Meanwhile, MacDonald, despite his lack of management experience, felt he had proved his mettle as MWRA chief. Even though the tunnel piece of the harbor cleanup effort was late and over budget, he had managed to beat back his critics while keeping the overall project on firm financial footing. He told Stinson he wasn’t going to let the cleanup become another Big Dig, the Boston megaproject whose price tag had already ballooned from $2.6 billion to $10.8 billion and continued to climb.
Somehow the two chiefs managed to forge a working relationship. After one session at MWRA headquarters, an agency staffer offered Stinson a ride to Logan Airport. As they approached the airport, the staffer asked the CEO which airline he was flying. Stinson coolly replied, “My own.” Kiewit operated four corporate jets so it could easily get Stinson and other top executives to job sites where they were needed most.
In addition to the settled claims, Kiewit had either already filed, or was preparing to file, two far bigger claims. The first had to do with the rock that the TBM had encountered early on, which the contractor contended was far harder to penetrate than the MWRA’s geotechnical estimates had predicted. The second claim involved the rock toward the end of the tunnel, which the contractor contended was so fractured that it allowed much more water to flow in than had been expected. Around MacDonald’s office, people began referring to these two immense claims dismissively as “the rock was too hard” and “the water was too wet.”
Kiewit signaled its aggressiveness by moving its Deer Island project manager to Washington, D.C., to work full time with company lawyers in assembling the rock and water claims. If those couldn’t be settled between MacDonald and Stinson, they would go to a special review board and, if necessary, to the courts after that. Kiewit assigned a no-nonsense executive to be the tunnel’s new “project sponsor,” an overall Kiewit boss who would oversee the job from Omaha, and the company promoted a veteran engineer to run the tunnel project from Deer Island.
Against this tense backdrop in the spring of 1997, Kiewit fired the first shot60 in the safety plug battle. Here the conflict moved down a few rungs on the org chart, from MacDonald and Stinson to people closer to the tunnel’s front lines. To make it easier for workers to yank out the safety plugs at the end of the job, Kiewit’s new tunnel manager wrote a memo asking for permission to relocate the plugs now. The contractor wanted to remove them from their current position—inside the riser elbow, at the end of those connector pipes, which averaged twenty feet from the main tunnel—and place them just sixteen inches from the main tunnel wall. That would make the plugs a lot simpler to remove, sparing the workers from having to crawl through those narrow “off-take” connector pipes. Kiewit also asked the MWRA to pay the costs of relocating the plugs.
Kiewit sent its memo to Kaiser, the construction management firm that MacDonald’s agency had hired to be its eyes and ears on the project and to ride herd on its many players. On tunnel matters,
MacDonald and his deputies relied61 heavily on Kaiser’s tunnel manager, Dave Corkum, a youthful-looking forty-three-year-old with a gap-toothed smile. A former geologist turned engineer, Corkum was now taking law school classes at night in preparation for yet another career change. With the tunnel action increasingly being driven by lawyers rather than miners, Corkum felt he had chosen wisely.
He firmly rejected62 Kiewit’s request that the MWRA foot the relocation bill. He and his counterpart with designer PB said additional studies would be required to make sure moving the plugs wouldn’t make them less effective. After all, the contract specified that “personnel safety is paramount.”
Kiewit’s construction manager replied with a sharply worded memo questioning Kaiser and PB’s professed concern for worker safety. He disputed their contention that asking a worker to crawl63 “on his or her stomach inside a thirty-inch pipe under self-contained oxygen to drain approximately 565 gallons of water, removing a steel circlip, then finally removing the dome, which weighs approximately sixty-five pounds, to then crawl backward, all the while supporting the dome in the center of the off-take pipe (thereby allowing it to pass through) is the best [we] can do for paramount worker safety.” Interpreting the refusal to have the MWRA pay the bill as an outright rejection, Kiewit decided to scrap the idea of relocating the plugs.
