Three summers ago, a bizarre spectacle played out in former I-90 express lanes near Lake Washington, where hard-hat workers jackhammered away hundreds of concrete rail ties they just built for Sound Transit.
That demolition, which pulverized millions of dollars worth of materials, and the subsequent rebuild of 5,400 track ties, were the main reasons that light rail service between South Bellevue and Seattle, promised by mid-2023, will be delayed almost three years to early 2026.
The delays are partly a consequence of attempting the world’s first light rail on a floating bridge, an audacious feat of engineering.
However, finger-pointing is already underway between Sound Transit and Kiewit-Hoffman, the prime contractor for the I-90 section of the $3.7 billion, 14-mile East Link connecting Seattle and Redmond. Sound Transit officials have blamed their contractors for “defective work.” Contractors accused the transit agency of moving the goal posts, adding mandates after work started, according to internal documents.
A Seattle Times review of hundreds of pages of claims and technical documents shows that when ripple effects of delays are calculated, Sound Transit might be on the hook for $250 million or more to Kiewit-Hoffman and other contractors and consultants — five times the price of Jeff Bezos’ wedding in Venice.
The main losers of the project’s missteps are the public who can’t yet ride the full corridor, which is supposed to haul 50,000 daily passengers. Without its floating Seattle connection, the Eastside-only starter line carries a mere 7,000.
Politicians and commuters have dreamed of a cross-lake rail connection since 1970, when King County mapped an I-90 floating bridge route in the Forward Thrust levy package, which voters rejected during a recession.
Voters in 2008 approved higher sales taxes to finance the Eastside-Seattle line, which Sound Transit promised to open by 2020. Route disputes in Bellevue consumed three years, long before construction began.
Sound Transit reached a milestone in May by pushing an unpowered railcar across the floating bridge, demonstrating the tracks are solid. The next major test is to run a powered train in July or risk more delays.
“It’s exciting to be able to show the project that’s been this long in coming, getting to these final stages and getting ready for passenger service. It’s fun,” executive project director Randy Harlow said during a site tour last month.
Sound Transit named many reasons for slow construction progress. New methods took longer than forecast. COVID-19 precautions, a weak supply chain and a four-month concrete drivers strike ate up time.
Kimberly Farley, then Sound Transit’s deputy CEO, also admitted in 2022 that “our program was not robust enough to identify the problems” with the contractors’ work.
Usually when megaprojects bog down, executives wait until completion before they hammer out final amounts, by a handshake or by litigation.
“Our focus here is not to start getting locked into all these commercial discussions,” said Terri Mestas, deputy CEO for project delivery. “We’re so close to the finish line, that’s where all of our eyes need to be.”
Kiewit-Hoffman declined an interview request and wouldn’t answer emailed questions for this article, “as we continue to have ongoing discussions with Sound Transit about open issues,” a spokesperson replied.
Its contract currently stands at $745 million, not counting rework and other disputed costs related to delays, for which the companies filed claims for 15 tasks potentially totaling $139 million.
Disputed concrete
The simplest place to set railroad ties is gravel ballast, nestled into well-drained soil, as it was on the Mercer Island portion of the I-90 crossing. Attaching ties to a repurposed bridge deck is trickier.
And perhaps surprisingly, the worst problems happened on I-90’s stationary, aerial bridge spans, not on the floating pontoons.
The mission: Build those 5,400 rail ties, called plinths, on-site from scratch, pouring concrete into blocks 6 inches or higher, while matching various slopes and curves. They required exceptional quality, especially the surface, to ensure that rail fasteners are never shaken loose by 200-ton trains.
Sound Transit first noticed weak spots in 2019, its reports have said. The agency approved patching those with epoxy and expected the problem could be rapidly and quietly cured.
But concerns about the concrete bubbled up into official project updates — a December 2021 progress report, and a staff presentation to a transit board committee the next April.
