The very urban portions of the coastal areas pay most of the taxes, while the rest of the rural parts pay a much smaller portion. Unfortunately, the rural parts (basically anything not directly within x miles of the coast) see this as a massive waste for something that won't benefit them.

The implications of this are far-reaching and incredibly polarizing for our state. Not good.

We all know about assumptions, but this shouldn't be entirely blamed on the contractor, especially since WSDOT is ultimately responsible for the project.

There's clearly a serious if not fatal problem with leadership of the whole project, which as I noted has very bad incentives that are aligned with allowing problems.

In this case, there should have been someone obsessing on the path of the tunnel. And then the boring crew, its supervisors etc. should not have, after hitting the casing (which cased the top part to jump many feet into the air), blithely continued boring until the machine failed hard (that could have turned something relatively fixable into the disaster they have now).

I'm unimpressed.