Who is responsible for the Washington Bridge failure? State may file lawsuit next month.
PROVIDENCE – Lawyers representing Rhode Island Wednesday said they expect to sue one or more companies who worked on the now defunct Interstate 195 westbound Washington Bridge as early as next month.
"Absent a startling revelation, which is always possible because we're still reviewing documents, our best judgment is in early August we will be in a position to definitively recommend whether or not to bring a suit, and if so, to whom against," Max Wistow, the lead attorney in the outside legal team hired by Gov. Dan McKee to recover money from bridge contractors, told reporters at a Wednesday morning news conference.
Asked whether at this point he thinks the state has a case against someone, Wistow said it is "way more likely than not."
Since April, the team – six lawyers supported by more paralegals and staff – led by Wistow and Jonathan Savage have been poring over tens of thousands of records related to the construction and maintenance of the circa-1968 Washington Bridge, which closed to avoid collapse in December.
The lawyers have also been working with engineering experts from Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, who conducted a "forensic audit" of the bridge for the McKee administration, to find what caused its condition to deteriorate.
Wistow said the legal team has asked WJE to dig deeper into the history and past work on the bridge to collect the information necessary to make a case, research that continues now.
He described the bridge case as "factually, very, very complex," but legally not much more complex than a professional negligence case against a doctor, accountant or other service provider.
When is the 'day of reckoning'?
When McKee in March announced that the bridge would be torn down, he said those responsible for the cost and inconvenience it has caused would face a "day of reckoning" that many residents are still waiting for.
In the short term at least, the decision to deploy Wistow and Savage on a mission to recover money from Washington Bridge contractors has slowed the release of information about what went wrong and why.
The state does not want to release any information that might disadvantage the lawsuit, including the preliminary findings of the WJE forensic audit.
"If we decide that there's not going to be a suit ... the decision of whether or not to release [the audit] will be the governor's, not ours – our role would be ended," Wistow said. "But if a lawsuit is filed, as is expected, we're not going to reveal the preliminary work of the expert or the final work of the expert until we are required to do so in court proceedings."
Wistow compared a bridge lawsuit to his case against those involved in the state's failed 38 Studios loan and noted that in that case, all of the civil case records produced by the plaintiffs were ultimately made public.
What about the Rhode Island Department of Transportation?
In addition to changing when information becomes available, a lawsuit will also likely shift some of the focus of efforts to assign blame.
After all, the state isn't going to sue itself, even if the Department of Transportation made errors, and individual DOT employees don't make attractive lawsuit targets because they aren't insured and have limited assets.
"For us to start blaming individuals with very little capacity to respond would just be playing into the hands of other defendants," Wistow said. "They would just say, look, the state itself is blaming its employees. So that doesn't sound like a practical or realistic approach."
But information about how the Department of Transportation maintained, or failed to maintain, the bridge is likely to be revealed by any defendant in a lawsuit.
"It would be an unusual case if we sued any other entity and they didn't try to shift as much of the blame as possible to the Department of Transportation," Wistow said. "And we anticipate that if there is such a suit that, yes, there would be all kinds of claims made."
How much do the lawyers make?
Wistow, Sheehan & Loveley PC, and Savage Law Partners LLP will get 16.67% of any settlement proceeds. Their contract also allows them to bill for expenses, although Savage said no such payments have been made so far.
Who are potential targets?
In April, the bridge legal team sent letters to at least a dozen firms advising them to put their insurance companies on notice and not to destroy any documents related to the bridge.
The firms that received letters were: AECOM, Cardi Corporation, Barletta Heavy Division, Aetna Bridge, VHB, Michael Baker International, Steere Engineering, Prime AE Group, Commonwealth Engineers, TransSystems Corporation, Collins Engineers and Jacob Engineering Group.
No companies bid to rebuild the bridge
The legal wrangling comes as the state tries to find a contractor to build a new Washington Bridge at a price it can afford.
At the start of the month, no companies responded to an initial request for proposals to rebuild the bridge and the specter of legal action against anyone who works for the state has been offered as one factor in the lack of industry interest in the project.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Washington Bridge-related lawsuit could come in early August
