Officials of the company that drove the bundles of 50-foot wooden pilings into the Chicago River at Kinzie Street last year blamed the city on Saturday for not telling them that a freight tunnel crossed beneath the river bed, an omission that may have led to the catastrophic downtown flooding.
Moreover, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corp. officials said that city inspectors gave them oral permission to override a written contract and pound the new timbers three to five feet away from the location dictated in the firm`s contract.
The company`s contract with the city specifically prohibited changing the location of the clusters of pine timbers-installed as bumpers to protect bridges from river traffic-warning that such an alteration could ”cause serious damage to various underground cables and structures.”
Whether the city authorized the contract change is a key element in a City Hall investigation of the cause of a subterranean tunnel rupture that has paralyzed Chicago`s central business core.
While maintaining that the city should have warned them about the tunnel, Great Lakes executives conceded that they did not ask city officials for any underground maps of the construction area, even though the contract stated that the company should ”inform” itself about any utilities near the site.
During their first public account of the pilings project, Great Lakes executives said they never would have started work at the Kinzie site if they had known that a portion of the old freight tunnel system snaked beneath the river.
”We had no more idea that there was a tunnel under that bridge than I might think there is one in my back yard,” Witt Barlow, Great Lakes president and chief executive officer, said Saturday.
The company statements, which came during an hourlong news conference at a Michigan Avenue hotel, escalated the finger-pointing as Great Lakes and city officials scramble to clear themselves of blame for the flood that swamped the Loop and may end up costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Both city and company officials acknowledge that pinpointing responsibility for the disaster will be at issue in the protracted litigation that is sure to follow.
Great Lakes Saturday sought to portray the Kinzie Street pilings project as a routine job that went off without a hitch, a simple undertaking for a century-old firm that describes itself as ”the most experienced dredging and marine construction firm in the Western Hemisphere.”
Company executives would not name the city workers who they say approved the relocation of two piling clusters near the bridge, but were adamant that a city inspector checked the construction site every day of the four-month long project that Great Lakes completed last September.
However, David Williams, the former public works commissioner who authorized the contract, said in an interview Saturday that oral permission to override a construction contract ”would be unusual.”
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Contract changes like that ”should be in writing,” said Williams, who added that he did not recall details of the Great Lakes pilings project, one of hundreds his department oversaw.
Williams maintained that it was Great Lakes` responsibility to obtain underground maps to meet the contract requirements that the company identify utilities before beginning work. Utility lines, such as fiber-optic cables installed by telephone, cable television and computer companies, run through the tunnel system.
”The city would never provide maps,” Williams said. ”It is incumbent on the contractor to do the research. . . .It is the logical and prudent thing to do.”
But Barlow said his engineers relied on a crude diagram provided by the city`s public works department, the advice of on-site public works inspectors and an Army Corps of Engineers map which showed the nearest tunnel was some 400 feet away from the Kinzie bridge.
In offering a partial chronology of the project that city officials suspect of causing the tunnel breach, Barlow said driving pilings near a tunnel was dangerous and the company wouldn`t have done it if it had known how close the tunnel lay to the construction site.
”You don`t drive pilings in within 50 feet of it, at least,” he said.
David Mosena, the mayor`s chief of staff, said he would not comment on Great Lakes` claims until the city had completed its investigation into the tunnel rupture and subsequent flood. Kelly Welsh, the city`s corporation counsel, said that he is interviewing city workers, Great Lakes lawyers and others to determine the cause of the tunnel rupture and flooding.
Mosena said last week that four other piling installations completed by Great Lakes under the $335,640 city contract last year are being investigated. Great Lakes spokesman Richard Adams said Saturday that since the flooding began Monday, the city had asked his company to ”hold off” on a $30 million contract awarded recently to alter a lakefront jetty at 79th Street. Adams declined to provide further details on the contract.
When Great Lakes completed its work installing pilings at five bridges on Sept. 21, 1991, company officials said Saturday, city inspectors visited only one site, the Cermak Road bridge. Installations at the four other bridges, including Kinzie Street, went unchecked, company officials said.
But Wayne Valley, the Great Lakes project manager who supervised the construction for the Oak Brook-based company, said a city inspector visited the Kinzie Street construction site every day, watching from the shore or a river barge. He would not name the inspector.
Officials at the Illinois Department of Transportation, which funded the project, said city officials were required to notify them when the work was completed so state inspectors could review the construction. But Omar Nashif, the Chicago District IDOT coordinator, said in an interview Friday that state workers have still not inspected the construction because city officials never told them it was finished.
”I haven`t received a notice from the city that the job is done,”
Nashif said. ”It has not been inspected.”
City officials said Friday they are investigating the state`s claims.
Great Lakes officials also said Saturday that before receiving the piling contract in May 1991, they admitted to the city that the company had been guilty of bid rigging.
Chicago law prohibits a company from getting a city contract for three years after a conviction or admission of bid rigging. As recently as 1989, Great Lakes paid $3.7 million in fines and damages to settle bid rigging complaints brought by Florida in a civil lawsuit.
In 1988, four former Great Lakes executives, including the president, pleaded guilty to federal bid-rigging charges.
”The individuals involved have been discharged,” Barlow said Saturday.
”They are not a part of this contract whatever.”
The company said that on April 16, 1991, it sent a letter to the city Department of Public Works describing the steps it had taken to assure bid rigging would not be repeated. On May 6, 1991, the contract was awarded.
Welsh said Thursday the city was investigating if the recent bid rigging should have disqualified Great Lakes from getting a city contract.
Barlow, addressing the controversy over the pilings project for the first time Saturday, described Great Lakes as a ”proud company” that had done major dredging and construction jobs throughout the country for 102 years.
Referring to Great Lakes projects such as the building of the Michigan Avenue bridge and the laying of landfill on which Meigs Field and Soldier Field stand, Barlow said: ”Virtually the entire lakefront was built by Great Lakes.”