C-SPAN on Pentagon Renovation

[Bill Stewart]

At 10:29 PM 09/15/2001 +0200, Anonymous Coredump wrote:
>Plans for the renovation of the Pentagon are being discussed on C-Span
>right now. Interesting sound-bites. Costs of replacing the Pentagon vs.
>rebuilding are the current topic.
>
>The URL for the project reports a 500 error currently:
>http://renovation.pentagon.mil/
>
>"The Pentagon is not compliant with fire safety codes; the Pentagon is not
>compliant with *any* codes."
>
>--Lee Evey, Pentagon Renovation Program Manager

Many years ago, when I was a tool of the military-industrial complex,
I was part of a project that bid on replacing the communications
infrastructure of part of the Pentagon, which included bidding on rewiring it.
Yow, what an ugly and impossible job that was!
The prime contractor we were working for didn't win the job,
so fortunately we didn't have to deal with it.
Just because the Pentagon is not compliant with fire safety codes
doesn't mean there isn't a lot of asbestos all over the place -
running new wiring in the ceiling would have been very risky,
even if anybody *had* a complete picture of what's in the ceilings there.

Bidding on the job was, IIRC, entirely unclassified,
so there are large parts of the blueprints that don't
even identify what agencies control some of the blacked-out spaces.
George Bush doesn't have all the right clearances to all the
different projects that have stuck stuff in there,
and some of the wires were installed by people who are dead now
and will never be able to tell what they were for or whether
they're still in use, but you can't just fish new stuff in
next to them, because a lot of the wiring troughs and plenum spaces
aren't sufficiently clear.  It's kind of like an old-fashioned
computer room or telco building where you can't quite get the
floor tiles to stay down, because there's so much excess wire
<fnord>that there's no room for the moat monsters</fnord>
<fnord>these aren't the skeletons you're looking for</fnord>
There aren't a lot of wiring / electrician companies that have
general enough permissions to work on the place.

This was 1990-1991, around the beginning of the Desert Scam war,
because one thing everybody insisted on was that,
while the wiring plans couldn't overly violate TEMPEST by being antennas,
they *did* need to get CNN piped in to everybody.
I was commuting past many of the places you hear about on the
NYC traffic radio reports; stopping by the UN to do anti-war protests
on the way back from bidding on rewiring the Pentagon was
heavily into cognitive dissonance territory, and one of the things
that helped push me into finding honest work...