Sound Transit engineers mainly worried that the rail ties lacked strength because they had too much unreinforced concrete at the top. Kiewit hired an outside engineer who found that a top layer of up to 4 ⅛ inches could be used “as-is,” except for a few taller plinths. A company letter insisted its original work met contract specifications, so Sound Transit should pay for any changes.
The impending crisis didn’t become widespread public knowledge until The Times, based on a tip from a transit worker, published photos of workers chipping at rail ties near the Jose Rizal Bridge in Seattle.
In her August 2022 report, Farley acknowledged: “Sound Transit and/or our construction management consultants did not identify contractors’ mistakes quickly enough.”
Even then, Kiewit and Sound Transit estimated that retrofits could be accomplished by late 2022, leading to passenger service in early 2024, using concrete grout to resurface the rail ties, like dental fillings.
Sound Transit probed deeper. A forensic lab test in mid-2022 found the grouting mixture could shrink and actually risk long-term failure of the concrete. As more cracks appeared, Sound Transit ordered a halt to the grouting.
Project staff finally broke more bad news to the board in March 2023: All 5,400 plinths must be rebuilt.
The defects led to an internal review at Sound Transit, and its promised reforms read like a confessional list: Add oversight staff at I-90 and elsewhere; establish “hold points” for Sound Transit staff and consultants to witness work tasks; hire more materials experts, and “rotate construction engineers and inspectors on a schedule to mitigate complacency.”
Contractors had their own critique of the agency, accusing Sound Transit of piling on new requirements without extra compensation.
“Sound Transit does not have carte blanche to declare KH’s work to be a ‘nonconformance’ or even ‘defective work’ as it has unilaterally done in this case,” said one of Kiewit-Hoffman’s technical letters.
Contractors carried out all replacements as ordered, though Sound Transit executives sometimes complained publicly they didn’t mobilize fast enough.
But last year, labor shifts increased to 24 hours, six days a week, and transit leaders’ confidence in the work improved.
“It’s more collaborative than I feel like it was a couple years ago. We were at loggerheads about everything, we still have struggles from time to time, but I feel like that level of satisfaction is going up over the course of time,” said Harlow, who took over East Link after leading the 2024 Lynnwood extension.
Floating bridge precautions
While Sound Transit wrestled with concrete problems on the fixed portions of the I-90 crossing, another set of problems arose at the floating pontoons across a 1-mile section over Lake Washington to Mercer Island. Any stray electrical current from the trains could cause the pontoons to crack, threatening their long-term buoyancy.
To insulate concrete and rebar from the current, concrete rail ties contained threaded nylon holes to receive rail-fastener bolts.
At first, some of the threads in the holes began to strip, as Sound Transit reported, because a waterproofing compound leaked in. Contractors cleaned the nylon holes with swabs and solvent, at an estimated $15 million cost, an issue “that is from our perspective, solely a (Sound Transit) issue,” wrote Brawn Lausen, the builders’ project manager.
Despite that effort, Sound Transit decided to replace all 19,500 nylon inserts anyway and spend at least $9 million to be sure they’re snug.
Crews must still patch tears in a rubberized insulation layer spanning the floating-bridge deck and pass a high-voltage test to comply with a Washington State Department of Transportation goal of preserving I-90 at least 70 more years. Other stray-current defense systems, including devices that control electric flows inside the pontoons, still need adjustments.
Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine cited electrical fine-tuning in May as causing a few weeks’ delay, from December 2025 until early 2026.
“We’re sort of in this together, and we have this mutual motivation to see it be successful,” said Evan Grimm, WSDOT state bridge engineer.
Costs and consequences
Sound Transit historically tends to postpone bad news, but in recent years leaders have promised more transparency. So why didn’t the agency reveal the dilemmas much sooner?
Peter Rogoff, a former Sound Transit CEO, said “the problem in the plinths was under considerable investigation, whether it was a one-off on a few items, and how pervasive it was” when he left the agency in spring 2022.
