A superb article about a Russian immigrant who happens to be a civil engineer and happens to know tunnels. Note the year when the article was published.
TUNNEL VISION VLADIMIR KHAZAK PLANS HIS MOVES YEARS IN ADVANCEBy James Wallace P-I Reporter
SUNDAY, May 8, 1988
Vladimir Khazak looks out his window at the cars and Metro buses clogging Second Avenue. It is the evening rush hour, and a massive traffic jam stretches north for many city blocks. On the street below, the sounds of horns, brakes, tires and engines ricochet between the walls of office buildings as people leave their jobs and head home - the sound of a city on the move.
Skyscrapers are rising. The waterfront is getting a face lift. A new city park is taking shape. And under Third Avenue, a block from the Exchange Building, crews are working 60 feet under ground on Metro's twin bus tunnels. Two years from now, those tunnels are supposed to carry riders on a 1.3- mile underground odyssey through the heart of downtown Seattle, avoiding the mess of cars and buses that now inch their way along Second Avenue below.
The sounds of that traffic jam are faint by the time they reach the window of Khazak's 13th-floor office. Khazak is construction manager of the half-billion-dollar bus tunnel project. It is a job that requires all the strategy of a chess master, someone able to analyze several moves ahead, anticipating and overcoming any challenge. "I am a chess player," Khazak says. "I like to strategize. I think in steps . . .. "But if you play only a few moves in advance you don't have a chance. You need to think a dozen or more."
And who plays chess like that better than a Russian?
Twelves years ago, Vladimir Khazak was an engineer from Leningrad, supervising construction of waste-water treatment plants in the Soviet Union. Today, he is in charge of one of Seattle's biggest, most costly and most ambitious public works projects.
He turns from the window toward a huge flow chart covering much of one office wall. Hundreds of boxes indicate critical construction deadlines. Lines connect to the boxes. Other lines connect to those lines and still more to those lines. It's an intricate puzzle, a step-by-step guide to hundreds of construction tasks that must be completed on time if the bus tunnels are to open on schedule. The chart ends in mid-1990.
"The most important thing," he says, "is to see the future all the time . . .things that have to be done today must not be allowed to block the picture of what needs to be done for tomorrow."
Khazak is the perfect construction manager for such an important project, say those who know him best. "He came to this project with the reputation as a tough project manager with a single-mindedness about getting the job completed and on time," says David Kalberer, superintendent of the tunnel project. "But he has much superior people skills than was the reputation that preceded him...'
Kalberer and Khazak have offices at opposite ends of the 13th floor of the Exchange Building. Kalberer formerly managed Metro's intergovernmental relations. He never before managed a large construction project. He is given to flashy European- style clothes. Khazak has been involved in construction management much of his adult life. He dresses conservatively. They met on the job.
Khazak is known around Metro for his dry humor and quick wit. And for his famous, oft-quoted "Russian proverbs." Ruth Williamson, Khazak's secretary, says her favorite is one about a tug boat captain. As she tells it:
The captain operated his tug in a harbor with a dangerous entrance. Many ships were wrecked on the rocks. But the captain always got his ships safely through. Each time he hooked up to a ship, he would pull a piece of paper from his pocket, read the paper and then navigate safely. One day, before he was about to hook up to a ship, the captain pulled out his piece of paper and fell over dead from a heart attack. Everyone rushed up to read the paper and learn his secret. The paper said: "The bow is in the front and the stern is in the back."
"That's just how Vladimir looks at things . . . very simply," says Williamson. "But a lot of people don't remember it." She describes Khazak as a tough boss to work for, demanding with a strong personality. But there is genuine affection for the man who went through several secretaries before her.
Kalberer, struggling to find the flavor of the man, says Khazak sees people and life as a story. "If you don't have a story to tell, you are not in sync," he says.
Khazak's story begins in the U.S.S.R. His parents were from Leningrad. As befitting a future engineer, his parents helped to build the city he was born in. In the early 1930s, during the Russian equivalent of the Alaska gold rush, his parents crossed the Ural Mountains by train, traveling the length of the country to help build the city of Magadan on the southeast coast.
His father was a civil engineer. His mother worked as an economist. Khazak was born there, in Magadan, in 1944. The family did not return to Leningrad until 1948, three years after the war. Khazak grew up in Leningrad and in 1961 went to the university there to study civil engineering. After graduating, he held a succession of jobs building waste-water treatment plants for pulp and paper mills.
Thanks to a trade agreement - partly due to the late U.S. Sen. Henry Jackson - that allowed Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel, Khazak was able to leave the Soviet Union in July 1976, with his wife Lyudmila and their son Misha. They now also have an 8-year-old daughter, Michele. His parents left the following year, with his sister and brother-in-law. The family lives in a home they built in Bellevue. His mother died three years ago.
Khazak's family is Jewish. His wife's family is Russian and lives in Leningrad. He struggles for the right words when asked why he left.
"It's very complex question," he says. "Some people will say for political reasons . . . no, its not pure political . . . it's political, economical . . . it's sense of adventure . . . all the above. You grow in the system and you come to the point of certain disillusionment and you are looking for bigger and better things to do with your life . . . suddenly such possibilities open. I just hate to miss opportunity."
