Chapter 245

At our evening meeting I filled the girls in on my conversation I had with Eric. Marcy's response was, as I thought "If they send us something to look at we will evaluate it 100%, just like everything else we do." The discussion moved on to the other more pressing things at hand.

We spent the next couple hours pouring over the 80 rape prevention seminar dates and scheduling people, places, times, planes, hotels, and mixing in MAAR audits.

I wanted to include spot audits - the eight college security audits - but I was afraid it would simply overload the process as complicated as it already was. It was a project I would just have to do on my own or with my administrators.

We had just finished up when Tony and Kathy came in to update the airport progress maps and reports. Both were upbeat. Even by taking the couple of extra days off for the holiday, they were still ahead of their self imposed schedule.

"Its amazing the progress you can make when you don't have to wait on some state inspector to hold three meetings and 4 conference calls to determine if four inches of pipe sticking out of the ground is adequate," he said with a laugh. "It made me realize that I have been doing state work too long without a break. This project is almost like taking a vacation on the job."

"The water tower had the first complete coat of paint put on it today. They will give it a day to dry and then the final coat of paint and another day and then the lettering. Are you sure that all you want are the gold and black JBG logo and Morton Field on it?" Tony said.

Our water tower was one of those short fat towers with four support legs instead of the newer poppy shape that everyone was using now. We had decided to go with that style to keep it below the tree line and not to create blind spot in the agencies Doppler radar. The main radar sweep was above the water tower. The top of the water tower was sixty feet.

The sweep of the Doppler was at 80 feet. I had overheard some of the installation techs talking that they should be able to see everything in the air at tree top level for over two hundred miles with this and the other radars in the area, depending how they chose to set the power level.

With the unit on Morton Field and the ones at Dover AFB, Norfolk NAS and Wallops Island the entire Delmarva area could provide overlap early warning for submarine launched cruise missiles intended for the Baltimore-Washington corridor.

The real reason the agency wanted it located here was to get that overlap protection and provide backup for Wallops and Dover in case of an early strike attack on those two sites. Those two would be the first hit because they were only a few miles from the ocean and both were subject to interference from salt water mist from seasonally heavy ocean storms.

The short fat water tower presented another problem. Because of the height there was only fifty feet of head or twenty pounds of water pressure in the water system. That was not enough to make many appliances work correctly, such as ice makers, washers, flushes, urinals and automatic spigots.

To compensate for the fire hydrants Tony had put down eight inch water mains to guarantee plenty of flow, the fire company boosted the pressure to whatever they needed at the end of the fire hose with the pumps on the fire trucks.

All sprinkler systems used a variable boost pump to get the required pressure and flow to operate the sprinkler nozzles. To compensate in all the buildings and get the water pressure where it needed to be the plumbers were installing a small boost pump and bladder tanks to bring the water pressure to 60 pounds.