LAST MAN STANDING . SUPPOSE we stood on a fully ‘carpeted’ deck, of some pedestal, maybe, or some structure that holds us from falling down. Then something smelled and, when the time came we could no longer bear wondering about the source of the stink, someone suggested, ‘let’s lift the carpet and find out’. Under the carpet, we saw a dead rat – just one – and it seemed too small to cause all of us trouble. So we told one of the helps to just remove the small creature from where it was trapped then throw it away. All the stink wouldn’t just go away because the dead rat has stained the concrete floor for all the time it was there. Cleanse the concrete then, the help was told. * * * It turned out the rat was accidentally trapped in a concrete floor gap wherefore it died and rotted. It was a small gap so the help needed some slender brush, and a little help from a trowel, to reach half the depth of the four-inch slab and force the brush and a piece of wet cloth in. While the help was into the task, a piece of the concrete slab the size of a gravel delaminated. It would not have happened if its boundaries were not previously cracked. The color at the extremities showed a brownish shade. When the help stuck a finger halfway down the depth of the slab, she recovered powdery pieces of corroded metal, most probably reinforcing steel. * * * As the help looked around a half-meter horizontal radius of bare slab from where she stooped, apparent continuities of initially discovered concrete gap, manifesting as progressive cracks, stained with the color of rust, were now evident. This triggered suspicion which she needed to inform the landlady about. Lift up another meter-wide of carpet, barked the boss. And when the help did, they both found that the cracks have progressed far enough to merit a more elaborate observation. Thereafter, the entire floor was stripped with carpet and it revealed patterns of cracking that betrayed the possible presence of fatal defects. * * * This is how more detailed investigations are normally triggered. You see a ‘minute’ imperfection that sometimes leads to shocking revelations. Let us make interesting speculations in this case. There are building systems that rely heavily on walls for load resistance. In such system (depending on specific conditions) severely cracked floors could be indications of progressive wall movements. And, because these walls are supported directly by foundation structures, any wall movement could be dangerous indication of corresponding movement of the foundations which could either be one of two things – you have unstable soil underneath or a deficient foundation structure. * * * Neither one is a good bet. What do you care about reasons if your building is already sinking like the Titanic – unless you still have the time and means to arrest it, or you just care about writing a doctoral dissertation on designing buildings that would not sink whether into quicksand or the largest of sinkholes. This is a bad situation to be into. You need to fix things but, in doing so, it may be necessary to abandon the building while it is being restored. A smelly rat triggered it all. Thereafter, we found cracked concrete and corroded steels with indications of progressive damage – sideways to the walls, maybe, and down to the bottom of foundations, perhaps. * * * The Pork Barrel scandal started just like this – a small crack on the floor pointed by a smelly rat which, in our case, is not necessarily dead. As the extent of progressive cracks in the Legislature gradually spreads, we begin to ask ourselves how far the web of complicity could go into the corridors of the tripartite government. Will the ‘cracks’ terminate on the four senators and dozens of congressmen and, thus, the entire ‘building’ can be restored, incrementally, without the need to abandon it? What if it spreads across the Executive or the Judiciary in ways that we cannot see now? Will there be even just one last untainted man standing to put things together? * * * It started with a bad smell that rocked off our sensibilities. It could end in a whole structure needing to be restored into sanity altogether. Simpler in buildings; how do you implement that in government? The thing is, we could have prevented all this had we habitually and consciously elected the right leaders and put to good use the vigilance that democracy affords us. We would not have needed a rat to tell us something was wrong – and we could have incrementally restored the building while comfortably residing in it, at the same time. But we have been so self-centered to see the signs until all that was left of us was to smell them.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 01:58:42 +0000
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