Central Artery tunnel project (Boston)

Tom's pun-bridge between "depressing" the weld pool and depressing the Central Artery — $17B final cost vs. $2B original estimate; the depression concept was proposed by one of Tom's MIT civil-engineering classmates. The Keverian/Dukakis "how do you depress the Central Artery" jokes are characteristic Tom local-color material.

The plasma jet also depresses the weld pool. What do we mean by depressing the weld pool? When you start talking about depression — before they built the Central Artery, the Big Dig here in Boston, that cost 17 billion dollars, original estimate of 2 billion. It was done by one of my classmates, an MIT engineer. He was a civil engineer, he was the one who proposed depressing the Central Artery. The joke in the early 90s was, how do you depress the Central Artery? One answer was, you could have George Keverian sit on it. George Keverian was Speaker of the House of Representatives in Massachusetts. He weighed about 450 pounds, so if he sat on it, you could depress it. The other one was, Michael Dukakis was governor, and they used to say you could have Michael Dukakis talk to it for an hour and that would depress it.