Big Dig’ tragedy reflects corruption

Milena Del Valle didn’t get the chance to greet her loved ones at Logan International Airport on July 10. While traveling with her spouse to the airport, Del Valle, a working-class Costa Rican living in Boston, was crushed to death when three-ton concrete ceiling panels in the Inter state 90 tunnel connector let loose and fell on the couple’s car. Angel Del Valle survived with minor physical injuries.

Ongoing investigations since the tra gedy have found many structural design flaws. One of the most serious: The bolts used to secure the panels weren’t capable of supporting their weight for the length of time the general contractors, the Bechtel Group and Parsons Brickenhoff, said they would.

The Laborers and Iron Workers unions, among others, had raised concerns about these flaws for years. They were ignored.

Massachusetts billionaire Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, his 2006 Democratic gubernatorial opponent and the state’s attor ney general, Thomas Reilly, and other politicians have postured to deflect blame for Del Valle’s death and the thoroughly flawed Big Dig from themselves, their offices, and the capitalist bosses and bankers.

For them, billions of dollars are at stake—not only in Boston but throughout the United States and internationally.

Still, they and many others, from Mas sa chusetts to Washington D.C. and beyond, are culpable for this entirely preventable disaster. The whole Big Dig project has been so rife with corruption, cronyism, graft, nepotism and wholesale criminal negligence from its inception that the weekly Bos ton Phoenix headlined a July 28 article “A Handy Guide to the Big Dig Screw-Up.”

To this day, despite over 15 years of Big Dig malfeasance reporting by the Boston Globe and other corporate media, state legislative investigations and more, not one politician or capitalist responsible for the death of Del Valle and the theft of billions of local, state and national taxpayer dollars has been arrested, charged or imprisoned.

What is the ‘Big Dig’?

Billed as the biggest and the most expensive civil engineering project in U.S. history, the Big Dig was meant, according to planners, to build a highway underneath Boston. Billions of dollars of commodities now flow annually through the Big Dig freeway arteries or those connected to it. The primary beneficiaries are the military-industrial complex, Big Oil, the affluent white suburbs and tourism.