INT: What was your first impression of Silano?

FS: He's just a terrific guy. He's a very likable guy and reminds me a lot of my father and a lot of guys I know. You know, he's about five-foot-nine, a little bit chunky, talks real plain, right out of Brooklyn, and brilliant is the thing that comes through. I mean you get past the kind of jovial way of talking and you see a person who's really a great engineer.

INT: Talk very generally about some of the other engineering challenges on this project.

FS: You have a very old East Coast city. Boston was first settled in 1630. And there aren't any accurate plans of what's under the ground. There are telephone wires, water lines, gas lines, electric lines, and in some cases you have drawings and in some cases you don't and even when you have drawings, sometimes the utility is not located where it says. So you're gonna be working underground. You can't shut down the telephone system for the financial district of Boston. I mean there are major consequences from interfering with any of these underground utilities.

So you've got an extremely complicated job to relocate these utilities before you do anything else so that you can then dig without disrupting the continued functioning of all of these services. In a way it's a less visible version of the need to respect the people who are using the road to travel to work or make their deliveries in a truck. Every telephone line, every electric utility, every gas line -- you touch a gas line you could have an explosion. So there's a meticulous job that needs to be done underground even before the quote, "real construction" begins just relocating all these utilities into coherent patterns so that they can be out of the way of the construction, but continue to function. One element of it was to renew almost all of the telephone lines with fiber optic in a totally different part of the city just to relocate them out of the way.

But sometimes when God gives you a lemon, you try to make lemonade. We had to relocate, so why not go to new technology and end up with not the same old telephone lines, but the newest technology? So while you're solving a problem, you try to not just get it out of the way, but actually prepare for the future. So there are a large number of those kinds of issues that come up any place that you're substantial amount of underground work, but essentially when you're in the middle of an old city with a lot of underground work and especially in a city where the economy is so totally tied to telecommunications functioning without disruption. It's a complicated job.

INT: What about tunneling underneath these historic structures?

FS: You have to prepare and think and plan and do it right. And I think the construction community has gotten very good at that. Internationally, people have become very good at tunneling. A lot of the tunneling work that we do in Boston using methods that were initiated particularly by the French, Italians, and Austrians who started out tunneling under the Alps. And a lot of those techniques and some of the techniques that we used in the Milan subway system were then copied in the Western Hemisphere, initially in Toronto and then we brought them into Boston to do our transit tunnels. Originality isn't what you're after. You'd like to find someone who's solve this problem before and if they had a good solution and it worked, you'd like to copy because every time you do these things you get a little bit better at it.

[With] some of these problems, there's nobody to copy and you have to do an innovative solution and really that's what Lou Silano did with the problem near Gillette; he had a unique problem. He found a brand-new solution for it, but to the best of your ability you try to use things that people have already done before and done successfully, 'cause you really can't afford to fail. There's too much at stake for the abutters and for the project as a whole.

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