Firm can't find warning on deaths

Officials at the Big Dig construction company where safety officer John J. Keaveney worked in 1999 have been unable to locate a memo that Keaveney said he wrote warning his superiors that the Interstate 90 connector ceiling could collapse, a construction industry official said yesterday.

Keaveney was interviewed yesterday at his home by investigators from the attorney general's office and the FBI, who are probing the tunnel collapse that killed Milena Del Valle on July 10, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Keaveney had volunteered to speak with investigators. His lawyer, Edward Boyle, who also attended the meeting, said after it ended that he had no reason to doubt Keaveney's veracity.

``The memo speaks for itself," Boyle said. ``. . . He's a hard-working man with a proven record of almost 15 years in the construction safety field."

Officials at Modern Continental Construction Co. are searching their files for the memo and taking other steps to determine whether it is authentic, but by yesterday could not say conclusively either way, the construction industry official said.

The Globe received a memo on Tuesday bearing Keaveney's signature and dated May 17, 1999, that outlined several concerns about the safety of the ceiling design. In an interview Tuesday night, Keaveney told the Globe that he had written the memo.

The document contains a warning that an ``innocent State Worker or member of the Public" could ``be seriously injured or even worse killed as a result" of the ceiling design. The memo also questions ``how this structure can withhold the test of time."

Keaveney, now a safety officer for another major Boston-based construction company, said during the interview with the Globe that he gave the memo to one of his supervisors, Robert Coutts. The Globe has been unable to reach Coutts.

The document was mailed to the Globe.

Other concerns outlined in the memo included the presence of water in drill holes, prior to installation of bolts and epoxy, and whether the bolts would be subject to movement when the tunnel's ventilation fans were in use.

After the Globe published the story, Keaveney released a statement to other news media saying he ``steadfastly stands behind the facts presented" in the story, which was based on the memo and the interview.

Since the ceiling collapse, the adequacy of the bolt-and-epoxy system used to hold up the 2 1/2-ton concrete panels has become a key focus of the collapse investigation.

A Modern Continental spokesman declined comment on the memo yesterday, reiterating an earlier statement on the ceiling collapse that ``we continue to cooperate with the investigation."

According to the construction industry source, one issue that Modern Continental is reviewing as it attempts to determine whether the memo is authentic is the chronology of construction of the connector tunnel. The memo was dated May 17, but the construction industry source said Modern Continental records indicate that holes were not drilled into the ceiling of the connector until June. If those records are correct, they would call into question whether Keaveney could have observed holes drilled into the ceiling in mid-May, as the memo said.

Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe, said yesterday in a statement: ``We interviewed on the record a safety officer on the project. He verified that he wrote the memo we quoted. We have verified that he did, in fact, work on the project. He has since said publicly that he stands by his statements to us. He volunteered to speak to investigators, and today he did so. We understand that there is an effort at Modern Continental to locate the letter at issue. We continue to look at all aspects of this story."

Sean Murphy can be reached at smurphy@globe.com.