Experts Call L.A. Subway’s Trouble Deeper Than Most : Transit: MTA says all such projects have difficulties. But problems here range from devilish geology to bad PR.

In London, subway construction has been blamed for a three-millimeter tilt in Big Ben, prompting one wag to note that England had its own “Leaning Tower of London.” In Munich, Germany, a bus plunged into a sinkhole above tunneling, killing four people. And in Buffalo, N.Y., a tunnel wall that was supposed to be a foot wide turned out to be 2 1/2 inches in some spots.

Things happen.

That at least has been the message from local transit officials in recent months as a state Senate committee prepared to convene today’s hearing on the Los Angeles subway. A growing list of problems--from thin tunnel walls and sinking streets to tainted contracts and criminal investigations--have threatened to derail the project for good.

“No one anywhere has ever built a system of this size and complexity without difficulties,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief Franklin E. White said recently, echoing an assertion he has made with increasing frequency as the project’s political fortunes have waned.

Well, yes and no.

Some cities have built subways of incredible complexity with only minor blemishes. Others have experienced serious problems. But few have run into such major roadblocks, vying with Los Angeles for the title of the most infamous public works project in the nation.

“Tunneling is a very tricky business,” said Richard Gallagher, retired chief engineer of the defunct Southern California Rapid Transit District. But, he said, “this project has been plagued with an unusual amount of trouble.”

After subway construction was blamed for causing portions of Hollywood Boulevard to sink up to 10 inches last year, a project official remarked that tunneling projects in other cities “all experienced not just sinkages, but actual surface collapses, something the management of the Red Line has been able to prevent.”

He spoke too soon. Just a few months later, Hollywood Boulevard caved in.

$5.8-Billion Project

The $5.8-billion, 22-mile subway project is one of the costliest public works projects in U.S. history. It dwarfs the $4-billion State Water Project, which included a 444-mile aqueduct from Northern California to Southern California built during the 1960s and early 1970s. In a project of this scale, some unforeseen setbacks are sure to develop.

But this sentiment “is a very convenient skirt to hide behind,” said Jim Pott, a Long Beach engineer and former member of the MTA’s defunct Rail Construction Corp. “Underground work is inherently a dirty, dangerous job. There’s no doubt about it. But that does not provide anything more than a fig leaf for some of the things that are happening here.”

And Jack Lemley, an Idaho businessman who was chief executive of the recently completed Channel Tunnel linking England and France, called the construction snafus “a deplorable situation.”

Not that Lemley’s “Chunnel” project was without major glitches of its own. It was finished months behind schedule and billions over budget, and when it was finally ready to go last fall, its high-speed trains broke down three times while carrying VIPS who were getting an advance peek at the system.

Still, Lemley says the Los Angeles project’s setbacks stand out. With other subway projects across the United States, he said, “you’re just not having the same kinds of problems.”

MTA officials wish they could say that being over budget and behind schedule were their biggest problems. Walls were built thinner than designed; tunnels were misaligned; ground sinkage--blamed in part on substandard wedges used in the tunnel’s support system--shut down tunneling for five months last summer; a 1990 tunnel fire forced closure of part of the Hollywood Freeway for three days; a 1994 welding-related explosion injured three workers; evidence of favoritism canceled the award of multimillion-dollar contracts; flooding in the tunnel shut down work for six months; and a runaway rail construction car injured three workers in 1994.

Local officials contend that their problems have been exaggerated and that transit projects in other cities have suffered similar troubles. For example:

* The English Channel tunnel cost twice the original estimates, partly because of the boring machine going out of alignment.

* In Denmark, twin waterway tunnels suffered what was termed “complete paralysis” in 1991 after a fire, the threat of flooding and other problems set back construction by months.

* In Boston, soil problems may add to costs and delays for the Boston Harbor Tunnel, the nation’s costliest public works project.

* A Portland, Ore., tunnel project had to abandon its tunneling machine because of unanticipated hard rock conditions.

In a historical footnote that must send shudders down the spine of Los Angeles subway officials, New York City began building a subway under 2nd Avenue in the early 1970s but abandoned the project because of money troubles. New York officials took out an ad seeking commercial uses for the unused subway tunnels. One company proposed storing wine there.

“The fact that human beings are building the system means that all will not go smoothly,” said White, chief executive officer of the MTA. “Some may say these are excuses, but . . . this is the reality. The record on this project is as good as any other of its type.”

