This is good news, Paul! Tell us more about it. Is it really hard metric or
are the components "soft"? Next time I'm in the eastern "Rez" (as the Navajo
call it), I'll have to check it out. Is the PHS ahead of other federal
agencies on this? Are those special tapes numbered in centimeters or
millimeters?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Fardig, Paul S.
> Sent: 2000 November 29 Wednesday 12:38
> To: U.S. Metric Association
> Subject: [USMA:9440] RE: Metric federal construction
>
>
>
> 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 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.
>
>
