At any rate, renovations planned long in advance — to keep the legislature from falling apart — are hardly a fair target for criticism.This conclusions assume one thing not actually disclosed in media reports on the need to relocate three floors of the Confederation Building tower and another thing that’s actually preposterous.
It’s fair to say if the Opposition’s roof was leaking, they’d be singing a different tune.
First, the big assumption, namely that the relocation was planned well before the lawyers on the fourth floor were told to pack up and shift.
Was it?
There’s absolutely no evidence to suggest it was. As recently as last November when asked about the escalating costs, public works minister Paul Davis didn’t mention them. In the House, Davis said nothing about old electrical wiring and a heat, ventilation and air conditioning system that needed replacing.
Nary a peep.
If he had, then none of this reno story would have gone anywhere.
He just talked about windows.
To the contrary, the evidence suggests that the relocation and the wiring and HVAC is a very recent story dating from after Christmas.
Second, there’s the funny comment about leaky roofs. It’s funny because in the 1980s, the Tories stuffed the Liberals in the most run-down, drafty, decrepit part of the Confederation Building they could find. Their crowd have never had to live in such conditions, ever. There was a roof right above them and it used to leak.
But it’s really laughable because the editorial seems to know very little about the actual construction of the building. He or she also didn’t pay close attention to the comments about who is getting shifted.
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Original architect’s drawing of the Confederation Building, showing the copper roof. Drawing originally owned by the roofing contractor, Simon Lono Ltd.
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Then there’s the cabinet room up on 11. No word of any renos there.
All of that was overhauled in the early 1990s as part of the renovations begun under the Tories in the 1980s.
Once you go up above the cabinet room, there is a mechanical space and then you get the roof: a geezly big, literally copper-fastened thing, no given to leaks. Again, no word of renovations to the roof.
Now to continue the editorial’s logic if you had a leaky roof, you’d do more than complain. You’d fix it. Yet there is no word of any work done on the roof. It was completely redone in the early 1990s, again as part of previous renovations.
What’s more, the Premier’s Office is Four floors below the roof. If the roof was leaking, then the water would hit - in order - the mechanical space, the cabinet room, the now-humourously-named communications and consultation offices, and the cabinet secretariat before it got to Kathy’s noggin or the buckets supposedly forming a maze on her floor.
Again, no word about any of that.
So let’s say that right now it looks like the Premier’s story was as accurate as her story about Joan Cleary, the bankrupt mill-buying company or a dozen other such examples of when what Kathy said and what happened were not even on the same continent.
But here’s another funny thing. All those floors in between are steel beams and concrete. Not exactly like the wooden floors in your house for letting water through. Water could find it’s way the holes for wiring and such through but it would have to be one helluva flood to come down to the 8th floor in such amounts that the floor was covered in buckets.
It would have to be like a break in the heating system that happened during the 1990s renovations after they moved the House of Assembly off the top floors. Someone on the 9th accidentally broke one of the hot water pipes for the heating system that, if memory serves, was coming out in favour of electricity. Water poured into the Premier’s Office and pooled on the floor like a giant lake. You couldn’t get from one side of the room to another very easily what with a couple of inches of water pool up there. In any event, it didn’t require any wholesale decamping to another floor, dislocating that floor’s original inhabitants while all the construction work got done.
Curiously enough that happened before the renovations to the 8th floor in the 1990s, as public works finished off the series of long-planned changes to the building dating from the 1980s.
In any event, some water probably worked its way down through electrical and mechanical access holes in the floor. If memory serves though, it didn’t make it down to the floor where the Premier and her staff these days will find themselves comfortably housed for the next year or more. That would be four more floors made of concrete and steel beams.
Sometimes people can’t see what is right in front of them. They make assumptions or they just don’t know some basic information that puts the whole thing in a different perspective.
That’s when you get opinions that are full of holes. That’s when you get comments by politicians that are as far from copper-fastened as could be and that likely wouldn’t stand the gentle breeze of a few pointed questions.
Unlike the roof at the Confederation Building, copper-fastened by expert roofers about 20 years ago and still holding up all that time later.
-srbp-
