my colleagues did a breakfast.

NARR: Just a few weeks before that settlement was announced, the Big Dig quietly ended. The joint venture of Bechtel and Parsons Brinkerhoff formally dissolved.

Mike Lewis: And it was, it was really nice because people came from the contractors, from the engineers, from the project staff from the city. And it was a quiet, appropriately quiet sendoff. And it was sort of a recognition that we had done this together.

Ian Coss: And at that point the books were closed?

Mike Lewis: The, yeah, it was now an operating facility and, um the project was complete.

Ian Coss: What'd you have for breakfast?

Mike Lewis: I remember bagels.

NARR: Thirty five years after the idea was first conceived, twenty years after it got federal funding and sixteen years after construction began, the Big Dig was over. And there were bagels.

MUSIC: Transition

NARR: You might expect from this episode -- really from the past few episodes -- that the Big Dig would go down as Boston's great failed experiment in urban beautification. Maybe all the tunnels have just been shuttered and filled in at this point, too leaky to use, too flawed to fix. That traffic is as clogged as ever, that people continue to rue the day that Fred Salvucci ever dreamed of tearing open our city streets and tinkering with what was down below.

But no. In a way, the strangest twist of the story is what happens after it's over.

NARR: In our final episode, the story of the Big Dig takes a turn...for the better.

AMBI: That’s a good-sized tree…it’s amazing how much these trees have grown. That can’t be more than 20 years old…

NARR: That's next time.

The show is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Ian Coss. It’s edited by Lacy Roberts. The editorial supervisor is Stephanie Leydon with support this episode from Elena Eberwein (Eber-wine). Mei Lei is the project manager, and the Executive Producer is Devin Maverick Robins.

I want to thank a few of the people we spoke to whose voices you don’t hear, but who helped shape my understanding of this story: Anthony Flint, Paul Ware and Tom Trimarco. And since this is our last real historical episode, I want to give a special thanks to Peter Higgins and the team at the GBH archives who helped us access the incredible audio you’ve heard throughout the series. You can see it for yourself, at GBH News dot org.

The artwork is by Matt Welch. Our closing song is “ETA” by Damon and Naomi.

The Big Dig is a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX.