Choo-choo boo-boo

We make newspapers at The Republic, not high speed interurban train lines, but still, something isn’t looking right to us about the whole $2 billion installation running down Granville from Hastings and the full length of Cambie from False Creek to the Fraser River.

As if on cue, a little bird dropped in recently to tell us how the original SkyTrain Expo Line was built. Disruption to businesses and residents the whole route long was as severe a disruption to businesses and residents as we say today on Cambie and Granville. But in the earlier example, the disruption took place in short, two-block spurts on which all the equipment and workers were intensively focused. Then, that section completed from digging holes to drying concrete, hoardings and fences would be taken down, the streets reopened, and the whole project would move two blocks further down.

What we see today in the construction of the Canada Line is about a hundred blocks being fenced up and dug out all at once, and every block disrupted in the most horrendous ways for the full two years plus of the project. We see whole strips of blocks of main arterial and commercial street ripped up and dug out, and not a soul around working on it for weeks or more. We see rented heavy equipment spread evenly throughout the massive scale of the project, and half or more of it sitting idle at any one moment.

Surely this can’t be the best way to plan out the schedule of work and the coming and going of different contractors. The extra cost of equipment rentals alone suggests the complete block-by-block approach is the way to contain costs and minimize disruption, while the scene on Cambie is the exact opposite of coordination.

All projects of this kind come with a project manager, a person in charge of laying out the scope and pace of work, and scheduling the rental of equipment and deployment of scarce workers. A competent project manager is the difference between a swift and well-done job, and a snarled, expensive, and badly-executed job.

We could be wrong, but the Canada Line looks for all the world like someone unqualified and inexperienced is in charge of managing this project. I wouldn’t even vacuum my house this way.

The number-one threat

It was a good week for little birdies. Listen to this whispered song: the number one disaster threat to the people of Vancouver isn’t earthquake, terrorism, or shipwrecks. It’s the little known chlorine manufacturing plant down there on the North Shore over the east side of the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge.

Look for the great big heap of salt and you’re looking at it. Chlorine is made by mixing salt with water then zapping it with electricity to produce sodium bauxite and chlorine gas. That’s World War I poison gas for those scoring at home.

Hardly any cities of this size in North America allow this kind of industrial activity to go on anymore anywhere near where people live. Chlorine gas, the World War I poison gas of choice, is heavier than air and so, in a leak, would spread around and settle into the low-lying areas (as it did into WW I trenches) near the harbour—like the downtown eastside, for starters. Chlorine gas is an efficient and quick killer—hence its use, and then because of its effectiveness, its banning, in wartime. One leaking chlorine gas-carrying train car in Mississauga Ontario some years ago caused the largest evacuation in Canadian history—250,000 people had to leave their homes for days—and shut down the busiest highway corridor in the country for over a week, costing billions in business damages.

Until very recently, the North Shore chorine gas plant worked two shifts, leaving the overnight period for thorough downtime maintenance. Lately, the plant put on a third overnight shift. Naturally, the workers and supervisors pressed into service in the graveyard shift are not the most senior and experienced. Also, as all manufacturing plants know, graveyard shifts are always fraught with mistakes and accidents because humans aren’t meant to work at night. And now they are working overnight in the plant, and what’s worse, there is no downtime between shifts to properly inspect and repair equipment.

What they do at night is load the train cars. This step is the most critical of all steps between making chlorine and using it in the customer’s own industrial plant. It is during transfer from the plant to the train car where, if something were to go terribly wrong, this is where. We’re told there is an estimate that 5,000 people would die if someone, groggy, rushing, and inexperienced, were to slip with the loading equipment or were to encounter a crack in it that wasn’t picked up by inspectors.

How can this be, you might ask. Wouldn’t an insurance company freak at the risk and insure only a plant far enough away from such a dense population centre? The answer lies in zoning and land use policies and history. The chorine plant in question sits on federal land from a century ago. If it sat on North Vancouver land, the North Vancouver insurer would never sell insurance to cover the City’s liability should there ever be, god forbid, an accident, and so the City would never expose itself to the potential bankruptcy of lawsuits and would disallow the plant’s further operation.

If the Fed’s transferred that land to the City of North Vancouver, the City would have to shut the plant down for lack of insurance to cover the City’s own liability. And the risk to a sizable chunk of exposed populations on low-lying land around the harbour would be lessened. That’s an easy public policy solution to a frightening threat to the public’s life and health. Because it involves, for the company, the closure of a plant located in a cheap tax area where industrial activity rates happen also to be cheap, the company lobbies to minimize and obscure the threat its plant represents.

Hush, hush, we all fall down

What’s that little birdie? Privatized building inspection companies routinely take kick-backs from builders in exchange for inspection reports that find nothing wrong in new buildings sure to be slip-shod, leaking, and leaning inside ten years? What’s that? There are builders that have gone bankrupt as often as seven times, as though going bankrupt to avoid liabilities arising from shoddy buildings, then starting up another company right away—this time in the girlfriend’s name instead of the wife’s—has emerged as the routine practice at one end of the industry?

That might have sounded like a tall tale a few years ago, birdie, before cracked Montreal subways, falling Minnesota bridges, and busting Louisiana levees started showing up on the evening news.

