Seattle’s $3.1B roadway project hampered by cost concerns, delays:

When bidding on any type of government work, the key has always been always been “get your foot in the door, get the job, the rest is carte blanche.”

Through the years contractors have made a fortune on city, county, state and federal government work and I mean a fortune. There are several reasons how and the main reason is, capitalizing on the owners mistakes.

# 1 – Most important; many of the “so called” engineers that are employed by the governmental agency  are not qualified for their positions and are just tokens on the governments payroll.  If it is not in the written in the manual they can not understand it. There is no substitute for “in the field experience and common sense.”

#2 – The engineering firm they hire to design the job is not qualified for that type of work. I have seen this man times.

# 3 – Kick-backs to the inspectors and their bosses. A TV or an envelope goes a long way.

# 4 – Excessive change orders on the project due to discrepancies in the design and the lack of knowledge from the people that design the project.

#5 – There has ALWAYS been a big “connection/marriage” between the engineering firms that are hired to to design the work and the government or department that owns the project. The old saying that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” is the absolute truth.

I have seen cars, swimming pools, appliances, driveways, garages and thick envelopes passed on the the guys that either award the jobs or the people that sign the extra sheets.  My old buddy LJP used to say “That is the America way.”

I am not implying that any of these scenarios are the contributing factors to the problems in Seattle but they can be possibilities.

I have done very critical jobs through the years for engineering firms didn’t know the first thing about the project they were designing. Example; a engineering firm that primarily designs bridges is hired to design a sewer project; etc. Someones cousin or son is employed there.

The corker for the unqualified engineering firms is; they get paid to design the mistakes and than repeatedly get paid  to correct them. I have never witnessed any engineering firm be fired for mistakes they made; mainly because the person that hired them would look bad.

A smart contractor will recognize these mistakes when they job is let out for bids but never divulge them until they had a sign contract in their hands. Many times the extras on a job will surpass the total of the original bid price.

I have seen small towns go bankrupt because they hired a engineering firm to design a job they  were unqualified to design; the contractor took advantage of the mistakes, broke the city with the extras and took some of the city’s assets in payment for their work.

There are so many different aspects to designing any job correctly, especially underground work where the variables are unknown. If the owner leaves out one or two of these bid items, they better have deep pockets to pay for their mistakes.

I personally know of a company that was heavily connected with a governmental agency who was on “time and material” for 7 years 24 hours a day.”  On a time and material job, the longer it takes the more the contractor makes. On a time and material job, the longer it takes to complete the project the more the contractor makes. These types of job are mostly initiated because there too many conditions that arose that were not covered in the original contract. Coincidentally it was also a boring project.  The contractor laughed all the way to the bank and was lighting his cigars with 1,000 bills.

Some of the agencies that “own” the project are too egotistical and arrogant to admit that they don’t know what they are doing and as a result they are taken to the cleaners. The rely heavily on engineering firms that they are either “married” to, in bed with or are not qualified to design that particular work.

Fox News

2012: Seattle purchased a 7,000-ton digging machine, ( first of all this is a boring machine not a digging machine)– here we are again, very ill informed) nicknamed “Bertha,” to create a 1.7-mile-long tunnel as part of a $3.1 billion roadway project, but it got stuck shortly after it began digging last year.Washington State Dept. of Transportation

For a multibillion-dollar public-works project called the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement, this city brought in a digging machine touted as the largest deployed anywhere: a 7,000-ton behemoth nicknamed “Bertha.”

The mega-machine’s job was to create a 1.7-mile-long tunnel that would allow the state transit authority to reroute a section of Washington State Road 99 underground to replace a 61-year-old traffic-choked viaduct that authorities say is seismically unsafe and must be replaced.

But Bertha has been stuck since early December when the tunnel-boring machine hit an 8-inch diameter, ¾-inch thick steel well-casing after only 1,000 feet of drilling, threatening both a delay in the $3.1 billion project’s completion and a multimillion-dollar cost increase.

All of the information about the buried steel sheeting and other pertinent information should have been available from past records kept. Very poor engineering on the part of the city. I have heard the “old story” many times that the records were destroyed in a fire or lost so the engineers can cover their butt.

You can be assured that this “BORING TALE” is not over.