Competing Interests : Building a Subway--It Isn’t Boring

When a pipe broke recently, leaving the 500-room Clark Hotel in downtown Los Angeles without water, manager Paolo Vinci blamed Metro Rail construction crews who were rerouting pipes nearby.

To supply his guests with water, Vinci hooked a fat hose to a fire hydrant.

Then he called “Tony, the guy you complain to.”

For Tony Ferruccio, the resident engineer in charge of building Metro Rail’s station at 5th and Hill streets, the call was a small reminder of the biggest challenge in subway building--coping with the urban environment that surrounds the job.

The corner of 5th and Hill, one of the busiest in Los Angeles, is next to Pershing Square and the Jewelry District. It is home during the day to wholesale and retail merchants and, by night, to marijuana peddlers, winos and prostitutes.

‘The Great Awakening’

Five months into construction, after years of planning, people along Hill Street are going through what subway builders call “the great awakening.”

They are realizing the extent to which digging up Hill Street, from sidewalk to sidewalk to make a block-long crater for a subway station, will disrupt their lives.

As merchants squawk about dust and detours and torn-up pavement, Ferruccio, 31, is having an awakening of his own--realizing just how much easier it would be to build the station if it did not have to be downtown.

Ferruccio already knew about Vinci’s problem at the Clark Hotel because water from the broken pipe was gushing into Ferruccio’s office in the basement of a building four doors down. But he told Vinci there was not much he could do about it.

Ferruccio, whose role as chief on-site representative of the Southern California Rapid Transit District makes him sort of the unofficial mayor of Hill Street, decided that the pipe had broken of old age, and that made fixing it Vinci’s responsibility.

Good Will or Money?

The stage was set for a debate that could have taken longer to resolve than the subway will take to build, but Vinci gave in, deciding that Ferruccio’s good will was more important than money to fix the pipe.

Vinci agreed to unhook “our lifeline”--as he called the hose that ran illegally from the hydrant through a hole in the sidewalk and down to the broken pipe in the Clark’s basement--and call a plumber.

“We just went ahead and paid for it ourselves rather than go into a lengthy debate,” the hotel manager recalled.

He said he is saving whatever bargaining chips he might have with Ferruccio for something more important: keeping the hotel accessible to guests while the station is being built.

Vinci’s biggest problem is that the Clark has only one entrance--on Hill Street. He knows that Hill Street will have to be closed for brief periods to build the station. But he hopes nonetheless that Ferruccio will find some way to avoid it.

“As long as they keep our entrance open, we’ll be happy,” Vinci said.

Ferruccio said he does not know how he can always keep Hill Street open.

But he and a small army of RTD construction managers will try to minimize disruption to the Clark and other businesses on the block by juggling community interests with contractor needs.

While the shell of what is expected to be Metro Rail’s busiest station is constructed during the next three years, Ferruccio and his colleagues will keep a lid on the street as much as possible so that most construction can go on underneath it, out of sight, while cars roll by on top.

The hitch is that it takes nearly a year just to get the lid--or temporary decking--in place, and Hill Street will have to be sporadically closed to traffic next spring while the decking is installed.

Both before and after the installation, Ferruccio and his colleagues will have to balance the contractor’s desire to close as many lanes on Hill Street as possible with the public’s desire to pass by.

They will also have to factor in the Fire Department’s need for constant access, the Veterans Administration clinic’s need for parking for its ambulances, the parking lots’ need for accessible driveways, and the stores’ need for curbside deliveries.

Competing Interests

Ferruccio has helped build dams, tunnels and hydroelectric power plants. But nothing has prepared him to cope with the hodgepodge of competing interests that must be addressed to build a subway station downtown.

There, nothing is as simple as it seems.

Even a fence is not just a fence. Rather, it is something that can put a man out of business. And Myung Kyun Kim complains that the contractor’s fence is doing just that.

The wooden fence, eight feet high, is erected in the middle of the sidewalk that passes in front of Kim’s fast-food restaurant.

It separates the station perimeter from public passageways--reducing the public’s exposure to dust--but it is so tall that it hides Kim’s restaurant from passing cars.

Kim said his business has declined 50% since the fence went up.

“Even the deliverymen think our store is closed,” he complained.

Worst of all, he said, burglars have come to believe that it is open exclusively for them. Since the fence went up, Kim said, his business, Kal’s Burgers, has been struck four times. His theory is that the fence makes burglars feel safe.

Ferruccio would like to placate Kim and other people on Hill Street by replacing the wooden fence with a chain-link model.

