The Big Dig: The Sky is Falling in Boston

Boston's Multi-billion Dollar Boondoggle is a Killer

It’s been a long-standing joke in Boston. When you’ve got to drive through one of the tunnels of the disastrous Big Dig highway construction project, cross your fingers and drive like hell.

Hard to do when you’re sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in one of the tunnels, watching water from the Boston Harbor above you trickle down the concrete walls around your car and trying not to contemplate just when that trickle is going to become a flood.

Well, the joke became very unfunny on July 10, 2006. Riding in the passenger seat of a car driven by her husband, mother of three Milena Del Valle was killed instantly when a slab of concrete weighing several tons broke loose from the ceiling of the I-93 connector to the Ted Williams Tunnel and landed on top of their vehicle, crushing Del Valle.

Del Valle’s husband tried vainly to pull her from the car. He did not realize that his wife of only four years was already dead.

Boston residents aren’t calling the tragedy an accident. District Attorney Tom Reilly has announced that he is pursuing criminal action in the matter, and the scene of the accident has been treated as a crime scene. Colorful Boston flamboyance aside, and Boston’s political officials have been famously colorful and flamboyant since before Paul Revere took his revolutionary horse ride, residents are okay with this somewhat grandiose gesture. Boston’s been waiting for a Big Dig catastrophe for some time now.