When I first heard the latest bit of news on Tuesday about the further indefinite delays in finishing and opening the Eglinton Crosstown transit line, I thought of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who were once again disappointingly eliminated early from the playoffs.
Of course, I thought — OF COURSE — this is the kind of news we get. Twice in one week, we’d seen our hopes of an endlessly long-awaited, much-desired outcome crushed. Twice in one week when the news came it seemed somehow both expected and deadeningly gutting at the same time.
And then I thought of toxic nuclear waste. Naturally.
Before I explain, let me catch you up on the latest fun transit news, if you missed it: Crosslinx, the consortium of companies who have the contract to build the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line, was expected to give an update this week on when we all might expect the project to be finished. (When it was first announced, the line was projected to open in 2016. By the time the contract was awarded, the opening plan was for 2021, then it became fall of 2022. And then, surprise, it became … well, who knows? Not this year.)
But before any report on new projected timing came, on Tuesday Crosslinx was threatening to down tools on the project while it sues the provincial agencies Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario that are overseeing the work. In reporting by my Star colleague Lex Harvey, and other reporters at CBC and Global news, a picture emerges of significant problems: stations being rebuilt because concrete was improperly poured, test trains unable to complete the line at the normal speed because of how tracks have been laid, and so on.
Crosslinx says it should not have to take nitpicky instructions from the TTC — the city agency that will actually operate the line — because its contract is with provincial Metrolinx. And everyone is pointing fingers at each other to assign blame while no one is standing up to accept responsibility to just get the blasted thing finished.
At this point — after a budget that’s doubled, after more than a decade of Eglinton Avenue snarled in construction, after delay after delay after delay — most Torontonians are not interested in hearing out the various arguments assigning blame. We blame them all.
And I think most of us have a gut reaction that says none of these companies and government agency executives should ever get another dollar of public money for anything ever again. Let them argue about whether the terms of reference were complied with or unreasonably changed while they’re waiting together in the unemployment line.
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Our tempers are going nuclear.
But it’s when I think of nuclear stuff that I remember that’s not how these thing work.
For a few months when I was fresh out of university, I had a job at a trade magazine for the waste management industry, and we ran a story I helped edit on the massive “Superfund” cleanup sites in Hanford, Washington, the “most toxic place in America.” That’s the town where U.S. nuclear weapons were originally built, and because of neglect, negligence, and intentional recklessness, it was a massive radioactive waste site. Cleaning it up was to be among the biggest public works projects in U.S. history.
And do you know who was getting awarded the giant contracts to remediate the site? Mostly the same companies that had run the projects that poisoned the site. They were the only ones big enough, and with enough specific expertise, to handle the job.
They got rich making a mess, and then got richer cleaning it up. (By way of update, that cleanup project was originally supposed to be completed in 30 years. Three decades later, it’s projected to take at least another 20. So it goes.)
There are only so many giant construction and engineering companies who can handle things like digging subway tunnels. The ones that make up Crosslinx are companies whose names are on the construction hoardings and contracts all over the city for major office towers and government buildings and road and transit infrastructure projects.
Members of the consortium are involved in other consortia working on things like the Finch West LRT and the Eglinton Crosstown West extension. They are not just going to continue to work on the Crosstown, they’ll keep right on working on all kinds of other government projects.
And then there’s Metrolinx, which really is the only game in town for us: overseeing as we speak the projects named above, plus the giant Ontario Line subway, the Scarborough subway extension and soon enough, likely, the Sheppard East subway extension.
In the best case scenario, we’re looking at what? Another decade of construction at a bill of $30 billion? What does that translate into, realistically, based on what we’ve seen on Eglinton and Finch, and other provincially managed projects like the Ottawa LRT omnishambles? How long will we really be living with this kind of frustration?
Well, what’s the half-life of radioactive nuclear waste? Or the projected number of years before fans actually believe they’ll see the Maple Leafs win it all?
For our purposes, the numbers answering those question may as well all be the same, in that they’re all roughly forever. Another thing they have in common: they leave us feeling sicker the more the reality sinks in.