But Dean Hansen, the general superintendent for the contractor, the Guy F. Atkinson Construction Co., feels strongly that for the safety of his workers he wants to keep the fence wood.

Hansen said he is afraid that winos--Skid Row is only a few blocks away--will be tempted to heave their empty bottles at construction workers in the pit if they can see the workers through the fence.

Downtown street crime is a serious complication for the subway builders.

One construction worker from out of town arrived early at the contractor’s trailer expecting to find pre-dawn quiet but saw instead a pimp beating up a prostitute with a baseball bat. A neighborhood loon walked up to another worker and kicked him for no apparent reason. Hansen himself got involved in breaking up a fight.

Some of the “hands”--as engineers call the construction workers--are spooked by the prospects of working downtown. They are talking privately about breaking work rules to carry guns.

Ferruccio and his colleagues at RTD have proposed a compromise--a half wood, half chain-link fence. But so far the contractor has balked--quoting prices for the change that the RTD considers outrageously high.

Ferruccio and the contractor frequently butt heads over prices.

Ferruccio’s primary job is to make sure that the contractor builds the station safely, on time, according to RTD’s specifications and for no more money than the $39 million the contractor said it would cost when he submitted his low bid.

But the contractor is forever going to Ferruccio in search of approval to do things differently.

“I’m always being tested either directly or indirectly on how far I’m willing to go,” Ferruccio said. “The contractor is always . . . trying to extend the interpretation of the contract to his benefit as far as he can.”

Often the contractor claims that he needs to do things differently because conditions are not what they were represented to be when he bid for the work.

“Anytime something costs (a contractor) more than he thought it would, it’s only human nature for him to assume that it was a changed condition,” remarked John Fondahl, head of Stanford University’s construction engineering and management program. “Otherwise he would have recognized it when he bid the job.”

Lawyers are frequently brought in to justify changes, Fondahl said, and sometimes relations between a resident engineer and contractor deteriorate to the point where both sides keep lawyers on site.

‘You Never Give In’

It is a tough business. “You never give in on anything,” said Hansen, the superintendent for the contractor. “You can’t afford to. They’ll break you.”

Because nearly every major construction project leads to claims and litigation, both sides try to protect themselves with paper work.

Ferruccio is buried in it. He gets several letters from the contractor each day. His formal weekly meetings with the contractor are the subject of detailed minutes, and he and his staff of inspectors keep diaries with numbered pages to avoid any suspicion that they changed facts later to suit themselves.

Photo Albums of Progress

They also keep photo albums of the contractor’s work in progress.

Ferruccio’s experience until now has been on the contractor’s side. He is an employee of Dillingham Construction Corp., which entered into a joint venture with the Ralph M. Parsons Co. and DeLeuw, Cather & Co. to act as construction management consultants for the RTD in the building of Metro Rail.

The modest 4.4-mile subway, which the RTD hopes will be the first leg of an 18-mile run from downtown to the San Fernando Valley, will go from Union Station through the Civic Center and financial district to MacArthur Park. It is scheduled to open in 1992.

By far the youngest of the six resident engineers assigned to Metro Rail projects, Ferruccio has an idealist’s view. As the man in the middle between owner and contractor, he said he wants to “promote understanding.”

But he keeps his goal in perspective: A Superman sticker is pressed to the nameplate on his desk.

One thing both sides understand well is the technology of subway building.

Subway stations are built in a method called cut and cover, in which the hole is excavated and then covered with a lid, or temporary decking.

Cars ride on the lid while excavation proceeds underneath.

The station’s shell will be made of reinforced concrete poured into a hole about 80 feet deep, 60 feet wide--extending from sidewalk to sidewalk--and 835 feet long, extending from the intersection with 4th Street to the intersection with 5th.

Digging a hole of that size requires a substantial support system to keep the buildings on either side of Hill Street from falling into it.

The most important elements of the support system are soldier piles--pieces of steel 2 feet by 1 foot by 80 feet--that are installed vertically every six to eight feet around the edge of the station.

Such beams are ordinarily put into place with pile drivers, but that would make too much noise on Hill Street, where Clark Hotel guests may be trying to sleep.

So workers will use augers, three feet in diameter, to bore holes for the piles.

Cranes will then lift the piles into the holes, which will be filled in with cement slurry.

The soldier piles will pass through sidewalks on either side of Hill Street.

But underneath those sidewalks now are building basements that extend past the buildings’ property lines.

Workers are shortening the basements, using saws with diamond-studded carbide bits to cut through the sidewalk and existing concrete walls.

