Report Blames Contractors for Tunnel Collapse

Faulty and “unrealistic” design work by two of the main contractors on the Los Angeles subway project triggered the dramatic collapse of an 80-foot-wide chunk of Hollywood Boulevard four months ago, according to a troubling report released Thursday that rebuts past assertions from transit officials about who was to blame for the sinkhole.

The independent report, commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, found that project engineers broke from standard practice by planning the realignment of the Hollywood Boulevard tunnel without adequate supports, despite a rainfall-driven rise in the ground water level that made the soil in the area less stable.

MTA officials said they are taking immediate steps to respond to the new report, including barring from MTA work those engineers found to have erred in the design of the tunnel. But critics accused MTA leaders of passing the blame for the mishap onto their contractors without acknowledging shortcomings in their own oversight system.

“There’s no real accountability,” said Rocky Rushing, an aide to State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), a frequent critic of the MTA who has pushed for legislative reforms at the agency.

Rushing said that in light of a series of design snafus on one of the nation’s costliest public works projects, it was “revisionist history” for subway officials to describe the sinkhole as an anomaly. “This isn’t the first time this has happened, and I’d venture to say it won’t be the last,” Rushing said.

“It’s a very serious indictment of the way our team has been conducting business,” MTA board member and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said Thursday. “There are going to be a lot of uncomfortable people after reading that report, [although] not as uncomfortable as I was when I almost fell in that hole.”

The June 22 sinkhole has come to symbolize the $5.8-billion subway’s many problems, and it has proven a disaster for the MTA on several fronts:

The accident has meant months in delays and up to $6.7 million in sinkhole repair costs for the subway project. It has intensified political pressure from MTA critics who want to pull the plug on the subway altogether. And it has led to a spate of fines against one contractor for allegedly risking the lives of workers on the morning the sinkhole appeared in an ill-conceived and last-minute attempt to shore up the tunnel before it collapsed in a sea of mud and water.

“It was tragic. It should not have happened,” MTA Board Chairman Larry Zarian said at a press conference Thursday, as he and agency officials announced the findings of the new report. The $60,000 study was conducted for the MTA by Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, an Illinois-based firm that has done reviews for the agency before on past problems.

When television stations nationwide first aired footage of the sinkhole four months ago, MTA officials asserted that a broken main controlled by the Department of Water and Power appeared to be at fault for the sinkhole. But Thursday’s report rests the blame squarely on the shoulders of two of the main contractors--Engineering Management Consultants, a design partnership that has been paid more than $300 million under its no-bid rail contract, and Shea-Kiewit-Kenny, a tunneling giant that collected $155 million on the Hollywood work. The tunneling contractor was fired from the job last summer after the sinkhole and is now suing MTA.

The report found that the failure to turn off the flooding main for about 45 minutes does appear to have spread the damage, as the waterlogged street collapsed atop the subway tunnel some 65 feet below. But, the report said, it was the unstable soil from the poor tunnel design that caused the main to rupture.

Robert Giles, senior district operations engineer for the DWP, said the report offered a vindication for the water department after months of finger-pointing. “We believed all along that we did not have a leaky water pipe, that it broke only as a result of unsupported soil collapsing underneath it,” he said.

That was the finding of Thursday’s report as well, which concluded that engineers “never considered” how much weight could be adequately borne by the tunnel during the mining operation.

At the time of the accident, workers were re-mining some 80 feet of tunnel to correct a misalignment of more than a foot, and they were in the process of removing the outer concrete lining of the tunnel one segment at a time. But despite well-established practices, the report concluded, engineers had failed to properly use the steel-plated and timber supports that are designed to help ensure stability for the tunnel and the earth above. This would prove to be the critical error, officials said. Compounding the problem, heavy rainfall had driven the ground water level up in the area and helped to destabilize the soil--but engineers had failed to incorporate these changes in their planning, the report said. “The significance of the water level rises [around the tunnel] was not appreciated, and its consequences not anticipated,” the MTA’s consultants concluded.

Officials with Engineering Management Consultants, the design conglomerate, disputed the report’s findings, saying that they approved only a “generic” plan for the re-mining operation in 1994. Officials at Shea-Kiewit-Kenny, the tunneling contractor, never came back to them to modify the design plans to reflect the higher water levels in the area, officials with the design firm asserted.

Sven B. Svendsen, principal in Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, one of the partners in the Engineering Management Consultants operation, said design engineers were never even made aware that water had begun seeping into the tunnel area prior to the re-mining operation. “If you have a changed condition, you should go back to the engineer and get a solution for the changed condition,” he said. “That would be different than the [plan] we approved for a dry condition. This was not done.”

Shea-Kiewit-Kenny’s John Shea said in a statement that the report offered another example of the MTA blaming others for its problems.

“We are . . . confident after all investigations into the sinkhole are completed, SKK will be found to have performed the difficult and hazardous task of re-mining carefully and professionally,” Shea said. He added that “the real damage was caused by the DWP’s failure to promptly shut off the water main.” MTA officials, however, said they believed engineers at both Engineering Management Consultants and Shea-Kiewit-Kenny had fallen short. “We depended on them, and they didn’t come through for us,” said Zarian.

As a result, transit officials said they are ordering Engineering Management Consultants to remove all engineers and staff members who played a part in approving the deficient designs. Officials said it is not yet known how many people may be affected by that decision, but Zarian stressed: “Those persons may no longer work on the Metro Rail project again.”

In addition, MTA officials said they will review the firm’s no-bid contract for design work on the massive rail project because it “may no longer be in our best interest” for the firm to maintain exclusive rights to the job. Franklin E. White, chief executive officer for the MTA, said the agency may need to seek “more competition” from other design firms.

But the agency stopped short of firing Engineering Management Consultants outright--as it had done with Shea-Kiewit-Kenny after the sinkhole. Officials rejected that option because, in general, the firm “has done a great job” on the project, said MTA construction chief Stanley G. Phernambucq.

It was the third time in 10 weeks that the sinkhole incident has generated criticism and controversy over the MTA’s mammoth subway construction operation. A confidential Oct. 5 report from the MTA Inspector General, corroborating allegations that had been widely discussed in the subway community for months, found that project officials risked the lives of up to two dozen tunnel workers when they failed to clear out the construction area after the first signs of trouble that morning.

MTA and contracting officials “recognized the increasing likelihood for collapse” as early as 3:30 a.m., but no one shut down the tunnel for another five hours, the report found. Instead, project supervisors tried unsuccessfully to shore up the tunnel during that time, failing to tell safety officials that there were still workers in the mines, the report found. The workers barely made it out of the tunnel before it gave way.

Cal-OSHA had addressed similar problems at the sinkhole in an August report, fining Shea-Kiewit-Kenny $70,750 for allegedly usurping the authority of safety officials on the scene and violating other emergency and safety procedures.

MTA officials stressed repeatedly at Thursday’s press conference that they take ultimate responsibility for the failures that led to what Zarian called “our ever-famous sinkhole.” And they defended their policy of relying on contractors to make key decisions on the project--even though it meant in the case of the sinkhole that no MTA engineers had ever reviewed the faulty design plans. “It’s a very common practice to have contracted engineers to do this type of work. There is a check and balance system in place,” Phernambucq said.

But there was dissension even within the agency.

“This report again reaffirms in my mind that there has to be better accountability,” said MTA board member Nick Patsaouras. The transit agency, he said, needs to clarify the now-fuzzy lines of responsibility among the contractors, instead of resorting to finger-pointing.