Powers Fasteners Finalizes Civil Settlement

Jason Sandefur

While admitting no wrongdoing, Powers Fasteners announced a $6 million settlement with the family of the woman killed in the July 2006 collapse of Boston’s Big Dig tunnel.
The agreement is the first settlement in the case against a consortium of 16 companies, including the construction manager Bechtel / Parsons Brinkerhoff, contractor Modern Continental, designer Gannett Fleming and the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.
“We are grateful that the Powers family company has done the right thing,” said the family of Milena Del Valle. “Powers respected our family by answering our questions, giving us a Mass card in memory of Milena and settling the case. “We feel that the Powers family, like ours, has suffered enough.”
Powers Fasteners president Jeffrey Powers called the accident a “tragedy.”
“We too are a family – and together with our family of employees, we are forever changed by events of July 10, 2006.
“We hope that the settlement agreement we have reached will finally allow the healing process to begin. We also hope that this will lead others who, unlike Powers, truly were responsible for the accident, to do the same.”
Powers Fasteners, which manufactured the epoxy blamed for the tunnel collapse, is the only company charged in the incident.
The company recently lost its bid to have the manslaughter indictment dismissed. Superior Court Judge Patrick Brady rejected the argument by attorneys for Powers Fasteners that Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has a conflict of interest in the case because she sought criminal charges while simultaneously pursuing large civil settlements in the case.
By singling out Powers Fasteners, Coakley’s assessment of the case contradicts a National Transportation Safety Board report that spread broad blame for the ceiling collapse.
An NTSB investigation concluded that designers and construction crews had not considered that the epoxy holding 5/8″ diameter threaded steel anchor rods embedded about five inches in the tunnel’s concrete roof could creep under load. The NTSB specifically faulted ceiling designer Gannett Fleming for failing to stipulate which kind of epoxy to use during installation. \ �2008 FastenerNews.com