MBTA Cancels Upcoming Blue Line Tunnel Work

At a community meeting last month the MBTA’s Adam Kamoune announced the T would be closing down the Blue Line for nearly two weeks between Airport and Government Center from Saturday, April 2 to Thursday, April 14 for harbor tunnel repair work.

However, the collapse of a portion of the Government Center Garage that killed a construction worker and dumped tons of concrete on the road above the Green Line tunnel at Haymarket has forced the MBTA to push back the Blue Line project. Authorities are investigating the cause of the garage collapse and the MBTA countries to inspect Green Line tunnels below the collapse.

MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo made the announcement last week that the Blue Line project would be postponed until further notice.

The MBTA was planning on replacing 1,800 feet of track in the Blue Line’s harbor tunnel and this work is going to make the tunnel more resilient and less prone to some of the concerns from the environmental community like flooding. The work will also make Blue Line service a little more reliable in the future.

The work would have included tunnel inspections, tunnel lighting repair, fiber optic cable installation, and removing abandoned cable that exists in the tunnel.

The MBTA also planned to perform signal repairs, which is a major source of issues on the Blue Line when there are so-called “blind delays’’. The MBTA was also planning to investigate some of the drainage issues in the harbor tunnel.

The project would have closed the Blue Line from Airport to Bowdoin for 13 days. Bus service for residents and commuters would have replaced train service from East Boston to Downtown during work.