William D. Middleton, a retired University of Virginia engineer and editor of Transit Connections, said the subway builders are dealing with “some of the most complex” geological conditions.

John and Peter Shea, who head the construction consortium that was recently fired from the Hollywood subway because transit officials said they had “lost confidence” in the firm, say their staff was not told about some of the geological problems going into the job.

Engineers never bothered to track two “underground rivers” along the route that caused eight months and millions of dollars in delays, they maintain. The area’s soft soil has only compounded the problem, the Sheas add.

“You’re going to have less problems if you have hard rock,” John Shea said. The Sheas and one of their project managers are among those who are being subpoenaed to appear at a state Senate hearing on the MTA today.

Political Geography

Because Los Angeles’ soil and geological conditions may be unique, in fact, the MTA on Monday named three international leaders in the field to study the problem over the next several months--at a cost of $1,200 each per day. As transit officials struggle to win back public confidence, Mayor Richard Riordan said, the findings should help to determine whether area conditions are simply “inconsistent” with an underground route.

“The people of Los Angeles have been patient enough,” Riordan said. “It’s unacceptable to have any more delays.”

The subway hasn’t been helped by the political geography either.

The project has been subjected to aggressive press coverage, particularly from The Times, which has revealed many of the construction defects. And transit officials say that has hurt them.

“We’re constructing in a fishbowl,” White said. “We end up making things worse for ourselves in Sacramento and Washington.”

The resulting mix of all these factors has been an ongoing public relations nightmare for the MTA. The Los Angeles project was only the second to have its federal funding temporarily cut off. A top MTA administrator last week pleaded guilty to charges of accepting kickbacks in connection with the project. Last month, federal agents seized records from the subway builder, Shea-Kiewit-Kenny. A few days later, MTA fired the firm.

In the most recent threat to the agency, state lawmakers passed a bill that would have allowed cash-strapped Los Angeles County to seize $75 million a year for the next five years from the MTA--an easy political target that may rank just ahead of Al Davis in local popularity. Gov. Wilson ultimately scuttled the move, while allowing for a one-time raid of $50 million.

Since construction of the subway got under way in 1986, only a 4.4-mile segment has been put into service. That segment was called “the $1.3-billion tunnel to a hot pastrami sandwich” by Business Week in a reference to Langer’s Delicatessen at the end of the line.

The next segment of the subway--MacArthur Park to Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue--is due to open late next year. The subway is expected to open in Hollywood in 1998 and North Hollywood in 2000. The discovery of hydrogen sulfide gas beneath the ground in the Mid-City area has indefinitely delayed plans for a western extension of the subway while a new alignment is studied. Tunneling for the Eastside extension is expected to begin late next year.

“When it comes to sloppy construction supervision, you people have more problems than the industry as a whole,” said Wolfgang Homburger, a retired research engineer from the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco was built without the kinds of problems that have plagued the Los Angeles subway project, said state Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco), a former BART board member.

“They built that long tube under the Bay without the slightest hitch,” Homburger added.

BART severely disrupted businesses in San Francisco during construction, opened way over budget and ran into a number of start-up problems in the early days of service. But “they certainly never had any question about the contractor not following the plans,” Homburger said.

Asserting that Los Angeles’ problems are not like those of other cities, Long Beach engineer Pott cited the 70-foot-wide sinkhole that brought part of Hollywood Boulevard crashing down into a subway tunnel under construction.

No official cause for the mishap has been determined, and contractors on the job have traded blame, with construction manager Parsons-Dillingham alleging that the builders and engineers used supports for the tunnel that were too weak for the job.

Pott said he believes builders could have avoided the massive sinkage if they had properly checked the soil for ground-water sources to avoid the prospect of unstable earth.

“The scenario is so obvious that I regard [the sinkhole] as having nothing to do with inherently dirty and dangerous work,” he said. “It’s just stupidity.”

Middleton doesn’t expect problems to disappear even though the MTA has replaced the tunnel contractor.

“In construction of this type . . . if you go at it in the most prudent possible manner . . . trying to envision everything that could possibly go wrong, you’re going to end up with so costly and so slow a project you’ll never get anything done,” Middleton said,

Robert Vogel, a curator emeritus of civil engineering for the Smithsonian Institution, said, “When you’re building a building, everything is visible and predictable.” In tunneling, “you just cannot possibly foresee every contingency that might occur.”

James E. Davis, a former federal transit official who is executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that when a subway was under construction in Atlanta, businesses complained about the underground blasting.

