Officials Attack MTA Handling of Subway Job : Metro Rail: They cite recent tunnel problems as indications of mismanagement. The agency’s director says he is trying to reorganize the work.

Elected officials called Monday for the top executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to act swiftly to rectify what they described as the agency’s mismanaged subway construction.

The comments came in response to a Times article reporting that MTA engineers delayed enforcing a contract specification aimed at preventing the type of ground sinkage now plaguing Vermont Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.

“This goes beyond the normal difficulty that a construction project of this magnitude should have,” said Los Angeles Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who urged MTA Chief Executive Officer Franklin E. White to address what he called “a systemic problem with the construction process.”

Nick Patsaouras, an appointee to the MTA board, said that “Frank White now has to work through the smoke and mirrors . . . and take action. It’s at his doorstep.”

White said he is attempting to win the support of MTA board members for a proposal he first made last spring, to “fully integrate” within the parent transit agency the inspection, design and cost-control responsibilities of the existing Rail Construction Corp. The RCC is a subagency of the transit authority whose staff oversees many aspects of the project.

White also said he will withhold judgment about the problems along Hollywood Boulevard until the president of the RCC submits a report on the matter.

Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who represents the areas affected by the tunneling, said she and her constituents have lost confidence in MTA officials.

“I am horrified--furious beyond anything that I can describe,” Goldberg said. “They (MTA officials) never mentioned to me that they weren’t doing the grouting. Now the question is: Can we believe them about anything?”

The construction procedure Goldberg referred to is “contact grouting,” whereby workers pump grout into the soil from within each freshly dug, circular section of tunneling within 16 hours of each short advancement of a tunnel-boring machine.

Joel J. Sandberg, the MTA’s project manager for the 12 miles of twin tunnels that will connect Hollywood to Wilshire Boulevard, said officials delayed enforcing a contract specification requiring contact grouting because he wanted to save taxpayers money. He said he had hoped that other procedures would adequately stabilize the ground.

The Times also reported Sunday that in early August--five months after the MTA had finally ordered the builder of the tunnels to perform the contact grouting--a span longer than a football field was excavated without it. Inspection “nonconformance” reports show that the area where the contact grouting was not performed within the required 16 hours of excavation was beneath the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Whitley Avenue, which is in the area that sank.

Engineers, including representatives of the Federal Transportation Administration, are investigating what caused the ground to settle over nine blocks, from roughly Vine Street to Highland Avenue.

The article also reported that Sandberg and the project’s top tunnel designer--after learning in late July and early August that Hollywood Boulevard had already sunk by four inches--decided against a separate “compaction grouting” procedure. Some engineers believe that this process, which involves injecting grout from the surface level, could have minimized more dramatic settlement on the boulevard when a second tunnel-boring machine progressed through.

When that second machine passed, the ground sank an additional five inches, leading to a shutdown of all tunneling Aug. 18 and a closure of the nine blocks of the boulevard to car traffic. A number of water and sewer lines also have ruptured. The tunnel designer, Timothy P. Smirnoff, had told a meeting of Hollywood residents convened by Councilwoman Goldberg on Aug. 17 that compaction grouting “historically does not limit or change the amount of settlement (of) the ground.”

But the tunnel contractor, Shea-Kiewit-Kenny, was ordered by Metro Rail officials last October to perform compaction grouting “to arrest this continued settlement” along Vermont Avenue, where sinkage of four inches had been found.

Goldberg said she was angered, in part, because despite requesting “all the bad news” from project officials, she was never informed of ground sinkage on Vermont Avenue. Had she known at the Aug. 17 meeting that compaction grouting was used earlier to counter the settling, she said, she would have been better positioned to demand similar preventive measures on Hollywood Boulevard.

“If I had known that,” Goldberg said, “then they wouldn’t have gotten away with” stating that such grouting of Hollywood Boulevard was unnecessary. Smirnoff did not return calls seeking comment.

MTA rail construction President Edward McSpedon--asked Monday if he now thinks the decision to not order compaction grouting on Hollywood Boulevard was a sound one--said, “I’m thinking about it.” McSpedon’s engineering consultants have said they had hoped that other tunneling techniques would adequately stabilize the ground.

Salvatore J. Calvanico, resident engineer of the project for the MTA’s management firm, Parsons-Dillingham, said in an interview last week that he and his colleagues did not have the luxury of hindsight when weighing whether to order compaction grouting.

Assemblyman Richard Polanco, who last month called for an outside review of the Hollywood Boulevard problems by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said the grouting controversy is causing him to redouble his efforts. “It’s clear to me that they’re (Metro Rail officials) experimenting, that Hollywood Boulevard has been made a guinea pig,” said Polanco, who represents the area.

The chairman of the Rail Construction Corp., the agency whose board would be dissolved under White’s proposal, praised project engineers Monday and suggested that others did not understand the construction process.

“I for one experience with you the frustration of seeing what is in the public sector, compared to what the professional people that work in this industry really know what is happening,” said Robert E. Kruse, who is an engineer.