Big Dig no roadblock

Huge cost overruns. Tunnel leaks. Multimillion-dollar lawsuits. Big trouble for the companies managing Boston's Big Dig? Not really.

Bechtel Corp. of San Francisco and Parsons Brinckerhoff of New York are winning new contracts across the nation and around the world despite the project's widely publicized problems. Within the past few months, Parsons Brinckerhoff has landed an $11 million transit contract in Seattle, been recommended for another transit contract of up to $84 million in Miami and was selected to design a $1.9 billion bridge spanning the Ohio River between Kentucky and Indiana.

Also this week, the Washington State Transportation Department proposed a tunnel to replace an aging elevated highway in Seattle. Parsons Brinckerhoff will conduct an environmental study of the proposal under a 2001 contract.

Bechtel, meanwhile is coming off a year of record revenue, $16.3 billion, and near-record bookings of new jobs, valued at $21 billion, according to the company. Earlier this month, Bechtel won contracts, with a combined value of more than $1 billion, to build a natural gas processing plant in the United Arab Emirates and do the preliminary design and engineering of a liquid natural gas plant in Nigeria.

Construction industry specialists say it's not surprising that Bechtel and Parsons Brinckerhoff keep getting contracts, despite the uproar generated by recent revelations that the $14.6 billion Central Artery/Tunnel project, scheduled to be completed in 2005, has hundreds of leaks that may take years to repair and cost millions of dollars. A key reason: few other companies are big enough to tackle the large and complex projects in which these firms specialize.

Joel Levington, a construction industry analyst at Standard & Poor's, estimates that just 20 firms in the United States have the capacity for such projects, meaning that the same companies tend to win the contracts. Before beginning the Big Dig, for example, Bechtel was building the ''Chunnel," the tunnel connecting the United Kingdom and France across the English Channel, and before that, in another joint venture with Parsons Brinckerhoff, San Francisco's BART subway and light rail system.

''The companies that do big projects expose themselves to big risks, and they need size, debt capacity, people, and technical expertise," Levington said. ''A company with 20 employees can't do the Big Dig."

In Miami, where a selection panel recently recommended a team led by Parsons Brinckerhoff for a contract of up to $84 million to support a transit system expansion, the firm's performance in the Big Dig was thoroughly vetted, said Carlos Bonzon, assistant manager of Miami-Dade County. Parsons Brinckerhoff provided a detailed rebuttal of concerns raised in a report by the county's inspector general, including an accounting of how inflation and project changes approved by Massachusetts official boosted the Big Dig's cost from the the state's original $2.6 billion estimate in 1982, to the current $14.6 billion.

Bonzon added that Parsons Brinckerhoff had performed well on previous projects in Miami-Dade, but ultimately won the new contract by promising not to assign any staff from the Big Dig, as well as controversial transit projects in St. Louis and Los Angeles, to the Miami work.

''The key is always the people they assign to the project and who is going to be the project manager," Bonzon said. He added, ''I've been in this business for almost 40 years and I don't know of any contractor who hasn't had a problem here or there."

Bonzon's attitude is shared by other construction specialists, who say its not unusual for complex projects to cost more than estimates and entail problems and mistakes. A 2002 study of megaprojects funded by the Danish government found that 90 percent of such projects experienced cost overruns, averaging 45 percent over estimates for rail projects; 34 percent for tunnels and bridges; and 20 percent for roads. The Big Dig was not part of the study.

Al Hauck, head of the construction management department at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Calif., said big civil engineering projects entail so many unkowns, such as soil conditions below the surface, that it is difficult to predict costs before ground is broken. And the more complex the project, the more unknowns are involved, he said.

Chris Swan, the chairman of the civil and environmental engineering department at Tufts University, described the challenge this way: ''I can make concrete and I can make steel, and I know their properties. But when you're dealing with the earth, you didn't make it, and you can't be sure of its properties."

Bechtel is the among the world's biggest construction companies, with a reach that extends well beyond roads, tunnels, and bridges to include power plants, airports, and wireless networks. The company is rebuilding Iraq, developing a depository for spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and cleaning up radioactive and chemical waste at Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, where plutonium was produced for nuclear weapons.

Engineering News-Record, a leading trade publication, ranks Bechtel as the nation's biggest contractor, and the fifth-largest global contractor. The firm, privately owned, is also the nation's fifth-biggest design firm and sixth-biggest construction manager, with combined 2003 revenue nearly twice that of its nearest US competitor, KBR of Houston, according to Engineering News-Record.

Parsons Brinckerhoff, meanwhile, ranks as the nation's second-biggest construction manager, and 11th-biggest design firm, according to Engineering News-Record. Parsons Brinckerhoff, also closely held, reported 2003 revenue of nearly $1.4 billion a 7 percent increase from the previous year.

In addition to size, industry specialists say both companies are aided by a long and distinguished history, and technical accomplishments few firms can match.

Bechtel's early megaproject was the Hoover Dam, which, when construction started in 1931, was the biggest civil engineering project in US history. Parsons Brinckerhoff's heritage includes designing New York's first subway line, laying out the Cape Cod Canal, and designing the tunnel that connects Detroit with Windsor, Ontario, across the Detroit River.

In Kentucky, state transportation officials cited Parsons Brinckerhoff's well-established technical credentials in selecting it to design the Ohio River bridge. Michael Goins, spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, said the Big Dig controversy was considered during the selection process, but added state law prohibits officials from discussing the deliberations until final contract negotiations, still underway, are completed.

Spokesmen for Bechtel and Parsons Brinckerhoff say their clients and many prospective clients understand the challenges of big projects, and that has helped them weather the storm.

Robert Gavin can be reached at rgavin@globe.com.