They are then putting up new retaining walls that will be out of the way of the piles and relocating water, power and telephone laterals that serve each of the buildings behind the new walls.

They are also relocating utility lines in the street.

Because there is no frost in Los Angeles, utility companies here have traditionally laid some of their lines shallowly--within four feet of the surface.

But the beams that will extend from soldier pile to soldier pile across the street and support the temporary decking on which cars will ride are three feet thick. The decking itself adds another foot.

Thus, the beams and decking would crush most of the lines if they were not moved.

Many of the utility lines are old, however, built in the 1920s and would fall apart if they were moved.

So the first thing the contractor has to do is build new utility lines deeper than the decking will be.

Eventually he will suspend these new gas, telephone, water, sewer, storm drain and electric lines from the decking.

Installing the decking is the most disruptive part of the whole job. With Hill Street closed, probably at night, the contractor will dig a trench 60 feet across it and put down one of the largest steel beams made anywhere. The contractor will then cover the beam and reopen the street to traffic in the morning.

He will repeat the process nightly until he has spaced a series of beams all the way down the street.

Atop the beams he will lay the timber mats.

Once the whole street is decked with these mats, he will lift one or more of them out with a crane and put a backhoe into the hole to dig it deeper while cars and trucks rumble by on the rest of the mats.

For years, designers employed by the RTD have worked to predict what the contractor is likely to encounter when he excavates.

While some Metro Rail test borings have led to the discovery of “historic trash,” such as bottles, pieces of metal and ceramics, according to RTD reports, the only thing of archeological significance expected at 5th and Hill is a brick water duct--a portion of La Zanja Madre, Los Angeles’ first water system.

It is expected to be buried under Hill Street just south of the Clark Hotel, where in the last century it carried water from the Los Angeles River to the outskirts of the pueblo.

If it is found, the contractor is required to stop work while the project archeologist examines and removes it if he wishes.

Always Surprises

But there are always surprises in underground work, and no contractor in his right mind would sign an agreement that did not provide for additional compensation in the event he ran into one.

A map of all of the known underground power, telephone, telegraph, water and gas lines, storm drains, sewers, and traffic light, police and fire connectios looks like a picture of a plate of spaghetti.

Even in Los Angeles, where such maps are said to be good, the contractor has run into utility lines that were not supposed to be there.

While drilling a test hole for a soldier pile, he also ran into a mysterious steel plate about 20 feet underground.

A larger hole was dug to get a look at the plate, and both Atkinson and Ferruccio had people on the scene to take pictures.

Hansen thought it might turn out to be a remnant of an old Red Car turnaround.

It was just a few feet away from the Subway Terminal Building, from which Red Cars once departed via tunnels to Glendale Boulevard where they hit ground level and continued north.

But that idea was quickly shot down when someone noticed crude oil seeping from the hole.

Hansen then thought the steel plate might be the capping of an old oil well.

That theory had some credibility because the old Los Angeles City Oil Field, discovered when oil seeped to the surface in the 1880s, had been located not far away. That now-abandoned field produced more than a million barrels of oil a year, and no record of the precise location of many of its wells exists.

Fire officials, however, discounted the oil well theory, much to the relief of panicky RTD officials who feared that the entire project might be shut down because of public outcry about a dangerous well downtown.

But fire officials said the seeping oil was no big deal; in fact, it is commonplace.

No one knows yet what the steel plate is, even though a month has passed, nor does anyone seem in a hurry to find out.

Both sides have been preoccupied with staking out negotiating positions on the crucial question of who will pay to dig it up.

Some surprises, though, cannot be negotiated.

One night about a month ago the contractor was laying a new high-voltage power line that will snake from 4th Street down Hill to 5th when the urban environment intruded at its most capricious.

The line is a high-priority item. Atkinson faces a $5,000-a-day penalty if it is late getting the line to another subway contractor who needs it to power the machine he will use to bore twin tunnels from 5th and Hill streets to the next station at 7th and Flower streets.

Atkinson crews barricaded 4th Street, which is one-way eastbound, to eastbound traffic.

But no one thought to barricade the street to traffic going the wrong way.

A woman, strung out on cocaine, drove her car into the work site at high speed.

She barreled into a backhoe and seriously injured two workers.

Unhurt herself, she handed her infant to a stunned worker and ran into a nearby parking structure.

There authorities found her a short time later, nude and muttering about God.

“We were really lucky no one was killed,” Ferruccio reflected.

But he noted, “It is getting kind of spooky around here.”