By Robin Washington
July 9, 2019

In a bit of unintended irony, the train announcement for Aquarium Station on the Blue Line tells passengers it’s the stop to make a connection for water transportation.

The announcement is referring to the T’s water shuttle, but riders are likely more familiar with the water on the platform.

“I always see water [there],” said Amy Cosman, who’s been using the stop for five years. She said she’s never seen it without water on the platform, which the T has addressed by placing orange cones that one more typically sees when someone is mopping a floor.

At the eastern end of the station, near the New England Aquarium and the harbor, riders can hear a continuous trickle. That turned into a torrent during a Jan. 2018 storm, when water gushed down the stairs at the Atlantic Avenue entrances. The same thing happened that March, closing those entrances.

In the following year, the T took several temporary measures to dam the water, which MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak reported to the agency’s Fiscal Management and Control Board this February.

“We had our first deployment of a temporary flood barrier around the Aquarium headhouse, which has been an ongoing challenge,” he said. “This is a temporary solution. It’s actually using a tube filled with water to hold out water.”

For a permanent solution, engineers will have to identify all the ways water is getting in and plug them. MBTA environmental chief Andrew Brennan told the control board this month that it won’t be cheap.

“We’re talking in the tens of millions of dollars — $20 to $40 million — for Aquarium Station,” he said. “There’s literally dozens and dozens of entry points for water, so we’ve got to figure all that out.”

Brennan said the project falls under the T’s resiliency program, and attributed much of the flooding to climate change, expected to get worse on the entire Blue Line as time goes on. But Carlos Peñaranda, who’s been commuting at the station since 2001, said it’s been leaking since it was rebuilt in 2004 as part of the Big Dig.

“The water’s always been here,” he said.

“Part of the problem is because they keep trying to patch [it],” he continued. “Water’s always going to find its way. They rebuild the aesthetics of the station, so it’s aesthetically looking nice. However, they never fixed the problem, the core issue that causes the floors to erode, which is running water all the time. It’s [a] no-brainer.”

In a 2015 interview with me, State Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack also acknowledged the problem goes back years and could be linked to the Big Dig.

“Whether the leaks at Aquarium are because the original contracted work was not overseen properly … and the contractor didn’t do their job, or because the rebuild was right and the problems developed afterward,” she said then, “the point is the T’s responsibility is to be able to identify and address problems like that, and when they’re not, we need to do better.”

If that sounds like the T was going to get to the bottom of it and identify exactly who or what was responsible, it hasn’t, at least not publicly. Earlier this month, T spokesman Joe Pesaturo said, “There have never been any claims made against the designer or construction for the Aquarium project.”

That’s despite a settlement with the commonwealth from Big Dig contractor Bechtel Parsons Brinckerhoff to pay for leaks in the Expressway tunnel a few years after the project was completed. The joint venture has not been publicly deemed responsible for the leaks at Aquarium.

As for the future, Control Board Chairman Joseph Aiello said the agency needs to work with the city of Boston and other government entities to fight back the tide in the area as climate change gets worse.

“If we don’t engage in a locally-globally solution here, you know, people are not going to swim to get to a dry station,” he said.

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