Git 'er done.
They'll eventually be charged with something.
I told them you might as well not waste your time because the West Virginia guys will have this road built before you finish your paperwork,” Lewis continued.
and there it is...
It shows the incompetence of the federal gubmint.
I wish Baby Dog’s Dad would turn those miners loose on our roads here in the hollers and ridges of West Virginia.
God bless those miners!
Riiiiiight.
According to whom, NYP?
Does anyone actually believe that BS?!
My money says Garland is reviewing environmental regulations and Highway Construction laws as we speak and will likely come down hard on these folks with Severe Criminal Prosecution and Asset Forfeiture. It’s just what commies do when you make them look bad.
Nothing illustrates the difference between socialism/communism (government) versus capitalism (free individual people and enterprise) better than this story and the one about the 15 DHS workers moving one log that would fit in your fireplace, a whopping 15 feet.
I would not be surprised if the government will force the road to be destroyed because an environmental impact study was not done prior to the road opening.
You bet turned a blind eye - else they would have gotten a black eye.
This is what men used to live for.
To build something substantial that will stand for a long time and be used by others.
I heard Bill Bruford (one of the great prog-rock drummers: Yes & King Crimson) talk about a stone bridge he helped build in the 1960s. He still takes pride in it standing today.
Precisely why FEMA is a useless entity. Too big, too slow. By the time people are done dying they’re starting to be ready to help....and ‘ready to help’ means weeks and months before anything is accomplished. It is the nature of bureaucracies.
They’ll do their ‘lessons learned’ to be better next time. Next time the disaster won’t look anything like the last one. Rinse repeat.
FEMA budget should be nothing more than a pile of cash ready to be rendered to local people who know *exactly* what can, and needs, to be done. Maybe FEMA should be just enough people to itemize the types of people and equipment across the country that might be helpful in a disaster.
Or drop some cash at local Churches! ...of course, that’d never happen.
There is so much pent up creative force and energy in this country just waiting to be unleashed from the Bureaucratic sissy state...too afraid of its own shadow to move and get needful things done for the people!
I’m sick of the stagnation!
I believe that my friends in Bat Cave will benefit from this. After the storm, they had to be helicoptered out.
This is great. I wonder what the residents of Chimney Rock will do with that poor ravaged town. I hope good things.
“Country folks can survive” -HW Jr
Bureaucrats live in fear, which to the rest of us is paradoxical, because they're harder to fire than anybody. But that doesn't mitigate their psychological reality. Hence, the reason in their "minds" for what they do is fear of somebody making a mistake. What they don't live for is to help get things done such that there are fewer mistakes.
These miners build roads all the time. They know very well what they must do to rebuild a road that goes into a river: Dump BIG boulders into it to anchor the fill. The problem is that the roads miners typically build don't have to last very long because they move on once the deposit they're working is depleted. Importantly, these miners are NOT familiar with the history of that particular river.
How big do the boulders have to be for that particular river for the fix to last long enough to justify reconstructing the town? Or are they building it to last only long enough to break it down and get it out of there? If they are fixing it for the long term and there aren's any boulders that big they can move can they be cemented in during an emergency project like this?
Government and engineering firms can be repositories for that kind of information from past projects and failures, which then a "helpful" bureaucrat could share with the guys with the excavators. It could be that getting a concrete truck in there at the right time for a particular arrangement of boulders would fix it more or less permamently, which of course beats a solution that gets washed out fifty years hence.
Is is worth building a whole town that gets wiped out every century? Could be that it is! Consider that quartz mine in North Carolina upon which the world's semiconductor industry depends. Those guys gotta live somewhere! Hence, one can build for the ages (the typical risk-averse bureaucrat mode) or build for what is a reasonable term knowing that the deposit will last only so long, or if it will, how long will the fix last before it has to be done again.
This of course comes in to designing for the scale of events. Upon occasion, my dad did bond financing for flood control in Southern California. He explained to me that they could finance for a 100 year flood, or for a 200 year flood, but the latter would be three times the cost. Was the community infrastructure worth that extra cost? Yes, all of these are estimates, but this is where that historical repository comes in. So how long this is all supposed to last versus how much engineering is involved is rife with trade-offs and uncertain risks as considered against the obvious urgency of the immediate situation. If they took one more day and the fix lasted a century instead of until the next big event, would it be worth it? This is where talented leadership should enter the picture. Information helps mitigate those long term risks.
There is a line in the movie ‘The Wind and The Lion’, great movie by the way, where the American ambassador is talking to head of whatever country they are in about building a road across the desert. The Arab guys says, “You can’t build a road across the desert, the sand will swallow it up.” The ambassador takes a long puff off a big cigar, looks at the guy and says, ‘Sir we’re Americans we can do anything.’ Almost brought the house down. Still one of my favorite lines from a movie.
Would love to see this country get back to that mentality.
I remember when Donald Trump went into Central Park and hired a team that got it’s skating rink rebuilt.
“Donald J. Trump refurbished the Central Park -skating rink two and a half months ahead of his own speedy six-month schedule and $750,000 below his own projected $3 million budget, having taken over the project after the city spent six years and $12 million unsuccessfully trying to get the job done.”
How? He didn’t meed to use the city bureaucrats and all their red tape.
Government bureacrats and the contractors they make agreements with are joined in making any project cost more than necessary and take longer needed.
Immediately after the Deep State steals the election for Harris and following the arrest of Trump and Company she’ll sic the DOJ on these rednecks for insurrecting.