The Khazaks left with seven suitcases and the equivalent of about $200 American money. First stop was Vienna, Austria. Khazak will never forget those first impressions of life in the West.
"You go outside to see how Vienna looks and what kinds of cars are on the street," he remembers. "The picture of capitalism is changing in your head in a matter of seconds . . . not in a matter of hours. It's very interesting . . . that what you learned for 15 years in school about Marxism and Leninism could be destroyed in five minutes when you walk in a Vienna supermarket . . .."
Instead of going on to Israel, they decided to go to the United States. A Jewish immigration organization helped work out the details. "They asked me where I wanted to go. I said I want to go where pulp and paper industry is," Khazak says. "They sent us to Seattle."
They were met at the airport by a Seattle family in a volunteer organization helping resettle Jewish immigrants. The family helped the Khazaks find an apartment on Capitol Hill and provided other support until Khazak eventually found work.
That first trip from Sea-Tac to Seattle was unforgettable, Khazak says. He had never seen so many big cars. And he had no idea the United States could be so green. "I was kind of under impression that United States was a smokestack from the Pacific to the Atlantic . . . a lot of concrete," he says.
Most Russians have two impressions of the United States, he adds. Both are wrong. Some see this country as the "toughest place on planet," he says. "A terrible place. A country of unemployed, exploited, abused racially, sexually . . . it's Ku Klux Klan and organized crime . . . a lot of people believe this. Others believe the United States is "the paradise of the earth. Buildings are big, people are big, cars are big, salaries are big and everything is very cheap . . ." His own preconceived view was that America was a country "with a lot of possibilities and opportunities."
Khazak pauses with his thoughts, his eyes glancing at a Russian calendar on the wall of his office that was sent to him by an old friend in Leningrad. The calendar shows a beautiful Leningrad park.
"I did not see it right," he says. "I could never imagine the type of housing here . . . houses with backyards and all these rhododendrons. I thought that if in Soviet Union we have apartment buildings, then in United States apartment buildings should be bigger and taller and wider . . . it means you are trying to create something without the proper information."
Khazak has several funny stories about those early days in Seattle. He recalls walking with his wife into the Safeway store at Mercer and Broadway for the first time. "We could not sleep for a week," he says. "One question in your head is . . . how in the hell is it possible to produce it all?"
He was also confused by one of the first television programs he watched: "Streets of San Francisco," a police action show staring Michael Douglas and Karl Malden. "I could not figure out why the hell they were showing this," he says. "We all were raised in what they call social realism, that objective of art is to educate and develop positive feelings in people, right? What was (the) objective of 'Streets of San Francisco?' "
And he will never forget one of his first job interviews with a local engineering company. The president of the company who interviewed him was from China, and spoke with a heavy accent. He left that interview, he says, without having understood one word. He was also stumped during another job interview, when he was asked how much money he wanted to make. Those are not questions employers ask in the Soviet Union.
"It was an impossible question for me," he says. "I finally said I wanted to make about $500 a week. I was called a few days later and told I could start work for $800." Instead, he took a job in Aberdeen, working on a waste-water collection and treatment project. He later worked in Olympia for two years on waste-water treatment projects there.
In 1982, Khazak went to work for Metro, as construction manager of a $120 million Renton treatment plant project. Three years later, he was construction manager of the tunnel project, already in its final design phase.
He was taking command of a project as controversial as it was costly. The proposal to build the tunnel was never put to a vote of the people. The downtown business district would be disrupted for several years. Critics characterized the tunnel as a colossal mistake that would do little to ease downtown traffic congestion. But Khazak was not intimidated. He welcomed the challenge. This is a man who says he would have liked to have been construction manager for the ill-fated WPPSS project.
"The problem with WPPSS was that they forgot what was their purpose, to produce cheap energy," he says.
Had Khazak been involved in the tunnel design, he would have argued for a broader vision of the city's future. "If it would be up to me to plan it, I would try and convince people that it be (a) bigger project than it is now," he says, "bigger in the sense it should be more flexible for the future use . . . "
Pam Hoppes, Metro's right-of-way supervisor who has been involved in complex negotiations with property owners whose business were altered, destroyed or affected by the bus tunnel, recalls an early meeting with Khazak. "He looked at me," and asked, 'Why are we building only one tunnel?' " she says. " 'Why don't we drill two on top of each and move the Alaskan Way Viaduct under the bus tunnel?'
"And I thought, 'I love this guy.' "
Every other weekend, Khazak takes his 8-year-old daughter on a tour of the tunnel project. It has consumed much of his life the past two years. "It's much more than a job, " he says. "It's very big part of your life. I spend with this job more time than I spend with my family."
Khazak has become attached to this area. There are friends here. There are roots. Perhaps not as deep as those he dug up when he left the Soviet Union, but it would not be easy to leave.
"As a good project manager, I will tell you that everything is negotiable," he says when asked if he would leave Seattle for another job when the tunnel project is finished. He looks out the window at the city below.
"I'm doing this because I like to do it, because I know how to do it, and because I'm paid to do it," he says after a while. "And if I do it really well, and people think that I do it really well, then I want them to allow me to do bigger and better things."
wj
