From: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (Patrick Townson)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom,misc.misc
Subject: Day Two of the Flood
Date: 15 Apr 92 05:20:00 GMT
Reply-To: ptownson@eecs.nwu.edu

Well, the finger pointing, rumors, innuendo and downright lies have
begun in the battle to glean 'the truth' behind the collapse of the
tunnel wall early Monday which left downtown Chicago flooded and
without power as the third day gets underway. 

At a City Hall press conference Tuesday, a person was named as the
villian responsible, and publicly fired by the city from his
employment in the engineering department. He complains he was made a
scapegoat to cover up for the failure of others to listen to warnings
about leaks in the tunnel as long as eight weeks ago. 

Then there is the as yet unamed 'construction company' which was doing
work to shore up the Kinzie Street bridge, and it was their heavy 
machinery digging nearby which 'must have caused the disturbance which
caused the wall to collapse ...'

The older buildings downtown which got flooded may very well come out
to be in better condition than some of the newer places where the
foundations were constructed differently, using cheaper materials and
'modern ways of construction'. It would be a shame to see something
like the 80 story Amoco Building have to be completely torn down
before it fell over and collapsed in a heap as a result of a greatly
weakend foundation ... but that's life in the big city, I guess. Of
course no one is willing to speak the truth when it is their own oxe
being gored ... and difficult questions put to city officials never
get answered on their own merit. Instead, they turn it around, and
challenge the credentials of the person asking:  who are you? who sent
you here? what is your educational background and your past experience
which allows you to dare question what we are saying?  The question
itself never does get answered, of course.

Or try asking those whores of the print media at the {Chicago Tribune}
why they said something stupid in their newspaper about sabatage being
ruled out as the cause of the collapse ... 'but the mayor held a press
conference,' they wail ... 'they had charts and graphs and told us
that was not the case at all ...'

Of course we know that (a) only Mayor Daley can have experts working
for him, like those in the city engineering department, and that (b)
the City Hall press relations department would *never* lie to the
{Chicago Tribune} about anything ...

Yet people we know in the Fire Department and Police Department --
people with no axe to grind either way are flatly condradicting what
the city is saying, but doing it privately to selected people in the
media. We're hearing several things, all of which City Hall is flatly
denying; but on the other hand, what has a Chicago police officer to
gain by saying:

The police are investigating sabatage by a disgruntled and fired
ex-employee of the City ... of coure there are hundreds of those
people, politics being as they are in Chicago, and your ability to
work a polling place and get out the vote on election day being far
more important than your college degree in civil engineering and your
work related experience with underground tunnels, etc.

What would a wagon man (a police officer who drives a paddy wagon
around the city on call to officers effecting an arrest or in response
to a 'man down' (intoxicated or sick person lying in the street, etc)
have to gain by pointing out he had carried two bodies to the county
morgue who were apparently homeless people living in the tunnels and
'the paper work got lost or mixed up on the way ...'

Yet at the city press conference today the question was asked point
blank, 'Mister Mayor, we know there are dozens, maybe hundreds of
homeless people who have discovered the old tunnel system and make
their home down there. Were any of them killed in the flood?'

And the answer, note how it avoids the question ... 'do we know that?
do we know there are a large number of homeless people living in the
tunnels?'  'the police have never reported that ...'  And then a
denial there any deaths at all 'due to the accident caused by the
carelessness of the man we are discharging today' ...

You see, to admit there are (or were?) large numbers of homeless men
living down there requires an admission that we have lots of homeless
people in Chicago and no plan for them ... none at all. After all, we
stopped giving public aid money here; not even the $150 per month we
used to give. The idea of men living in tunnels underground and coming
out at night to scavenge for food in trash barrels is very disconcerting 
to our city fathers. If we do not have such a thing, then by extension
we could not have had any going back underground and falling into an
eternal sleep about four in the morning; to never wake up again when
the onrush of water first came past them an hour or so later ...

So when city employees who work in the tunnel say there are areas
under the city they do not like to go to alone, or without carrying a
weapon with them because there have been instances of a man jumping
out of a dark corner in front of them with a knife in his hand, ...
well, they must be liars.

When a wagon man says he took two bodies to the morgue picked up near
an obscure tunnel entrance on Canal Street and the paperwork never
seemed to reach the medical examiner's office ... he is a liar also.
Where are his credentials? What could he possibly know about how the
computer prints up those documents, etc?  Don't bother us with details
about reciepts given to the wagon men when they drop off their 'cargo'
at detox, the county jail or the morgue ... 

And if a police captain says his snitches on the street suggested he
look at sabatage, well ... you know the answer ... the mayor's office
said that was not true, and they sing a solo accompanied by the gospel
choir at the Tribune .. 'they had maps!  they had charts! a lazy and
incompetent worker caused it all!' ...

And then the temerity of the man who asked about the condition of
foundations in some of the buildings  ... 'no problem at all! our
experts tell us that blah blah ...'

And what about earth so eroded at this point that we might expect
street cave-ins from now till doomsday?  'if you are such an expert on
this, I'm sure our engineering people would have hired you by now to
share your skills ...' 

And the best one perhaps of all: 'how could there have been sabatage?
why, any person down there trying to knock a hole in the wall would
have been killed when the water came in ...'

Simple: an explosive device with a timer could have been put there
earlier, oh, say sometime early Sunday morning, 24 hours before. It
might have been the so-called 'disgruntled city worker'; it might have
been a disturbed homeless person; it might have been anyone. 

'Mister Mayor, will there be any problem with rats coming out on the
streets since their nests were disturbed and washed away?' 'no, none
at all ... rats are good swimmers, they'll survive.'

What about the homeless people? Are they good swimmers, will they
survive?   Oh, I forgot that's not the proper sort of thing to ask;
after all what would I know about those things? Where are my
credentials to ask such things? I'm a troublemaker I guess, like Emma
Jones who when asked her occupation thought about it a minute then
said, 'occupation? I'm a hell raiser ...'

Edison tells us the electric service downtown will come back on 'any
day now'.  Does anyone remember the 1988 Mother's Day fire at Illinois
Bell, and how emergency service would be up and running in 2-3 days,
only to finally be restored over a week later, with full service
taking a month to bring back on line?  Hell, they don't even have all
the water pumped out yet, and since the city has been unable to figure
a way to get it out of the tunnels (it will take about a week to dig a
connection between the tunnels and the Deep Tunnel sewer reservoir),
it appears the building owners in the process of pumping out their own
buildings will wind up taking most of the reserve left in the tunnels
along with it.

Downtown today we saw large hoses (fire department type) snaking up
out of building basements and into the street where water gushed out
flooding the street as it ran into nearby sewers. The intake hole in
the river has been plugged to the extent the leak has slowed to almost
a trickle, and crews were able to enter the tunnel and barricade it on
both sides of the hole.

Marshall Field announced today they will remain closed indefinitly at
their State Street flagship store until cleanup is finished. Their
loss to date has been about $500,000 in merchandise alone, not
counting lost wages and sales. Losses overall are in excess of one
hundred million dollars at this point from lost wages and sales in the
stores downtown. Most companies are continuing to pay their employees
at least for another day or two. If they will do so next week, should
the disruption continue that long is not certain.

Certainly it will be well into next week before elevator service and
full electrical power from temporary systems is in place. 

And people still ask me why it is I want to leave Chicago once and for
all ** so badly ** -- 'my' Chicago has been gone for twenty years now,
maybe longer.  But the mayor tells us everything will be fine, and the
{Chicago Tribune} has the maps, charts and graphs to prove it.


Patrick Townson