Bechtel’s Big Dig problems no surprise to Yucca critics

Benjamin Grove

Friday, Nov. 12, 2004 | 10:47 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Yucca Mountain critics glumly note that Boston's controversial "Big Dig" public works project, plagued by leaks and cost overruns, is managed by the same corporation in charge of the proposed nuclear waste dump.

Critics wonder how the Bechtel Corp. expects to forever seal away the nation's most radioactive nuclear waste if it can't plug holes in a highway tunnel.

"Bechtel is as over-bloated a bureaucracy as our own federal government," said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Nevada environmental group Citizen Alert. "We have to start demanding more accountability."

Yucca is managed by Nevada-based Bechtel SAIC Co., LLC, a partnership of Bechtel National Inc., and Science Applications International Corp., currently under a $1.8 billion six-year contract for Yucca that is up in 2006.

Bechtel SAIC is the lead contractor under the Energy Department, which oversees the project aimed at establishing a national nuclear waste repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

A Bechtel SAIC spokeswoman in Nevada referred questions to a corporate spokesman in Maryland, who was unavailable.

The $14.6 billion Big Dig, managed by Bechtel and New York-based Parsons Brinckerhoff, was launched in 1991 as one of the largest public works projects in the world and aimed at unclogging Boston traffic. Workers have largely completed the project, replacing an elevated downtown highway with an underground tunnel, and extending an interstate through a tunnel under Boston Harbor to Logan Airport.

But now millions of gallons of water are leaking into the tunnel system, an engineering investigator says. Finding and fixing the leaks could take up to 10 years, said a consultant hired by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. The consultant found oversight lapses, suggesting Bechtel and a co-contractor knew it had faulty construction in the late 1990s.

Bechtel issued a statement this week saying "seepage" is inevitable in new tunnels of the type in Boston, but can be mitigated with maintenance programs. "The tunnel is structurally sound," the statement said.

Nevada officials have long faulted Yucca contractors, including Bechtel, for flawed science and shoddy work. It's no shock now that Bechtel is facing charges of bad construction and oversight lapses in Boston, said Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency.

"It doesn't surprise me a bit," he said.

Bechtel SAIC is one of the corporate defendants in a lawsuit filed by some Yucca workers alleging the company and several of its subcontractors ignored worker safety issues, despite knowing risks. Bechtel officials strongly deny wrong-doing.

The problems at the Big Dig further call into question Bechtel's management at Yucca, said lawyer Joe Egan, who represents the workers who filed the lawsuit.

"I don't think you can have confidence in anything the Department of Energy does, or in any of the contractors it is supposedly managing," he said.

Bechtel has a 100-year history of reaping huge profits at the expense of taxpayers and the environment, consumer watchdog group Public Citizen said in its report "Bechtel: Profiting from Destruction," released last year. The report cited the Big Dig and Yucca as examples.

"We think there is a pretty long history of negligence and misuse of taxpayer dollars by this company," said Sara Grusky, a policy analyst for consumer group Public Citizen.

Now Public Citizen is tracking abuses by Bechtel in government projects in Iraq, Grusky said. A number of former Bechtel employees have landed jobs with the Bush administration, she said.

"Because Bechtel has such an inside line to the Bush administration, there's just no accountability," Grusky said.

Bechtel is the ninth largest government contractor with $14.1 billion in contracts since 1997, according to Washington watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

Bechtel has projects in 60 countries. Bechtel projects have included Hoover Dam in the 1930s, reconstruction programs in Kuwait after the Gulf War and the English Channel Tunnel.