The final price tag isn’t known yet. East Link’s $3.7 billion spending plan has churned through its $202 million contingency fund and sits “basically right at its cap of the overall budget,” Michael Morgan, a megaproject delivery executive, told board members this spring. New progress reports anticipate more claims and costs around the corner.
A cost overrun won’t trigger any near-term tax increase. But if Sound Transit does spend significant amounts settling East Link disputes, that might delay future projects, or shove more debt onto future generations. And potential I-90 overruns pale in comparison to bigger cash flow problems for the agency, such as how to finance the $7 billion West Seattle corridor.
So far, the cross-lake delays have led Sound Transit’s board to authorize higher payments totaling up to $140 million to six parties, including WSDOT, construction management consultant Jacobs Engineering and Kiewit-Hoffman. Of that sum, $68 million went to Mass Electric because it had to wait years for rail construction to finish so it could install signals and systems.
If all the pending and expected claims get paid, the final bill for delays could exceed $250 million.
But staff reports also promise to “aggressively pursue” a return of funds if Sound Transit can show that a contractor’s own acts or inaction caused higher costs.
The contract calls for $15,000 in so-called “liquidated damages” each day the job is late after Sept. 24, 2021. That translates to roughly $22 million, but Harlow predicts the agency will calculate “actual damages” instead of liquidated damages.
“There’s unquestionably going to be litigation,” predicted former transit CEO Rogoff, who provides strategic advice to transit agencies.
Deputy CEO Mestas, who moved here a year ago after leading big projects for Los Angeles International Airport, declined to discuss claim or counterclaim numbers. “We don’t have a number to hang our hat on yet, and that’s not unusual.”
More than a year ago, some Sound Transit officials discussed replacing Kiewit-Hoffman.
“I thought very hard about whether we should consider another contractor and change,” said transit board member Claudia Balducci of Bellevue. “That would have entailed a lot of delay and stopped the project — if we could even get a new contractor on board — at a higher price.”
Blacklisting or firing large contractors is rare and would be especially abnormal regarding Kiewit, which has decades of floating bridge experience and recently was building four Sound Transit projects. It completed the southern half of the 2024 Northgate-Lynnwood line trouble-free and helped Sound Transit solve a problem by bridging over wetlands in Federal Way.
Mestas calls I-90 rail unusually complex. “We’ve said this a lot, but this kind of approach has never been done before. I think that sometimes, we don’t give ourselves enough time.” She hopes the public understands “we want this to be of excellent quality and safety.”
The final exam
Next up, trains must travel electrified during a critical test run in July. Otherwise, the latest East Link target launch date of Jan. 31 will slip again.
If that happens, it could conflict with Sound Transit’s goal to open the three-station line to Federal Way in mid-March. Staff have looked into a Federal Way-first scenario based on what Mestas calls due diligence, but she emphasized Sound Transit remains on pace to open Lake Washington passenger service by early 2026.
That would finally connect Seattle with 10 already opened stations, including Marymoor Village and Downtown Redmond, which launched this May.
“You can’t talk to anybody about Redmond without them asking when we’re going to connect” to Seattle, said Balducci.
Before planning any celebrations, Sound Transit must prove the Eastside line’s most exotic feature — track joints that flex in six directions to carry trains between the fixed I-90 spans and onto the floating pontoons — will work.
The eight joints rest upon seismic dampers — like those supporting the roof of Lumen Field — to keep rails parallel when lake levels change 2 feet seasonally and trains roll at 55 mph. They’ve endured land tests in Colorado, but not yet over water.
Sound Transit will double the typical number of practice trips, Harlow said, including 20 days of running full time every eight minutes or so, and 75 days of other trial runs.
In hindsight, delays for such an intricate corridor aren’t surprising, Rogoff said.
“Five years from now, as people are using it routinely to get between the Eastside and Seattle, few of them will remember that it was late to be finished.”
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