Now to the boringest stuff: infrastructure. Know how I know it’s boring? I’ve been doing it for 30 years and no one except me finds it interesting.
I think people find infrastructure boring because
it's underground and therefore invisible, or it’s concrete and steel and of course everybody knows that stuff never
needs maintenance.
Let it break,
however, and society teeters on the brink of anarchy.
Don’t think so? Try
living for a week with no water. Or
electricity. Or sewerage. Or the trifecta of all three gone even if it's only for one day: riots, looting, and shouts of, "FEMA! FEMA!! Where are you FEMA?!"
Here are
photos. I'll keep the text to a minimum.
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| KAP worksites look like others across the globe ... |
Georgia Tech required all Civil Engineering students to take 'Construction Management', a course which discussed the aspects of building a civil engineering project: scheduling, logistics, materials, budgeting, bidding, a bit of contract law, and a topic called Mechanization that I remember vividly.
Mechanization was all about the third world, and it was a strange thing to discuss in prosperous downtown Atlanta in the mid-1980s. My Navy days had included a stark and brutal introduction to the third world, but I had gotten into Tech and thought those days were forever behind me.
The tenet is this: machinery costs money. The professor said, very clearly, "You are Georgia Tech engineers and will find yourself practicing all around the world. In many places, the cost of labor is so low it will not make sense to mechanize an activity. Especially since those locations will also be quite remote, making it even more expensive to acquire and maintain large machines."
KAP is one of those places.
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| ... even though the "Mechanization" tenet is illustrated every day |
The laborers under the makeshift tent above are mixing chemicals and granular silicon, creating a grout that flows underneath the crane rails. They have an electric drill with a long paddle-bit to stir the witches' brew in a sawed-off plastic 50-gallon barrel, which they pour into hand buckets by tipping the barrel. The buckets are carried to the rail, set on their sides, and left for a minute so the grout can ooze into the rail bed.
In Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, or Florence, this would be done by an enclosed mixer with a metered hose output, all mounted on a small carriage that could be wheeled along the rail line. And without exposure to God knows what liquids and fumes.
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The large-scale tasks here are definitely mechanized, and there are a LOT of large-scale tasks going on.
This is a "Power Pick", used to break up the hard soil. It has apparently been abandoned by its driver,
in the middle of the road, because of the Eid holiday. |
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Ducts stop and the cable beyond is buried
directly under the dirt. This is fine, since we
can protect our cables by forever controlling
who is allowed to dig in this area. |
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Manhole with 4 ducts at the
bottom; wood and Styrofoam
concrete framing -- which
is mighty fine. Wood is
the preferred material for
making concrete forms
throughout the world. (More
business for Foreston!)
Styrofoam is placed between
the wood and concrete, making
it easy to strip the wood away
after the concrete has set. Using
this technique causes a lot of
little white "snowflakes" to blow
across the desert, however. |
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| This is our electric power cabling. It's as big as my Saudi phone. |
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Close, but not quite! Look carefully, the four ducts at the bottom don't actually go
through the wall and into the building. Fiber entrance is not possible. Too bad. :-( |
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Now this is how to build a telecom room: no underground walls!
Easy cable entry no matter where you are! I'm stealing this idea. |
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| Speed Limit 30 |
Back in Due West, a marvelous math teacher taught me that we use "Hindu-Arabic" numerals. well, the Arabs don't use them, so what's up with calling them Arabic? These are the numbers used in Saudi Arabia today. I can recognize all of them, although 6 gives me occasional trouble, and I don't always see the zero. And one missing zero can turn what I think is a price of 10 Saudi riyals into a price of 100 Saudi riyals. (FYI: $1 US = 4 SAR)
0 = Ù
1 = Ù¡
2 = Ù¢
3 = Ù£
4 = Ù¤
5 = Ù¥
6 = Ù¦
7 = Ù§
8 = Ù¨
9 = Ù©
Numerals are read from left to right in Arabic, so you have to adjust the right-to-left flow of normal reading when you encounter numerals.
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| The business end of C/D HUTA 14 dredger. That screw-front drills into the sand, wghich is sucked up through the ship and into a shore-side pipe. Guys on deck provide a sense of scale. |
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| The shore-side pipe that HUTA 14 keeps filled and flowing |
The dredger was running full tilt when we took the pipe photo above, and I could clearly hear and feel the stones clattering through the pipe. The pipe dips below the road just outside the right margin of this photo. The Contractor decided that's better than sloping the road up and over the pipe, because the slopes become really long when you build them for heavily-laden dump trucks.
