The installation of 50-foot-long piling clusters at the Kinzie Street bridge last summer was a routine city contract: replace bundles of weathered wood pilings with new timbers of yellow Southern pine.
But city officials said Wednesday that it became a project fraught with mismanagement and riddled by irregularities, ranging from the construction company`s failure to locate an underground freight tunnel to city engineers`
failure to make a final inspection of the site.
The city also released correspondence, written by city workers who investigated the tunnel breach, that blamed the pilings installation for creating ”added soil pressure” on the tunnel, eventually causing a cave-in that led to the disastrous Loop flood.
The heads of two city officials rolled Wednesday because of their roles in the pilings project, and two more appeared on a hit list of those whose firings are being sought.
Mayor Richard Daley has also requested the 29-day suspensions of three other city employees for their parts in supervising and inspecting the pilings work.
The former acting transportation commissioner, John LaPlante, was forced to resign by Daley on April 14 for not acting quickly to fix the tunnel rupture.
At a City Hall news conference, Corporation Counsel Kelly Welsh again pointed a finger at Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corp., the company that last spring was awarded a $335,640 contract to install protective pilings at five Chicago River bridges, including Kinzie Street.
Alleging four instances where Great Lakes did not follow specifications of its city contract to replace the pilings at the southeast corner of the Kinzie bridge, Welsh placed blame squarely on the Oak Brook-based marine construction giant for contributing to the city`s flood woes.
He also said that the company`s recent bid-rigging convictions may have barred them from seeking the contract in the first place.
Afterward, Richard Adams, a Great Lakes spokesman, released a statement that said the company had informed the city of its prior convictions and thus was qualified to bid on the project. At a weekend news conference, company officials had denied culpability in the tunnel collapse, saying they had completed the work to the city`s satisfaction.
But Wednesday, Welsh said that the information the firm gave the city
”was not correct.”
He added that though Great Lakes received oral approval from a city employee to place two piling clusters in a place other than specified in the city contract-a location later determined to be almost directly above the ill- fated freight tunnel-the contractor never gave city engineers a required written notification of the new piling location.
Welsh alleged that Great Lakes did not fulfill contract language
In a chronology of the pilings project and the city`s bungled efforts to fix the tunnel before the flood, Welsh said city officials learned that the pilings project may have caused the tunnel rupture in March in a hand-written memo from James McTigue, an engineer whose firing is being sought by the city. In a follow-up letter from Louis Koncza, the city`s chief bridge engineer who was fired on Wednesday, the alleged link between the piling installation and tunnel damage was made clear.
”Investigation into the cause of the damage (to the tunnel) reveals that on Sept. 20, 1991, new pile clusters were installed under City contract to replace old deteriorated piles,” Koncza wrote to LaPlante. ”It appears that the added lateral soil pressure exerted by the new piles resulted in wall failure of the freight tunnel, which is very close to the pile cluster.”
After the tunnel breach was detected, a map was prepared detailing where the new pilings had been sunk, Welsh said. That map was drawn by public works engineer Dennis Sadowski, a supervisor on the pilings project who was forced to resign Wednesday for his part in overseeing the work and its final inspection.
Sadowski`s map showed that the new piling clusters-two bundles of 37 50-foot-long pilings-had been hammered into the riverbed almost directly above the freight tunnel, which lay some 20 feet below the river bottom.
Details of the piling construction at Kinzie and four other bridges covered by the Great Lakes contract were taken from a daily diary kept by city inspector James Bolster, Welsh said.
Bolster was to keep the diary in order to report on the job`s progress to the state Department of Transportation, which funded the pilings` replacement, and to catalog any construction problems for his superiors in the Department of Public Works, Welsh said.
Bolster`s suspension was also sought on Wednesday for his connection to the pilings construction and the final inspection of the project.
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It was from Bolster`s diary that Welsh read of a Sept. 11, 1991, request from Great Lakes that two new piling clusters be installed in a location other than specified in the city contract.
Public works supervisor Frank Ociepka agreed to the new placements as long as they were placed ”within the line of old pile clusters indicated on a bridge map,” Welsh said.
Ociepka, a manager who helped oversee the pilings job and whose dismissal is being sought, said he consented because he expected to later review a written description of the plan from Great Lakes, Welsh said. Ociepka never received such a document from the company and did not pursue the matter with the contractor or anyone in the city.
After the project was completed, Ociepka received word from Bolster of the new pilings` precise location, Welsh said. Neither of the clusters had been placed where Ociepka had anticipated.
As called for in the city contract, Sadowski and Bolster embarked on what was to be a final inspection of all five bridges after the project`s completion.
But in interviews with city officials during the last week, both admitted they visited only the bridge at Cermak Road.
Great Lakes officials conceded in a weekend news conference that inspections at the other four bridges did not occur, saying that the city engineers felt that they were familiar enough with the work that such an inspection was not necessary.
Welsh, however, said Sadowski and Bolster bypassed the other sites because they could not find a place to park.