7-3-07 The Gift That Keeps On Giving

A small "News In Brief" article buried deep inside yesterday's T&G about the leaky Thomas P. O'Neill Tunnel in Boston caught my eye with it's statistical information. According to the article's figures (and my calculator), the tunnel has been leaking an average of 43 gallons a minute, every minute, 24 hours a day, over the first three months of 2007. That's up from the average of 36-1/2 gallons per minute during the first three months of 2006.

The money spent for "leak abatement" in the tunnel last year cost about $5 million dollars. Essentially, this breaks down to each gallon of water costing $3.84.

That's about a dollar per gallon more than the current price of gasoline.

The truly incredible thing about this is that the leakage is increasing, not decreasing. This means that the more the contractors do this work, ostensibly, to STOP the leakage, the worse it gets!

It reminds me of the project in the "Sopranos" where they built the "Museum of Science and Trucking."

Of course, in real life, the pork in public works projects in Massachusetts is much more subtle. Somebody has to get killed by tons of concrete falling off a ceiling over a roadway before anybody gets outraged by this crap.

Meanwhile, $3.84 a gallon for seawater leaking into the Thomas P. O'Neill Tunnel remains a mere "factoid" in the T&G...