When spring turned to summer, Kiewit floated a new plan: replace the fifty-five plugs with one giant one. Near the tunnel’s eight-mile mark was something called a venturi, a transition point between the end of the regular tunnel and the start of the much narrower section called the diffuser tunnel. Kiewit’s idea was to remove all fifty-five plugs currently in the elbows and install one enormous bulkhead at the venturi. If that worst-case scenario of a ship anchor ripping off one of the diffuser heads actually came to pass, this new blockade at the venturi would hold back the waves, giving the sandhogs sufficient time to retreat to Deer Island. Once the tunnel was finished, the relatively quick job of removing this venturi bulkhead could be handled by a small crew relying on supplied air or even by remote-controlled explosive charges.
This proposal, like the other, produced sniping between Kaiser’s Corkum and Kiewit over costs, responsibilities, and motivations. With the clock ticking, Corkum blasted Kiewit for having “only the vaguest idea64 as to how it intends to accomplish the task of removing the riser plugs. We would advise that this planning process should begin now!” Designer PB eventually quashed the idea of the venturi bulkhead, citing engineering concerns. Subsequent proposals and counterproposals went nowhere.
By that fall, things began to boil over. The Kiewit construction manager fired off a memo to Corkum saying the contractor was at wit’s end. For seven months, he wrote, Kiewit had pursued various alternatives, only to have them shot down. Corkum, he complained, wouldn’t tell him exactly how he and PB wanted the plugs removed. Rather, he would say only what was unacceptable, which appeared to be pretty much everything. It was an exhausting guessing game. Now, the Kiewit manager wrote, “time being of the essence65, and with no acceptable alternative available, we feel the only solution is to proceed with pulling the safety plugs as soon as we are ready to begin backing out of the tunnel with utility removal and final cleanup operations.” He noted that Kiewit would reach that point in just a couple of weeks.
The significance of this memo rested partly on the unusual piece-by-piece manner in which Kiewit was paid. Essentially, it would sell the tunnel to the MWRA in roughly one-thousand-foot sections, starting at its easternmost end and eventually concluding at the shaft. Before the MWRA would pay for a thousand-foot section, its construction manager Kaiser, in the person of Corkum, would inspect that section, creating a punch list of problems that needed to be fixed. When both sides agreed that the punch list had been dealt with satisfactorily, the “sale” of that tunnel section would go through, and the MWRA would cut a check in proportion to that section’s size of the overall tunnel cost. Based on the contract, Kiewit wouldn’t get paid for a section unless all the utilities had been stripped out and it was in what homebuyers and sellers refer to as “broom-clean condition.” After all, the tunnel’s ventilation, electrical, and transportation systems were so unwieldy that it would take months to dismantle them. It was hard to imagine how Kiewit could have delivered a broom-clean section if those utilities were still in place. But it was just as hard to imagine how crews could be safely sent in to remove the plugs once all those utilities were gone. The piecemeal payment arrangement, combined with the $30,000 in liquidated damages that Kiewit was incurring for every day it was late, made it all the more urgent for the contractor to move through this final cleanup stage as quickly as possible.
60 (Chapter 3, note 14)
Kiewit fired the first shot: Robert Regazzini (Kiewit construction manager), memo to Dave Corkum (ICF Kaiser Engineers area manager), “Change/Clarification Request Form No. 96,” March 10, 1997.
61 (Chapter 3, note 15)
MacDonald and his deputies relied: Dave Corkum was directly employed by Stone & Webster, a subcontractor for Kaiser. In most tunnel correspondence, however, parties involved identify him as a Kaiser employee, and he essentially functioned as one.
62 (Chapter 3, note 16)
He firmly rejected: Dave Corkum, memo to contractor Kiewit, “Subject: CCR 282-96—Reuse of Tunnel Offtake Plugs,” April 4, 1997.
63 (Chapter 3, note 17)
asking a worker to crawclass="underline" Robert Regazzini, memo to Dave Corkum, “Subject: FTM 282-2164, FTM 282-2165: Reuse of Tunnel Offtake Plugs,” April 8, 1997.
64 (Chapter 3, note 18)
“only the vaguest idea”: Dave Corkum, memo to contractor Kiewit, “Subject: Bulkhead at Venturi,” September 3, 1997.
65 (Chapter 3, note 19)
“time being of the essence”: Robert Regazzini, memo to Dave Corkum, “Subject: Removal of Secondary Riser Pipe Safety Plugs,” October 16, 1997.