A friend of a friend is involved in the Longfellow Bridge repairs here in Boston (see previous posting about how the repairs, if done within budget, will cost 4X the original construction cost, adjusted for inflation). There hasn’t been a public announcement yet but apparently the project is already roughly a year behind the 3.5-year schedule (which would have enabled a reopening of Boston-to-Cambridge traffic in late 2016).
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The whole story reads like something from the last days of Rome or what you would expect in some former colony abandoned to corrupt local leadership:
From the wiki:
On May 1, 2007, a fire broke out under the bridge, ignited by a cigarette left by vagrants who sometimes stayed in the covered crawlspace under the bridge deck. The fire caused the bridge to be shut down to vehicle and train traffic,[13] and also severed Internet2 connectivity to Boston, causing problems with the Chicago-New York OC-192 route, according to the Internet2 blog.[14]
In the summer of 2008, two state employees stole 2,347 feet (715 m) of decorative iron trim that had been removed from the bridge for refurbishment, and sold it for scrap. The men, one of whom was a Department of Conservation and Recreation district manager, were charged with receiving $12,147 for the historic original parapet coping. The estimated cost to remake the pieces, scheduled for replication by 2012, was over $500,000.
MassDOT announced in May 2011 that work would begin on stripping and cleaning rust from steel arch ribbons that have not been painted since 1953…
Our whole rotten stinking government – a big moldering pile of lawlessness and theft and neglect, all embodied in one bridge! And we the taxpayers get to pay the price of it all.