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Although it is not currently fashionable to express any sympathy for BAE, the company that designed and installed the infamous luggage-shredding machinery which has kept Denver International Airport from opening on anything close to schedule, to some degree I share the pain.
Though I would dearly love to specialize in things I'm good at -- coffee drinking, library loitering, general puttering -- the MacArthur Foundation has never recognized my genius at these pursuits by issuing a grant that would allow me to focus exclusively on the perfection of my talents.
Instead, I've been subject to the whims of people with checkbooks. One of them, a local engineering shop run by a friend, won a contract to install some new control relays in the electric plant of a town in New Mexico.
He's a hardware guy -- his favorite programming language
is solder -- and he needed some software that would allow a
remote computer to monitor the smart relays.
All the
real programmers hereabouts were tied up on other projects,
so he asked me to tackle the job.
That was last October. On the surface, the job looked simple enough -- mostly just cobbling together some off-the-shelf software. I estimated the job at 40 hours.
But there are always complications. The relays didn't communicate in quite the same way as their manuals stated. The programs and languages we employed -- Qmodem and its own script dialect, Spitbol, assembler, proprietary RS-232C drivers, text editor modified for a remote ANSI terminal -- all had their quirks, as did the hardware. There were many nights when, the harder I worked, the worse it got.
Details would be painful for me to recall and tedious for you to read, but suffice it to say that by the first part of this month, 10 months after commencing a relatively simple project, our monitoring program was working, although it still needs some fine-tuning.
This was probably about one billionth as complex as scanning bar codes on carts as they whiz by and then routing them and tipping them at the proper place. From the vantage of my brief adventures in techno-nerd country, the wonder is that it's all in place and wired and that the carts move.
The rest is just fine-tuning, and the travails of the baggage system will probably be known only to historians a few years hence when DIA is a routine fact of urban life.
Consider the Moffat Tunnel, an earlier public-works project designed to maintain and enhance Denver's status as a transportation hub.
A century ago, Denver was essentially a dead end for west-bound trains. Going west by rail meant a 200-mile detour south to Pueblo, west to Salida and north to Minturn before continuing westward.
This was intolerable to Denver's civic leaders, who saw Pueblo, the state's second-largest city then and a growing center of heavy industry and rail transport, as a rival that had to be suppressed.
Pueblo politicians were able to block the first two efforts to use public money to bore a tunnel due west of Denver, but eventually the Moffat Tunnel Improvement District was approved by the legislature.
The 6.21-mile tunnel was supposed to take two years to bore and cost $6.72 million. Construction actually cost $15.5 million ($44 million including bond interest), and took five years, not two, largely on account of unforeseen conditions underground.
The Moffat Tunnel, which finally opened in 1928, took too long and cost too much. It was a scandal. Some speculators got rich, and taxpayers got taken for millions of dollars. And does anybody besides a few railroad buffs cara about that now?
Critics then missed the major effect of the Moffat Tunnel -- its small pioneer bore, later converted into a tunnel to bring water to Denver. A bigger water supply meant Front Range suburbs, Republican suburbs that could overwhelm ethnic Pueblo's Democratic votes.
Over the years, Colorado politics changed on that account; the Pueblo blue-color bloc counts for so little now that in 1994 we have two multi-millionaires running for governor, although one received the Democratic nomination.
After the tunnel, Colorado population became more concentrated in the metro area. This affected highway routes and airport locations and industrial sites -- it changed the geography of the entire Rocky Mountain Empire.
And it is to these ends that the critics of DIA should be focusing their attention. The thing is built, and it will open someday -- nobody's going to walk away from a $3.2 billion investment.
But will its higher fees mean more impetus for direct flights to ski areas, thereby dispersing traffic but causing more noise and aggravation in the mountains? Will increased costs mean that connectors from Grand Junction or Alamosa will prefer to go to Albuquerque or Salt Lake City, thereby further fragmenting the state? Will DIA's northeast location cause south-metro passengers to use the Colorado Springs airport, thus building that city at Denver's expense?
Those are the questions that DIA's critics should be asking, because the answers will tell us something that will matter. BAE's baggage woes will be a footnote about 10 seconds after the ribbon-cutting.
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