Moving Day

The WordChemist blog has a new home! The new incarnation of WordChemist resides at http://wordchemist.com/scienceblog/. I am shifting the focus of the blog to scientific topics, including the role of science in society, under-reported scientific developments, and areas where several threads of scientific inquiry converge. Visit my main website, http://wordchemist.com for news items and a sampling of articles that I have published.

Silver Spring Transit Center goes off the rails

And there it sits. Remember the 2008 groundbreaking, followed by months of relocating utility lines and dealing with polluted soil? Remember how glad we all were when this thing finally started taking shape? Well, we are still waiting for completion, and we will wait for quite a while longer. The lawyers and engineers are trying to decide whose set of specs they were supposed to be following. The builder says they followed the specs they were given. Metro says that the concrete is too thin in some places, too thick in others. One side wants to patch up the bad places and move forward. The other side wants to rip the whole thing down and start over. They have spent about $100 million on this already. About the only good thing you can say about this gargantuan hunk of concrete is that it provided some people with employment during the depth of the crash these last few years. That's small comfort to the thousands of commuters who have to walk all the way around the construction site every day just to get to their bus stops.

Well, heck. Here is a photo I took on December 9. If it looks like not a lot has changed since my last posting in August, you're right. Apparently, a subcontractor was cutting corners, and the thickness of the concrete was not up to industry standards at several places on the top level. Completion of the transit center has been delayed "indefinitely". Here are a couple of links to articles in the Washington Post:

Silver Spring Transit Hub Gets Another Delay (Jan. 10)

Silver Spring Transit Center Delayed Indefinitely (Jan. 13)