Our new (Federal) hospital currently under construction at Fort Defiance,
Arizona, on the Navajo Indian Reservation, is essentially all metric! We
are hosting a tour of the facility for the the Department of Interior,
Planning, Design, Construction and Maintenance Council on Tuesday, December
12th. Care to join us Dennis?
We've also given out metric-only tape measures to all employees at one of
our Service Units in Arizona, upon request of the Service Unit Director,
plus to all of our engineering staff throughout the state. We've had well
over a thousand metric-only tapes (5 and 8 meter) made up with our Agency
logo on them, and I've only got about 50 left. Time for another order!
And I just got a call from the General Contractor for another of our new
(Federal) hospitals, not yet under construction, in Winnebago, Nebraska,
about how to meet our standard boilerplate requirement for metric training
of all workers who will be on the job, which again is all metric.
It's a big ocean, but every drop helps.
Paul S. Fardig, P.E.
Acting Director
Division of Facilities Operations
Indian Health Service
U.S. Public Health Service
-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis Brownridge [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 1:04 PM
I've been searching high and low for metric federal construction projects
here in Arizona. We have two new high-profile federal buildings just
completed: a visitor center at Grand Canyon National Park, and an ornate
federal courthouse in Phoenix that is being hyped as the most high-tech,
avant-garde courthouse in America. None of the publicity describing them in
great detail has any metric figures, or any that are soft conversions of
hard metric figures. I have personally measured the visitor center, tape in
hand (got a lot of funny looks!) and could not find any hard-metric
dimensions, even in non-modular things like sidewalks. I did find one small
Forest Service picnic-ground project which, if you looked very closely at a
reproduction of the original drawing, had dimensions in meters. But all the
signs describing the project were wombat, the modular buildings and
components were wombat, and the workers I saw were using wombat-only tapes.
I suspect there is no real metric building going on anywhere in the U.S.
(other than highways). I think the bureaucrats who claim otherwise have been
less than honest with us.