Language is sometimes difficult.
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| Inside meeting |
Above, left to right: Chinese, Chinese, Costa Rican, Lebanese, Pakistani. An American took the photo, and the Egyptian is out-of-frame to the left. Meetings are conducted in English, and occasionally turn into serio-comic episodes of, "What did you say?" or "What do you mean about the 'you will be paying the sky while we plow under the bed'?"
We set up a meeting between the Chinese crane crew and a local supplier who could provide a 110-ton crane, a 50-ton forklift, and a 10-ton forklift. After an hour of translating through Pakistani/Saudi/Lebanese/Chinese accents and keeping vocabulary very limited, we had agreed on tasks, financial terms, and the necessary bank transfers between the Chinese bank, a Saudi bank, and our Lebanese bank as guarantor. We set a delivery schedule for the forklifts at 7 am the next morning.
The forklift truck showed up at 7 PM that same day, after the port security gates had closed for the night. The Saudi bank had closed earlier that day (Thursday) for its special Eid weekend, and the Chinese bank belatedly -- and unsuccessfully -- attempted to transfer funds Friday morning. All of a sudden, we had a forklift operator camping out in his truck at our port gate in the desert for three days until Monday morning when the money could change hands, after both cultures' weekends had passed.
I swear, sometimes I don't believe what's happening, and I'm standing there as an eyewitness.
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| Outside meeting |
That's the Chinese crane crew (orange safety vest) trying to tell us why they need this area backfilled and covered with concrete, even though nobody told us earlier -- and the ship arrives tomorrow. You can see we're backfilling even as we're arguing. We compromised by placing precast concrete planks instead of pouring new concrete. Couldn't get the Chinese guy to understand that it takes 10 days for concrete to set enough to support his 100-ton STS crane. What do they teach Chinese engineers, anyway?
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| My Fender -- what they call these giant rubber "dock bumpers". I named this one Stratocaster. Telecaster and Jazz Bass are already installed. |
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| Fenders doing their job on MV Palanpur, who brought our Liebherr mobile crane last week |
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My good buddy 'Superman' Elie lifts a chunk of concrete. They use thick sections
of very lightweight concrete in their buildings for thermal insulation. Smart! |
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| Terminal Operations Building. Sign is to remind people not to work so fast. |
Our Terminal Operations Building will be pretty nice. Lots of windows to see cranes, containers, and vehicles, and a large open area on the top floor for the "on-watch" crew to interact. Supposed to be an interesting mixture of high-tech systems with lots of traditional granite and marble. Can't wait to see it completed.
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| Gas station just outside the gate |
Including the building to the left out of frame, this gas station has two restaurants, a 'supermarket' (convenience store), two electronic shops for cell phone gadgets, and a barber shop. The bakery at the right end makes fresh pita bread every day. Yummy! (I have not visited a barber shop since my arrival, and will try to avoid them until my return to Boston.)
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| Mosque immediately behind the office building |
I took the photo above several weeks ago, so apologies if you've already seen it. I like it because it captures the strange dichotomy of Saudi Arabia. The green grass contrasts dramatically against the desert immediately across the street; that dichotomy is obvious, but do not underestimate how much time and money and symbolism are implied in this simple difference.
The mosque manifests a deep religious conviction that is rarely found in the US, but it's built in a very contemporary architectural style. To me, it captures the contrast between old Arab traditions and modern customs.
The communications tower behind the mosque illustrates how Saudis depend utterly on cell phones, radio transmission, and 21st century internet technology to conquer the incredible expanses of emptiness. The tower is absolutely untouched by an architect: it's a blunt utilitarian force, just as much of the Kingdom relies on blunt utilitarian forces to survive each day of sun and heat and dust and wind.
In the far background are fabric tents as big as airline hangars that protect the maintenance shops for the very large construction equipment on our project.
Those far away maintenance tents represent present-day Saudi perfectly: a traditional Arabian tent standing against the harsh Arabian sun, to protect the huge machines that can -- maybe -- turn this stark desert into a functioning human community.
Those traditional tents are sheltering the future of Saudi Arabia.