Developers as an industry are among the most lucrative sources of ad revenue in most local media. “And Sharkey says: Hey, Kemosabe! You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces.”

Projects projects everywhere and nary an expert to check

Little Birdie says: there are rumours of major structural engineering problems not just in the Canada Line project, but in the complex over-the-water convention centre, the difficult Sea-to-Sky Highway project, and the tricky below-sea-level foundations to the False Creek Athletes Village project too. And why is that? Because there are only so many people around who know how to work out the unique problems each of these massive feats of engineering projects present, and with too many going on at the same time, there just isn’t enough expert advice to be found. Add to that the pressure of the ticking clock on the front lawn of the Art Gallery, and corners are said to be getting cut all over the place.

Everything will get done in time and maybe even on budget, and will look marvelous for the first few weeks during the Olympics. After that, with a bit of shaking from the usual low-level tremors, a bit of landsliding from the usual torrential rains, and a bit of pounding from the usual traffic, and all bets, so birdie says, are off.

It’s that post-Olympics period that is looming before us ominously that is beginning to earn the wide-eyed focus of those in the know. Don’t think anything wrong can happen on that scale? Did you hear about the very recently-built largest nuclear plant on the planet that turns out, quite by accident, to have been built right on top of a previously unknown tectonic fault line in Japan? That’s the one that shook and then shed a radioactive cloud five days before plant officials had the courage to tell government officials what happened during one minor tremor. And that’s in Japan, where they take regulations seriously, and take a very dim view of corruption of inspection officers.

Another one for the loss column

The US war on Iraq is lost. From The New York Review of Books (“The Iraq war is lost,” it states unequivocally in the August 17 issue) to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs journal (“Who lost Iraq?” it asks in large bold print on its Semtember/October cover), all the intellectual class is in agreement.

That’s good news and bad news. Good news because no victory should come from anyone’s illegal and unprovoked war of aggression and the US should lose and lose big-time if there’s any justice in this world.

But it’s bad news too because, if history is any guide, when the US begins to lose a war, that’s when it becomes particularly dangerous. The damage to Northern Vietnam from indiscriminate carpet bombing, and the ravaging of Cambodia and Laos, all took place after the US policy makers realized there was no hope for the US, and it all took place only to help US forces and collaborators get out ahead of advancing enemy forces. Now that US policy makers realize clearly they have no hope in Iraq, the real fireworks are about to go off.

First use for the third time

There is enough evidence that the US used nuclear bombs—perhaps small-yield, locally-affecting, infrastructure-protecting Neutron bombs—on two occasions already in Iraq.

The infamous Highway of Death is so named because, following the complete and total surrender of Kuwait by Iraq in 1991, as a convoy of civilian technicians, local administrators and sewer and lighting workers, who were all part of the nation-rebuilding efforts of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, traveled out of Kuwait, American bombers arrived in the sky and utterly annihilated all of them. Few pictures were taken by journalists, and even fewer of them were close-ups of details. In one, which appeared on the cover of a French photo magazine in 1992, the driver of a truck is seen still sitting up straight and gripping the steering wheel, only he is a charred skeleton.

If he were killed by flying shrapnel from conventional bombs or bullets from aircraft-mounted guns, he would have been blown away from his steering wheel. If he died in the fiery blaze of his truck hit by an incendiary and exploding, he’d be lifted out of his seat.

The unique features of the Neutron bomb, first deployed during the presidency of Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, are its low shock wave, thus preserving infrastructure, and its extremely short-lived but extremely high heat spike, thus instantly melting flesh that might be lurking inside said infrastructure. A person in a truck in the vicinity of a neutron bomb detonation would not be overly disturbed by any flying objects or blast waves, but his flesh would be vaporized form the hard infrastructure of his bones which would be left behind but scorched.

The man in the picture died either from a bullet, a bomb fragment, a burning vehicle, or a neutron bomb. There is no other possible cause of death on that highway in that event. You tell me which one of those four possibilities fits the picture evidence best.

But wait, there’s more: In 2003, the elite professional Republican Guard fell back from all defensive positions except one, the only airport in the country capable of landing large military-supply cargo planes. As many as 100,000 took a last stand at the Baghdad Airport.

The Iraqi strategy was a response to the American strategy of a thinly-deployed, rapidly moving offensive throughout the country that would not be bogged down by the heavy and slow logistics of dragging along supply lines. The strategy was predicated on an immediate and complete capture of the Baghdad Airport so that necessary supplies, already in the air from American bases, could safely land and immediately deliver necessary supplies like bottles of water and food rations.

A battle ensued therefore at the airport. Reports in newspapers such as The New York Times reported very heavy fighting there, the only place in the whole country where any serious resistance was encountered by the advancing Americans.

Then, overnight, there was no fight anymore. A mystery surrounds the question of what happened to those 100,000 Republican Guard soldiers. And the airport was entirely closed to any media for nine months. Other Republican Guard units, well entrenched and ready to resist in a circle around the capital, fled the day after.

You connect the dots, Kemosabe. America, after all, is the only country on record to have used nuclear bombs in a first-use stance to achieve political aims, in Japan.