SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Dori: WSDOT clearly lied about Bertha blockage
Jan 3, 2014, 5:21 PM | Updated: 11:15 pm
They've been lying to us for a month about what's been blocking Bertha. They've been trying to figure out how to spin it. This is unbelievable incompetence. (WSDOT image)
(WSDOT image)
Dori Monson reacts to Friday’s revelation by the Washington Department of Transportation that an 8-inch steel pipe is to blame for blocking and damaging Seattle tunnel drilling machine Bertha:
Taken from Friday’s edition of the Dori Monson Show.
Does anybody believe that they didn’t know before now what was blocking Big Bertha and this isn’t a classic Friday news dump where they’re hoping it’ll get buried by the end of the week?
I bet they’ve known for days. I bet they would have done this press conference later if The Seattle Times hadn’t gotten the story because you do it at 4 p.m. to make it even tougher to get on the newscasts.
It was stuck and hadn’t moved before I went on vacation for the holidays, so almost a month. And I was incredulous they didn’t know what was blocking it. So it’s a huge steel pipe that was put in the ground in 2002 by the Department of Transportation when they started to do some test drilling for the viaduct replacement project. The Department of Transportation put the obstruction in front of the Department of Transportation’s project and they didn’t know that?
Either they’ve been lying about it for a month or they didn’t know. This is unbelievable.
They’ve been lying to us for a month about what’s been blocking Bertha. They’ve been trying to figure out how to spin it. This is unbelievable incompetence. This is exactly what we predicted on this show years ago when we said there would be unfathomable delays and at least a billion dollars in overruns on this project.
This is the first in what is going to be a financially disasterous project. And when you look at the Big Dig in Boston and the billions of dollars of overruns there and think that the geniuses that run this state were somehow going to be impervious to what happened with the Big Dig in Boston – now we’re seeing first hand everything that we predicted coming true.
How many people are collecting a paycheck for this project and they are going to find they can’t move forward? What’s going to happen? Are all these people going to collect a paycheck for a year to sit on their butts because of the incompetence? That’s what we have to find out.
Wow. We can all agree this is a stunning development.
Taken from Friday’s edition of the Dori Monson Show.
JK
