Blogs Jan 13, 2014 at 11:09 am

Comments

1
Kind of unfair to say they have no idea what's going on. What is going on is taking the time to study and choose the best, most safe, methodical approach. No need for histrionics.
2
look, there are 4 kinds of facts:

1. known knowns
2. known unknowns
3. unknown knowns
4. unknown unknowns

now, please freaking relax.

love, donald rumsfeld.
3
update: Exploratory shaft work continues

oh my.
4
This part of the explanation is not bullshit:
"It’s also important to remember that the work we’re doing is very difficult."

There's no reason for you scrivener-types to have a complete understanding of just how difficult this shit is. You appreciate the difficulty when you (correctly) exhort voters to contemplate potential cost overruns, and I encourage you to extend your limited understanding into these types of announcements. The engineers and contractors know exactly what they're doing, they're building a great big goddam tunnel, and dealing with this type of unexpected development is a part, possibly the most important part, of completing the assignment.
5
This is exactly why I was against the tunnel. Everything that is happening is exactly as I predicted. I'm no seer, I'm not a fortune teller. I'm just a mildly informed, civic-minded Seattlite who knew that the tunnel was a fuck-up in the making and sure enough, it is. Cost overruns, stuck drills and running behind schedule - yet the Seattle City Council and the business leaders in this city demanded it happen, and the voters said yes. It's too late to back out of this massive fuck-up so say goodbye to countless funding that should go elsewhere.
6
They must have figured the earth was going to great the Tunnel Boring Machine with flowers and didn't develop an exit strategy.
7
Any time I can come up with more than 10 possible problems for a project, you know it's in for a world of hurt.

Time to kill the underfunded out of control #99tunnel and make it into a skate park
8
We need a surge. A surge *always* works. Anyone who doesn't support the surge hates our troops and hates America.

Not troops. I mean our workers. Our borers. The boring ones. Those who bore. Support them because we've spent this much and therefore it's your duty to double down on this thing.

What if we'd listened to John Kerry when he asked "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" We'd have cut our losses and run. Did we listen? No! We surged in and thousands more died and we spent billions more. Can you imagine what would have happened if we hadn't?

Or look at Iraq. What if we'd bugged out instead of surged? We might have lost Fallujah. After so many died to take it, we might have seen Fallujah fall to the evildoers. But no. We didn't give up. Lesson learned. Lesson. Learned.

Afghanistan, same thing. After you've spent a fortune, you've got to spend more. Otherwise, the outcome could really suck.
9
I foresaw all this happening. It's a tunnel. Tunnels always have problems. But the viaduct is going away! Isn't that worth just about anything?
12
@1 and @4. Yes, listen to them.
This is not writing code. It's nothing that can be fixed with a few clicks of the mouse. It's real world, featuring hundreds of real people (most of whom are as smart as or smarter than you are). In the real world there is gravity, water, weather, unknown underground conditions and such, and they are dealt with off-line (so to speak).
All of you "I told ya so"s , why don't you go hibernate for a couple of years and come back when the project is done?
I just have to imagine that if there had been a blogosphere when I-5 or the original SR99 had been built (or the floating bridges) what kind of doomsday prophesies would have taken place among the then crystal ball set.
13
I bet STP wishes the longshoremen would put up another picket right about now...

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