Duct Tape

I do not want to go to New Jersey today. That should come as no surprise. I suspect it would be fairly low down on your list, too.

I have made the train reservations, and the limo will pick me up at Newark ‘s Penn Station, and I said the name twice, so that the livery company would not think that I meant mid-town Manhattan . I wish I was going there, on a vacation, and not looking over my shoulder at tropical storm Ophelia that is lurking off the outer banks of North Carolina , and worried about Judge Roberts opening statement in his confirmation hearings.

Senator Schumer of New York makes me nervous. Someone needs to get his dosage right.

I think we are all a little gun-shy of the elements this week. They say we will not see the effects of the storm until Wednesday, and I hope this little jaunt is safely in the history books before it begins to rain.

I’d like to get a vacation, but everything is starting again, the huge ponderous motion of the government slowly beginning to head down the tracks after the listless days of summer. Ponderous is the nature of the government, even in disaster response. Maybe particularly in disaster, which only intensifies the usual confusion. I was gratified to note that Mike Brown quit his position as head of FEMA. I checked my messages this morning but no one from the Agency called me.

Mike Brown says he didn’t want to be the fall-guy for the disaster, but I guess that is the way it is going to go down. I hope everyone else doesn’t get a free pass on this. The guy they have brought in behind Brown is named David Paulison. He is the US Fire Commissioner and used to be Chief of the department in Miami Dade County .

Coming from Miami , he ought to understand hurricanes, which is good. But some of the commentators are yammering this morning that he was the one who recommended we stock up on duct-tape a couple years ago in the fight against terror.

He was ridiculed at the time, but I think he was right. I have had no terrorists in the house except me since I went to Home Depot and got a life-time supply.

Duct tape is useful for other things, too, besides anti-terror preparations. I held a muffler on my car for a month one time with a fresh roll, and I was only moderately surprised to find that the launch crews on commercial satellites sometimes use it to keep parts of the boosters together.

They call it “600 Mile-an-hour Tape.”

I was thinking of some of the other potential applications yesterday as I left my desk and went up to the roof to take the morning break. The Bus Station building has a little roof garden that is accessible only by the freight elevator. From it there is a fine view to the north and east of the District. You cannot see the heroic parts of town, since the monuments are hidden behind the cooling tower and the HVAC shelter, but it is a remarkable place to watch the city.

I was wondering how much duct tape they use to put up those construction cranes. They seem to spring up like mushrooms, and I have no idea how they do it. They are ten stories tall, at least, and two of them are working the pit across New York Avenue . They are spindly little box frames things with a turret mounted on the top that anchors a control cab and a delicate lattice-work frame fore and aft. The pieces all stay airborne through a series of masts that resemble a sailing ship.

If there was an official District bird, it was undoubtedly be the crane.

I counted ten of them along with two conventional derricks within my constricted view. There is a cluster across the street and marching off toward U Street , and another cluster to the east, beyond which lies the bulk of FedEx Field out on the horizon in Maryland . I never thought people would want to come back downtown to live and work after 9/11 and the anthrax scare, but they certainly seem to be. One of the new buildings has a big sign on the side that advertises “Luxury Living from the low $800s.”

The District construction boom seems to be continuing, and if there is a housing bubble, the cranes don’t seem to have heard about it.

There are more of them, just out of sight, towering over the Navy Yard. Coming in from the Virginia side, you would think that the Martians had landed and were striding across the capital in triumph.

The structures make me wonder. How do they erect them? I have never seen one go up; they just appear, fully formed. Then they build the buildings around them. Do they become the elevator shafts? How do they get the control cab and the motors down again? Erect another crane?

I’m glad we don’t get hurricane winds here often. I would think the cranes would blow down in a good stiff wind. I don’t know how much duct tape it would take to keep them up, though I am happy that finally someone at FEMA may have a clue.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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