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In this August 1888 photo, wooden pilings are seen sunk in the ground during the construction of the Boston Public Library. Groundwater levels have been dropping for years in some Boston neighborhoods, exposing the wooden supports that have propped up the city for more than a century. Without the protecting embrace of water, the pilings quickly rot.
AP Photo Courtesy of the Boston Public Library
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MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said the agency is footing the bill "as a gesture of good faith.""No study has been generated to indicate that a transit tunnel is the primary reason for groundwater levels dropping in any particular neighborhood," he said.Mike Nairne, who lives nearby, paid a few thousand dollars to have engineers dig up his back yard and look at the pilings under his home. The diagnosis: minor damage. The water being pumped by the MBTA has restored the water levels around his pilings at no additional cost to Nairne."In three or five years our pilings would have rotted," said Nairne, who can check his water levels through a monitoring well.Despite evidence that water levels are dropping, lawsuits seeking to hold the city and state responsible for personal property damage have so far been unsuccessful because no law guarantees a right to groundwater, said James W. Hunt, Boston's chief of environment and energy.More than a dozen Beacon Hill homeowners sued in the 1980s, claiming government agencies were responsible for the damage to their pilings after the state built a highway underpass on Storrow Drive. That case was settled out of court and others are pending.The owners of a waterfront office building have sued the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, claiming the notorious Big Dig lowered groundwater levels and damaged its pilings. The Big Dig is the unofficial name for a project to route the main artery through Boston through a tunnel.But although the $14.6 billion project created miles of new highway tunnels under downtown Boston and has been famously leaking ever since, it has so far contributed little to the problem, said Lambrechts. The comparatively tiny Storrow Drive underpass, for example, poses a greater threat to groundwater than the entire Big Dig.One possible solution is to put barriers in the ground to prevent the groundwater from escaping, Lambrechts said. But such a solution would be costly and it's unclear who would pay."First and foremost we need to stop the leaks," Hunt said. "We'd love to find a silver bullet. We unfortunately haven't found that."
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