Hatchet Man vs. the 800 Pound Gorilla

October 18, 2023·54 min·4 clips

A 1994 reporter grills Jim Karasiotis on how Boston can trust Bechtel when the state's own PR rep is on Bechtel's payroll — and Karasiotis defends it by saying he doesn't want to know how his office renovation gets done.

Fred Salvucci had carried the Big Dig for years. By 1991, after almost 20 years of pushing the project, he stepped away from the thing he had helped define. Nobody knew who would take it next. The episode follows that handoff through the opening of the Ted Williams tunnel, one of the project's big milestones. For a moment, people were happy. That mattered because the Big Dig already had controversy every day, and the trouble was sitting right outside the celebration. The tunnel existed, but it was not whole. It ran under the harbor and worked for ceremony and antique cars, but it still did not connect to I-90 or I-93. A tunnel without links is a promise with a hole in it. The missing connector made Fort Point Channel the next hard problem, and the story loops back to the project's beginnings. Salvucci's earlier breakthrough had spared homes. The harbor route, found through an unlikely road-builder's call from a phone booth, still had to cross the channel. Fort Point Channel would not stay quiet. The host uses it as the place where the connector problem stops being abstract. Bechtel comes into the frame here. The episode calls the firm the 800-pound gorilla, then names this as its first King Kong moment in public. The milestone starts to look less like a victory lap and more like a warning. One interviewee's six-phase theory of projects moves from euphoria toward blame, punishment, and misplaced glory. The tunnel opening lands just before that turn. What looked like progress was also the start of a harder fight over the connector that would make the tunnel matter.

As heard by us

A Big Dig episode that makes a tunnel milestone feel like civic history.

The Big Dig moves into Fort Point Channel, and the first milestone does not pretend the hard part is over. What gives the piece its shape is the human work around the engineering: Fred Salvucci's long stewardship, Jim Karasiotis arriving from the old adversary side, and Bechtel…

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Why you'd press play

You want the tunnel feud where the hardest piece still has not happened yet.

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