In no one we trust
The problem is much bigger than Matt Amorello.
There will be more than enough blame to go around in the death of Milena Del Valle, the 38-year-old Jamaica Plain woman killed Monday night in the collapse of concrete ceiling panels in a Big Dig tunnel. Those officials who failed to oversee construction of the largest highway project in US history, and those contractors who failed to ensure the structural integrity of its roadways and tunnels, all will be called to account.
A more immediate issue than culpability is credibility, and no one in Boston has any. There is not a single local public official associated with the Big Dig who inspires enough confidence to convince drivers that those tunnels are safe.
Not Amorello, the chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, who has spent more time maneuvering to hold onto his $223,000-a-year job than actually doing it.
Not Thomas F. Reilly , the attorney general of the Commonwealth, who has huffed and puffed plenty for 18 months but has recovered none of the paltry $108 million he estimates the state is owed for cost overruns and repairs from contractors on the $14.6 billion project.
Not Michael J. Sullivan , the US attorney who has brought indictments against only six midlevel managers of a single concrete company accused of using diluted concrete that could account for some of the persistent tunnel leaks.
Not Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, who has seen those tunnels mostly from the back seat of a limousine whisking him to Logan International Airport for yet another campaign trip in his doomed pursuit of the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.
Not Christy Mihos, the former Turnpike Authority board member who has turned his early warnings about Big Dig troubles into a single-issue, independent run for governor.
The political ambitions, preoccupations, and self-interest of all these guys got us into this mess. There is no reason to trust that any of them will get us out of it. The Democratic Legislature and the Republican governor should agree on the appointment of an independent, apolitical, special inspector general with broad authority to conduct an investigation and follow it wherever it leads. Then, they should get out of the way.
In the aftermath of the fatal collapse of a 40-foot section of ceiling in the I-90 Connector to the Ted Williams Tunnel, local politicians followed their usual stale scripts. Amorello overstated the breadth of his knowledge, claiming that the cave-in was ``an anomaly" and that ``the tunnels are safe." Romney persisted in seeing the situation as a simple power struggle, repeating his call for Amorello's resignation ``for a long list of management failures." Reilly, a Democratic candidate for governor, continued to ignore his ongoing responsibilities by launching a toolittle-too-late criminal investigation and promising now to take steps ``to make sure nothing like this happens again."
Again? It should not have happened at all.
A decade ago, former state inspector general Robert Cerasoli warned of safety concerns with the tunnels and the lax state oversight of Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff , the international engineering consortium that ran the project.
Last year, Edward M. Ginsburg , the retired Middlesex probate judge hired by the Turnpike Authority to recover damages, accused project managers of hiding information from his investigators and chastised state officials for having too cozy a relationship with contractors. ``They were all married to each other," he said after being fired for his efforts.
``My feeling was that it was not being taken care of," Ginsburg said last year. ``I mean it was going to be ignored or papered over. I just didn't think that was appropriate. And I wasn't going to be responsible for someone getting killed if one of those walls gave out again."
Now someone has gotten killed. It is time to turn the investigation of the Big Dig over to a grown - up who can see beyond his political self-interest.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 