“Every time they blasted, things fell off their shelves. Now, if you go to Atlanta, the subway is the lifeline of the city.” He predicts the same in Los Angeles.

“Down the road, the system will be so efficient and move so many people and make the area so much nicer and attractive, people will forget that you had a sinkhole and you had a few collapsed streets,” Davis said.

Worker Accident Rate

Despite its many problems, Los Angeles has avoided the loss of life that has accompanied the construction of transit systems in other cities. During building of the New York subway in 1915, the street collapsed and swallowed a streetcar and brewery wagon, killing eight people.

Fourteen workers died during the first 10 years of building the subway in Washington.

A recent audit of the MTA found that the worker accident rate was about half of the national rate and significantly improved over the rate for the first leg of subway construction. But the audit by the Big 6 accounting firm of Arthur Andersen noted that the Washington Metro system had a lower rate, using half of the safety staff. And the recently fired tunnel contractor was assessed $1 million in fines for worker safety violations last year.

Cal/OSHA on Monday assessed an additional $70,750 in fines against Shea-Kiewit-Kenny for violations concerning the sinkhole, including finding that crews worked in unsafe tunnels and supervisors “usurped the authority” of safety officials who had issued orders to evacuate.

The most serious injuries to date have been to a worker whose right leg was amputated in a construction accident and a worker who suffered burns over 80% of his body in a welding-related explosion.

Some of the problems are not even technical, but stem from loss of credibility that has increasingly made local officials weary of the project and its management.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg had been assured by transit officials that tunneling had been completed in her Hollywood district only to find out later that excavation was still taking place when the giant sinkhole opened up June 22.

And when Goldberg and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky visited Hollywood Boulevard the morning that the street collapsed, they had been assured by MTA staff that everything was OK. But as they returned to their cars, they heard another big chunk of the street cave in.

Some MTA observers believe transit officials compounded their problems for years by insisting at community forums and in other public statements that there was no cause for concern.

“From a PR standpoint, the agency has tried to sell the public on assurances that are just not realistic,” said Michael Gagan, a lobbyist who represents transportation contractors and serves as editor of the MTA Report, an industry newsletter.

That message has been toned down noticeably in recent months, as rail officials now insist in letters to the editor, radio spots and other public forums that problems are endemic to any major tunneling project. But Gagan fears it may be too late.

“Now it doesn’t matter what the agency says because the public is already skeptical,” he said. “It rings hollow.”

Transit officials have been criticized for saying they will do something and then not doing it. For example, the MTA still has not taken all the steps it promised the Federal Transit Administration to win back funding for the project.

This not only has led to a loss of public and political support for the subway, but also has caused some MTA board members to urge a re-evaluation of whether they want to build a subway beyond North Hollywood. Current plans call for extending the subway to the Eastside, the Westside and across the San Fernando Valley.

Dogged by questions about misalignments of its subway tunnels, MTA officials sought to find out as far back as early 1994 how their project compared to others across the country.

“Given the unique nature of each construction project, particularly underground construction, I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘normal,’ ” former construction chief Edward McSpedon wrote in a May, 1994, report.

“It is not our intention to imply that we do not have serious issues to deal with or that we do not have room for improvement,” McSpedon wrote. But compared with other projects, he said, “our problems are not unique or unusual but are in fact typical.”

Less than five months later, McSpedon was fired.

* DIFFICULT DECISION: New construction chief started out by firing contractor. B1

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Troubled Subways

The $5.8-billion Los Angeles subway project, one of the costliest public works projects in U.S. history, is over budget and behind schedule and has been plagued by a litany of problems. Local officials say that all cities have had troubles while building transit systems, especially subways. Here is a sampling:

BALTIMORE (1991)

* Collapse of a street and the threat of fire in gasoline-soaked soil forced a nine-month delay in the city’s street tunnel line.

DENMARK (1991)

* Twin waterway tunnels suffered what was termed “complete paralysis” after a fire, the threat of flooding and other problems set back construction by months.

LONDON (1994)

* Subway construction led to the partial collapse of an office building at Heathrow Airport and has been blamed for a three-millimeter tilt in Big Ben.

MUNICH, GERMANY (1994)

* Four people were killed when a bus plunged into a sinkhole caused by a tunnel collapse during subway construction.

PORTLAND, ORE. (1994)

* A tunneling machine had to be abandoned because of unanticipated hard rock conditions.

BOSTON (1995)

* Soil problems may add to mounting costs and delays for the Boston Harbor Tunnel, the nation’s costliest public works project.

Source: Times Files