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A podcast by GBH News reporter Ian Coss gives this notorious project a long-overdue reappraisal. Bonus: The show comes with lessons for climate infrastructure projects of the future.
If you’ve lived in Massachusetts at any point in the last 50 years, you’ve heard of the Big Dig. It’s infamous — a tunnel project that was supposed to bury an elevated highway in Boston to the tune of $2 billion that eventually ballooned in cost to $15 billion and took a quarter of a century to finish.
The Big Dig was more than just a highway project, though. It was a monumental effort that Ian Coss, a reporter at GBH News, calls a “renovation of downtown Boston.” The project built tunnels and bridges, yes, but it also created parks, public spaces, and mass transit options that transformed the city. In a nine-episode podcast series appropriately called The Big Dig, Coss dives into the long, complicated history of the project, making a case for why the Big Dig was so much more than the boondoggle people think it was.
I talked to Coss about how the Big Dig came to be and the lessons we can learn from it as we continue to adapt our built environment to a changing climate. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I moved to Boston for college in 2010, and I remember going to the North End and being struck by how beautiful it was. I didn’t realize how recently that view had changed until I listened to your podcast — I mean, the Big Dig had only wrapped up a few years earlier.
It’s easy to forget how quickly it transformed. I grew up in Massachusetts, so when I would come into the city I would see [the Big Dig] being built — I have vague memories of the elevated artery. And when I moved to Boston Proper in 2013, which was less than a decade after the project wrapped, it was stunning for me to be like, “oh, this is what that project was,” because I definitely didn’t understand it at the time.
What made you decide to create an entire podcast about this “renovation” of Boston?
I think part of it was this disconnect where I grew up hearing about the Big Dig and mostly hearing bad things about it — it was behind schedule, it was a disaster, a boondoggle, etc. — because that really was the reputation of the project, nationally and locally. And then moving to the city and seeing the fruits of it, it was hard to reconcile those things. Like, this “disaster” created a greenway through the middle of the city. Now you can actually get to the airport.
What was driving that narrative of its being a disaster?
The Big Dig went on a very long emotional journey. It started as this kind of visionary, idealistic project championed by activists and supported by politicians of both parties. And then, after navigating the process of funding, permitting, contracting, managing, and designing, by the time it's in construction, it really is not a source of pride.
There are a number of technical things about the Big Dig that could have been done better, and we can learn lessons from it. The way it was contracted could have been done better. The management structure could have been done better. There were flaws in the design, including a fatal flaw that cost the life of a driver in the tunnel.
I think a lot of it is about the storytelling. Just to give one example, so much of the negative narrative around the Big Dig was around the cost. You often hear about how it started with an estimated cost of $2 billion and wound up costing $15 billion. But I think that narrative misses a few things.
One is that it was never going to cost $2 billion. That was not a realistic estimate. But in our country, it is so hard to get approval, political support, funding, and permitting in place that there is a very strong incentive all throughout the process to downplay the costs, downplay the risks, downplay the disruption, make it sound like this is going to be quick and easy and painless and cheap, just to get to the starting line. Because the paradox of it is that if we had known in 1983 or 1987 or 1991 that this was going to be a $15 billion project, it would have never happened. And yet, in hindsight, there are many smart people who told me that this project was a bargain at $15 billion because of what we got in terms of economic benefits, transportation improvements, and environmental improvements.
There’s almost an element of asking for forgiveness rather than permission here, but that forgiveness is inevitably laced with anger because of those expectations.
Right. If only it were just forgiveness.
The Big Dig had its roots in the National Highway Program. Were all those projects going constantly over budget?
There’s a great paper that I cite in episode four where the authors studied the cost of highway building per mile every year from the 1970s through the 1990s, and it’s actually a great sample set because we’ve built so many highways of different sizes in different states. Basically, what they found is that highway costs per mile really ramp up significantly in the 1970s. And that’s, of course, the period when the [Big Dig] was first getting conceived.
So the short answer to your question is, it was cheaper once. But there were other costs, in that those early highways in the ‘50s and ‘60s largely did not consider the impact on communities or on the environment. They did not make a lot of mitigation efforts to minimize the day to day disruption caused by those projects. So I think part of what the Big Dig captures is this really historic change in the way we build things in this country that was ushered in by the anti-highway movements, by citizen activism, and by the National Environmental Policy Act. Over the course of the 1970s we made it much harder to build things, for very good reasons.
I think the Big Dig — which some people describe as the last great project of the interstate era — captures an attempt to do a massive, ambitious infrastructure project that is also loaded with environmental mitigation and also has a robust community process. Part of what we learned through that is that you can have a project that’s cheap and efficient, you can have a project that’s democratic and humane, but it’s tough to have it all. And the Big Dig was trying to have it all, and we did get it all, but at enormous cost. That was the thing that could never be solved.
You make a connection between the Big Dig and climate change right from the first episode. What are the climate lessons we can learn from the Big Dig?
In some ways, it’s ironic to hold up the Big Dig as a case study for climate change because it’s a highway project. My point is not that the Big Dig is, like, the future of infrastructure. But what it offers is a recent case study on a massively ambitious building project. We have some distance, and you can see the whole arc of it, but it very much lives within our era. It’s not the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge or any of those other big projects built in a different time under different conditions.
