The World's Greatest Science...

So I work at the mess that is LANL! And I love reading the letters to the readers forum, which I think captures the feelings of lab workers these days. I'm especially enjoying the ongoing talk about the new four story open-roofed parking structure they are building in the main part of the lab.

I link to the whole story cause I'm not sure if you can read this outside of the lab's network.

Jan. 19, 2005

"Worlds Greatest Science ..." making bad parking lots

I am having just as much of a hard time stomaching the phrase "The Worlds Greatest Science Protecting America" as anyone else. I am sure that anyone who has been to a conference lately understands just how in error this phrase is. (Like Carl Gable in his Dec. 10, 2004 letter, I too refuse to get business cards that say this.) Yet I am trying to remain optimistic looking for reasons that it might be true, even by seeking examples close to home.

As a resident of Technical Area 3, I frequently use the new west parking structure. However, I have noticed over the past several months that the upper floor of the four-floor structure has not been open. That means that 25 percent of the structure is not usable. Having come recently from academia in a town where parking was far worse, I don't complain about how it is here because we really, in fact, have it quite good. But the fact that this floor was closed for months with no apparent work being done puzzled me. When I asked what was going on, I was told that the Lab couldn't figure out how to remove snow from the upper deck and therefore could not open it during the winter.

Ok, so I can understand that maybe nobody thought about this when that structure was initially built. However, if we really have the "World's Greatest Science ...." that should imply some intelligence is actually based here, right? One sign of intelligence is that we don't make the same mistakes twice.

So why are we building that huge parking structure in front of the Otowi Building (of the very same design, but twice in size) with the very same flaw?

Perhaps we should rephrase it to the "World's Most Expensive Science ..." or the "World's Least Planned Science ..."

--Clair Sullivan

The next letter is also about parking structures, and even mentions the infamous Park'N'Ride structure - they took away the metal roofed structure that protected us from inclement weather, due to lightning dangers. Instead we just stood out in the open during the thunderstorms, yay.

Jan. 26, 2005

West parking garage lightning protection

Clair Sullivan's letter on the west parking garage about the top deck misses another safety issue that appeared when the garage opened. They removed the pedestrian shelter at the park-and-ride lot at Technical Area 3 because it was metal and did not have proper lightning protection. The concern was that the people huddled under the shelter would be vulnerable lightning. No consideration was apparently given to the several lightning strikes each year to clusters of people out in the open, such as football huddles and golfers.

They built a very nice semi-enclosed bus shelter as part of the west parking garage and it has no lightning protection. Well, I suppose that's ok, as it is in the protection shadow of the four-story garage. But the new parking garage [near the SM30 warehouse] also has no lightning protection. None. If you are on the top floor of the garage during a summer thunderstorm you will be at much greater risk than you would ever have been in the shelter at the park-and-ride lot. When facilities was asked about the absence of lightning protection, their response was (paraphrasing now), that the Department of Energy construction standards did not require that the building be protected because it was cheaper to replace it than to protect it. When we raised the question of personnel safety on the upper deck, it was ignored.

So there you have it; the park-and-ride shelter was removed because it didn't have lightning rods and presented a potential hazard to the occupants. Then two new structures were built with lightning rods deliberately not installed because the DOE regulations did not specifically require them. Is providing lightning protection an unallowable expense in the DOE contract?

--David W. Thomson

So I'm wondering, should I mark out the phrase "World's Greatest Science...Protecting America" from my new business cards? Perhaps put a little sticker on top of it saying, "evolution is just a theory", or "We didn't lose any disks"?