After 4 Years Bertha Is Near Her End Meanwhile In Fort Worth

The after four years part of the headline caught my attention in this Seattle Times The end is near for Bertha: After nearly 2 miles in 4 years, tunnel machine about to break through article.

Bertha's tunnel boring got behind schedule by a couple years when Bertha stalled after hitting an unexpected steel pipe.

There was never a mystery as to why Bertha's tunnel boring came to a halt. The entire debacle was openly covered in a transparent way via multiple media.

Meanwhile in Fort Worth...

Way back in 2014 construction began on the first of three simple little bridges being built over dry land, built with an astonishing four  year timeline. Longer than it took to build the Golden  Gate Bridge and other actual feats of world renowned engineering.

Construction on the only one of the three bridges to actually raise multiple V-piers above the ground has been halted for over a year, with no explanation for the construction halt. When the bridge construction was halted it was reported it would take about a month to resolve whatever the mysterious issue was which halted construction.

A paragraph from the Seattle Times article, the likes of which you likely will never see in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about anything happening in Fort Worth...

The 9,270-foot dig ranks among the trickiest megaprojects in history: Bertha was the largest drill on Earth when it entered the ground nearly four years ago, and it pushed through glacial soils that were abrasive and sloppy.

Meanwhile in Fort Worth...

If Fort Worth did have an actual newspaper doing what actual newspapers do, as in informing its readers about these things called facts and information, a paragraph from an article about America's Biggest Boondoggles' stalled bridge construction might go something like this...

The three simple little non-signature bridges rank among the simplest construction projects in public works history, with the longest project construction timeline for such a simple project, which has now been ground to a halt for over a year for reasons which no one apparently has an explanation.

On a related note, someone named Anonymous made an anonymous comment  to a blog post from a couple days ago about the Fort Worth Bridge Boondoggle, with that comment consisting of a quote which sort of makes clear what one of the problems is which has turned what should have been a relatively simple public works project into America's Biggest Boondoggle...

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Overhead Look At Year's Progress Building Fort Worth Bridges Over Dry Land":

People are always asking when this project is going to start. Well, we’ve started after years and years of planning. We’ve been pregnant for a long time, now we are showing.

~J.D. Granger, executive director of the Trinity River Vision Authority, July 2008

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That J.D. Granger quote is almost a decade old. In 2008 Granger is saying this project has been going on for year and years, and that now, in 2008, the project is going to be showing progress for the first time.

It is now almost ten years later. That is one super long, record breaking pregnancy. A large part of the pregnant project has been in the hospital for over a year. Apparently with the doctors unable to determine what has gone wrong with the pregnancy.

Meanwhile, only in Fort Worth, after such an inept debacle, would someone like J.D. Granger not be fired from a job for which he had zero qualifications, other than a mother who needed to  be motivated to keep her son employed by directing federal money to what, under her son, has become America's Biggest Boondoggle...