*On Thursday morning, the ground collapsed in the recently built tunnel under Serebryany Bor (a forest park area in Moscow). The cave-in occurred on the section of road heading out of the city toward the surrounding region. As a result of the accident, traffic on two lanes has been restricted. According to Moscow city utility officials, the ground gave way in one of the lanes, creating a hole 30 centimeters deep and measuring 1 by 1 meter. In the adjacent lane, a 1.5 by 1.5 meter section of the road surface was found to have bulged upward. Both damaged lanes have been closed, and traffic is moving along the only remaining undamaged lane. *http://gazeta.ru/realty/2008/04/24_a_2705678.shtml I spent a lot, a great deal of time on this tunnel. A grand embodiment of the Moscow city construction complex. A million violations. Ten times more expensive than it should have been. And it broke down immediately. The tunnel cost the city $250 million (!) per kilometer. It is a complex structure, but things of this level of complexity in Switzerland—even taking into account the high cost of labor—cost 4 to 5 times less. The contract was handed, without any tender whatsoever, to the notorious LLC "Organizer." All our attempts to bring even a little pressure to bear on them were brilliantly beaten back. Neither the Anti-Monopoly Service nor anyone else helped at all. To top it all off, Resin (Vladimir Resin, then a top Moscow city construction official) even sued me and the newspaper Novye Izvestia—and won. So that we would keep our mouths shut. The lack of a tender was explained primarily by the hyper-mega-extra technologies supposedly possessed by "Organizer." The work was said to be unique, you see, and therefore a tender could not be held. And in less than half a year, those unique works had already begun going spectacularly to pieces. I am sure that the London real estate purchased with the kickback from the tunnel's construction will prove far more reliable and durable, even if it was built using less "unique" technology.