The way I see it is that in order to mitigate or prevent the worst effects of climate change — and you can feel free to disagree with me — we’re going to need to build a lot of stuff. This is not a problem that we’re going to solve by riding bicycles and growing vegetables in the backyard, both of which I do and hope everyone does. And of course, those projects might look different than the Big Dig because building a wind turbine isn’t exactly analogous to building a downtown tunnel. But I think there are relevant analogies, especially things like coastal mitigation in cities, improving mass transit, building high energy transmission lines — these large scale projects that will affect people but also are an important public good.
You talked on the show about the Big Dig as an attempt to make this process more democratic at some level. People on both sides had very strong feelings about it. This reminded me of the NIMBY/YIMBY dichotomy of climate projects. Did anyone mention any best practices that could be applied to future projects of this kind?
I’ve talked with Fred Salvucci [former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation and driving force of the Big Dig] about this. He mentioned this biblical parable — he’s full of parables — about Jesus walking across the water and then turning to his disciples and telling them to follow. But they step into the water and fall right in, and when they get back out they say it’s impossible. And then Jesus says, “It’s easy to walk across the water. You just have to know where the stones are.”
And Fred said the lesson there is that, in order to navigate this kind of process, you have to know where the flashpoints are, what the issues will be. That way you can anticipate them rather than just going in and saying “this is my project, I’m going to do it this way and you can fight me on it.”
Part of what I think is really interesting about this, which I think speaks to present-day projects like offshore wind, is that in that fight, you have very well-intentioned actors who are trying to make the project better and using the environmental process to do that. And you also have bad actors who are weaponizing and manipulating the environmental process to their own personal ends. And those two things get all mixed up.
You know, I’m an environmentalist. I believe in environmental review. I don’t want to sit here and say that we need to get rid of all environmental permitting because it makes it too hard to build things. But I think it’s also important to recognize that these things can be weaponized.
Scheme Z, which proposed this big spiral loop of ramps and a bridge over the river, is a good example. Politically, that became very messy — they were trying to impose concentrated harm in the name of a public good. And I know, strategically, maybe there are things [Salvucci] could have done to mitigate that or circumvent that, but given the structures in place, the logical outcome is that it spends a decade in lawsuits and review committees and you wind up with something that’s okay, that everyone can live with.
The funny thing about that is that it turned into the Zakim Bridge, which is now a Boston icon.
Right. I mean, that’s part of the communication piece, too.
I was biking under the Zakim bridge the other day, and I biked through where there’s a nice pedestrian and bicycle bridge and this skate park that is always filled with people. Truly, that is maybe the best utilized public space created by the Big Dig.
It’s easy for me to play Monday morning quarterback and say “oh, you should have communicated that better, you should have told the story better.” I mean, he was saying all the right things. But then all you had to say on the other side was “it’s 18 lanes and five ramps,” and that sounded terrible and looked terrible on the page. And I mean, sure, I wish there weren’t all those ramps there, but like you said, ironically, the bridge became an icon of the city.
I think a big part of the lesson for me is how hard it is to build infrastructure democratically because the timescales are all wrong. These things have short-term costs and cause short-term disruption and bring very long-term benefits.
I was constantly struck by this issue of scale, both in terms of time and money. It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea of billions of dollars and projects that span decades. These are just things that are impossible for any regular person to really plan out.
I was talking to someone who said that their dad was in his 70s when the Big Dig was just getting started. And for him, it was like, “my city’s going to be torn up for the rest of my life,” right? That’s what this project meant for him — he would live with this mess of a project and never see the results. And he had to deal with that so that you could move to Boston in 2010 and never know the city another way. The cost of that benefit is borne by another generation.
And it’s the same thing with climate change. It moves on a scale that is so much longer than politics. The Big Dig took almost 40 years from conception to completion. So if you’re thinking about political capital, if you’re thinking about two- and four-year election cycles, it’s very, very hard to conceive, plan, and deliver a project on that kind of time scale.
The benefits and costs are almost inverted in climate change, in a way. We’re talking about future benefits, yes, but we’re also talking about future costs if we don’t do anything. But it’s so hard to make people think in a 40- or 50-year timescale.
If the Big Dig was so hard to make happen politically with what I think was a more genial political environment overall, it feels kind of impossible to think of building anything on that scale right now.
I gave a talk at City Hall a few weeks ago and I was talking with some of the young planners there, people who are in their 30s. Some of them have been listening to the series, and they told me they could not imagine what it would be like to get that kind of federal funding out of Washington, get all the local players on board, get it through the permitting process, and get it contracted. Because right now if they try to take away one parking spot and put in one bike line, they’re bogged down in meetings for a year.
I think climate change is also the inverse of projects like this because with the Big Dig, for example, you can feel the tangible benefits of a quicker commute and a more beautiful city. But with climate change, if the projects work, you’d actually feel nothing.
Exactly. Climate change is way, way harder. A road project or a rail project will have benefits. You get ribbon cuttings and photo ops. But if we make Boston resilient to flooding or something, you know, do some big project that would improve the shoreline or whatever ideally, that historic storm surge may never come, or it’ll come and we’ll be prepared for it and nothing will happen. But yeah, you’re working with long term counterfactuals.
It feels to me like climate change was designed in a laboratory to flummox institutions. It takes all of our cognitive biases, our ingrained social and biological blind spots and weak points and just flicks them all at us at once.
All nine episodes of The Big Dig are out now. You can listen on the WGBH website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.