Big Dig firm was warned about epoxy

The epoxy supplier indicted Wednesday on involuntary manslaughter charges in the Big Dig tunnel ceiling collapse faced serious problems with the strength and reliability of its glue on several Singapore projects at the same time that bolts fastened with an identical material began coming loose during construction of the ceiling in Boston, according to internal company documents obtained by the Globe.

However, engineers from Powers Fasteners never mentioned the problems in Singapore to Big Dig engineers investigating why bolts were slipping out or told them that the five loose ceiling bolts in Boston could be caused by a problem with their product.

Attorney General Martha Coakley announced the indictment of Powers Fasteners on one count of involuntary manslaughter Wednesday, charging that the company's failure to determine why epoxy bolts it supplied were coming loose in 1999 contributed directly to the death of Milena Del Valle when the concrete ceiling collapsed seven years later. Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board found that workers installed the ceiling bolts using the wrong type of Powers epoxy, a fast-drying form that tends to lose strength over time.

The attorney general's office has been aware of the Singapore complaints since last fall and has copies of the Powers documents.

The 50 pages of company memos and reports about Powers Fasteners' problems in Singapore show that, even as the Big Dig ceiling was being installed with Powers epoxy, company officials in Asia were increasingly worried that the fast-set epoxy being used there in residential buildings was 40 to 50 percent weaker than described in the Powers product catalogue. Customer complaints about the poor performance began in April 1999, two months before construction of the Big Dig tunnel ceiling started.

By February 2000, a quality control official for Powers said in an e-mail that the company was losing business in Asia because of the problems and that "we are very close to be forced . . . to quarantine the product."

"I don't have to tell you of the serious consequences both in terms of direct sales and in loss of face and reputation," the e-mail said.

Powers engineering manager Ray Williamson played a lead role investigating problems at both locations, and, as he did in Boston, initially blamed the epoxy's poor performance in Singapore on mistakes by the workers applying it. Unlike in Boston, where Big Dig engineers for Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff dropped the issue, complaints persisted in Singapore, forcing Williamson to go there to investigate.

Yesterday, Powers officials said Williamson had no reason to connect the problems in Singapore with those in Boston, adding that, at the time, Powers officials mistakenly believed Big Dig workers were using a more durable standard-drying form of their epoxy, not the fast-set type used in Singapore. State and federal investigators have not yet determined how the workers for Modern Continental Construction Co. ended up using the fast-drying epoxy on the tunnel ceiling instead of the standard epoxy Modern had ordered. However, Powers supplied fast-set for other uses, such as in the tunnel walls, and the products could have been mixed up.

"This is a case of apples and oranges," said Martin Levin, Powers' lead attorney at Stern Shapiro Weissberg and Garin in Boston. "The only potential link was that there was a complaint about fast-set. . . . Fast-set may have been used in the tunnel, but certainly Powers didn't know it" at the time. He noted that Powers documents supplied for the Boston job warned state highway engineers that fast-drying epoxy was not approved for overhead use.

But one lawyer involved in the civil lawsuits over the ceiling collapse said the Singapore documents might shed light on why the attorney general focused first on Powers, a relatively small player in the $14.6 billion Big Dig with 200 employees and annual revenue of $40 million. Though other, much larger companies involved in the tunnel ceiling failed to recognize that workers used the wrong epoxy, this lawyer said, Powers had direct knowledge that their fast-set epoxy was failing elsewhere.

"They knew there was a problem" in Singapore, said the lawyer, who asked not to be named because of a judge's order sealing most documents related to the accident. "But they said nothing" in Boston.

The Singapore documents could help Coakley prove that Powers acted with wanton and reckless disregard for safety, the legal standard required for a manslaughter conviction of a corporation, in remaining silent after questions arose about slippage of the ceiling bolts in summer and fall 1999.

Investigators in the attorney general's office have been looking into the problems in Singapore since 2006 when Thomas F. Reilly was still in office, but officials at Powers Fasteners said they believed the investigators had dropped the issue as irrelevant. "We were told by the attorney general's office that we shouldn't concern ourselves with the question of the Singapore complaints in addressing the possible manslaughter issues," said Levin.

Emily Lagrassa, a spokeswoman for Coakley, declined to comment yesterday on the Powers indictment.

When construction of the ceiling in the Interstate 90 Connector tunnel began in June 1999, New York-based Powers had launched a push to expand its business in Asia, hiring an aggressive new distributor, BVZ, to sell its epoxy bolts mainly for housing construction. Within weeks of BVZ starting its work for Powers, salesmen began getting complaints from customers that the Powers fast-set epoxy did not perform as well as Powers claimed in its catalog. They also reported that the epoxy seemed to turn strange shades of brown and green. Those concerns were quickly forwarded to Powers officials in the United States.

In September 2000, the Singapore Housing and Development Board reported that its tests of Powers' epoxy showed that anchor bolts fell out of concrete under the pressure of weights only half as heavy as the company claimed could be supported.

Philip Digby, a Powers official in Asia, confessed to colleagues in September 2000 that he had deliberately deceived BVZ by pretending that he did not know that complaints about the fast-set epoxy were longstanding. In fact, company officials said in the documents obtained by the Globe that they had begun noticing decreasing strength of the epoxy as early 1998.

"I must admit I feel very compromised lying to him," Digby wrote in one of the documents, adding, "It defeats me how we got into this position. . . . I suppose our hunger for the order and the best distributor."

Powers officials also apparently delayed informing Sika Corp., the company that makes the epoxy for Powers, about the problems in Singapore for more than a year. Powers documents show that Sika officials were surprised to learn of the problems in September 2000; Sika reported to Powers that there had been no significant changes in its manufacturing process that could explain the problems.

A spokeswoman for Sika said company officials investigated the complaints from Singapore after learning of them from Powers.

"Sika was made aware of the concerns expressed by Powers, and we fully investigated it," said spokeswoman Diana Pisciotta. "We were satisfied the epoxy as manufactured met all of our standards for internal testing."

Eventually, just before Christmas 2000, Williamson went to Singapore to investigate the problems with the fast-set epoxy, and the results, he later wrote, were "disappointing to say the least."

A Powers team tested the epoxy and found that it could not support as much weight as its catalogue said. Williamson speculated that the problems could be due to the humidity in Singapore or the fact that most of the epoxy shipped to Asia is older than that used in the United States. However, he acknowledged that he could not pinpoint one reason for the product's weakness.

By the time Williamson went to Singapore, construction teams had completed the ceiling in Boston's connector tunnel, which links Interstate 93 and the Massachusetts Turnpike to the Ted Williams Tunnel and is a major route to Logan Airport. Officials of Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, a consortium that oversaw the design and construction of the Big Dig, had dropped the loose-epoxy bolt issue after a brief investigation -- which included consultations with Powers employees -- and the replacement of the weak bolts in the Boston tunnel. Big Dig supervisors never determined why the bolts had come loose in the first place. The connector tunnel opened to thousands of vehicles a day in 2003.

Investigators at the scene of the July 10, 2006 accident that killed Milena Del Valle reported that some of the ceiling bolts that failed were covered in epoxy that seemed to be discolored gray or brown.

Powers officials yesterday said they would ask a judge to disqualify Coakley from prosecuting the case against them and drop the indictment, contending that she has a conflict of interest. The company's lawyers said Coakley should not be allowed to represent the state in a criminal case against Powers while representing the state in a civil lawsuit seeking millions of dollars in damages.

Coakley's office called Powers' contention "totally without merit" and said Coakley was confident she would prevail in court.