Big Dig Bail Out

The Big Dig is still making the news and it's supposed to be finished already. Delay after delay we thought we finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel, especially when they officially named the tunnel, but the job is still not done. Today the Big Dig headlines revolved around the millions of gallons of water that are still leaking into the underground roadways. A week ago it was the lagging state of the anticipated park construction.

The project was not only set to relocate the above-ground elevated roadway beneath the surface but to create a system of parks and greenways that would connect parts of Boston in ways it hadn't seen since before cars were prevalent transportation in the city. As the Globe reported last week the legal obligation to create the park system has not been met by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority – a promise that helped win favor of the project in the first place. The parks haven't been scrapped, but little progress has been made on them recently.

The bail out of the Big Dig roadways is perhaps to most troubling to those who traverse the tunnels on a daily basis. The good news is that the water flowing through the system is a third of what it was last year at this time. That still amounts to bad news in that 1.1 million gallons per month still are leaking into the tunnels. After the weeks of rain we've had in June, Bostonist found ourselves with a few puddles in the basement and an overall dampness, but a million gallons is a whole lot of water – per square foot we'd propose that the Big Dig is dealing with a problem that's proportionally greater than any sump-pump on the block.