Fresh from snarling Downtown Boston traffic for aeons…

Modern Continental, not content to bring Boston’s Mass Pike to a halt with shoddy construction work, apparently decided to take their mal-construction stage show on the road.

From my favorite procrastination reading material, the LA Times…

The concrete bridge was designed by HNTB Corp. of Santa Ana and built by Modern Continental Co., the Massachusetts-based company that was the contractor for Boston’s Big Dig highway tunnel. (A motorist was killed in that tunnel last year when her car was crushed by falling concrete ceiling panels.)

Thankfully, Metro has stepped in with safety measures and we don’t look to be repeating the Milena del Valle tragedy.

On Aug. 23, 2005, two years after the Gold Line opened, transit workers noticed fallen concrete, after spotting a child holding chunks of it in her hands, according to internal MTA documents obtained by The Times.

Though we apparently came close.

A visual inspection at that time revealed that Modern Continental deviated from the plan, building the affected shear key 6 inches short of its 18-inch design. The significance of that is unknown: “We don’t know if that 6 inches is the total reason for the cracking or if there is some other reason,” Thorpe said.

Wow. All I can manage is “wow.” It’s hard to fault Metro here, Boston didn’t realize that they had a lemon until after this particular bridge was constructed, and it sounds like if it was built to spec, we probably wouldn’t be having concrete showers. We hope that the MTA and the Pasadena GoldBlue Line Construction Authority can stop squabbling for long enough to jointly [threaten to] sue the construction company and recover appropriate repair costs and any other possible damages, assuming a determination that construction methods are to blame.