No shortage of needs

How about Charles Vest?

How about tapping the widely admired and principled former MIT president to head an exhaustive investigation into every single engineering aspect of the failing Big Dig?

How about allowing Larry Summers, the recently deposed Harvard president, to put his famous irascibility to good use? Team him up with Vest, create a good cop/bad cop dynamic, and set them loose.

Mitt Romney offered $20 million yesterday toward a complete review of the tunnel system, which is a good start. But how about giving a team of independent investigators absolutely whatever it takes to do the job? How about giving them subpoena power, a staff of 200 engineers and aides, and a couple of floors in a downtown tower?

How about they start not next week or next month or sometime after the next Big Dig disaster, but today, report to work, ready for action.

Maybe it's Vest and Summers, maybe it's someone else, but here's the point: We need a figure or figures of impeccable reputation, complete independence, and absolute authority to head this case. We need investigators with no ties to the project or all the state officials who appear to be playing politics with tragedy.

We need teams of independent engineers climbing along the ceilings, probing at the walls, poring over the minutiae of every Big Dig drawing and spec sheet of the past 20 years. We need these investigators hauling contractors and subcontractors to a windowless room and making them sweat right through their shirts.

Again, we need Vest or someone like him.

We need trust restored. We need a city's reputation restored. We need to have confidence that we can drive home from work without the sky crashing down on our cars. These tunnels are unsafe. We have to know how unsafe they are. This time it was a 3-ton ceiling panel. Next time it might be a gush of water or a collapsing wall or a light fixture dropping on a bus in the middle of the afternoon.

So here's what we don't need: We don't need what Matt Amorello wants, which is the same old Big Dig consultants investigating the agency that's paying their tab. We don't need some firm from Chicago taking its sweet time heading east with a handful of overwhelmed engineers. Send them home.

We don't need multiple law enforcement agencies stepping all over one another on repetitive investigations. We don't need prosecutors who don't understand the difference between a tieback and a necktie.

And Romney's right again -- we don't need Amorello anymore. This ceiling collapse wasn't his fault. He doesn't deserve all the blame. He was hired to finish the project and watchdog the budget. Now we need someone to do something different, which is restore faith. Amorello is not that guy.

We don't need politicians using the Big Dig in pursuit of higher office. Put another way, Romney has had three years to use his gubernatorial bully pulpit to hold Bechtel accountable, and he never has. Are we really supposed to believe that's going to change now?

We don't need Tom Reilly, the gubernatorial candidate, investigating the same construction project that Tom Reilly, the attorney general, overlooked for the past eight years. Reilly's a good guy who might well make a good governor, but he lost his virginity on the Big Dig when he pocketed all those campaign contributions from contractors while providing virtually no oversight.

Oddly enough, the adult in the room in all this happens to be Tom Menino -- the only politician without a taint or an agenda on the Big Dig. He was the first one to push privately and publicly for the kind of completely independent, exhaustive, and immediate investigation advocated here.

``What we have now is a political football, and the only one getting hurt is the general public," Menino said the other day from City Hall.

We need something we don't often get in this town. We need selflessness. We need action. We need it now.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.