The Big Dig: The Infamous Mega Project That Remastered Boston’s Plan

For over two decades, Dan McNichol was the spokesperson for the largest, most complex highway construction project ever embarked upon in U.S. history: Boston’s Big Dig. McNichol discusses the management of this mega-public works project, and describies its many civil engineering feats. Joint lecture with the Departments of Architecture and LARP.

Learning Objectives:

1. Public Works Management Examined: The Big Dig, officially known as the Central Artery/Tunnel Project, was a massive public works project spanning over two decades between 1987-2007. The lecture explores the twenty-years in which The Big Dig mega project public project was formed organically and was eventually organized into a federally funded, state run project built inside Boston’s city limits. The talk also covers the impacts of how the project’s staff of over 1,200 engineering and construction professionals and 5,000 hardhat workers was managed by a handful of state and federal officials for better and for worse.

2. Lessons Learned Examined: The Big Dig offers invaluable lessons-learned for future public projects. The lecture discusses a few of the major achievements and failures of managing the mega work from both a public administrations side and a private contractors vantage point.

3. Mega vs. Normal Public Works Discussed: The Big Dig is an anomaly among public works projects. In scope, management, and budget it is one of the largest, most complicated engineering and construction endeavors in the US. The unusual aspects of The Big Dig will be compared to smaller public works project’s in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

4. Advances in Civil Engineering Explored: Today’s engineering and construction technologies are the result of the work of those in the decades and centuries before. Likewise, The Big Dig project team pushed the bounds of established norms in civil engineering with innovative tunnel designs, the creation of one of the world’s largest ventilation systems, and the construction of the now iconic Leonard P. Zakim/Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge, a cable stayed bridge over the Charles River in Boston.

Видео The Big Dig: The Infamous Mega Project That Remastered Boston’s Plan канала BCT Program