Credit where it's due
Here's an interesting story, on KPTV, about the latest waste and mismanagement in the Portland water bureau. The extravagant covering of the Washington Park reservoirs was botched, and now tens of thousands of gallons of good water are being wasted daily. Who do they think they are, Google?
But funny thing, the Channel 12 people don't acknowledge that smart folks read about this a couple of weeks ago in the NW Examiner. Bad form, KPTV, bad form.
UPDATE, Friday morning: Now KGW has followed suit. Shame on them, too!
During the year when this was happening 2025, the city made the water bureau customer service manager ( not an engineer) the interim head of the water bureau ( what could go wrong?) Then when a permanent head was brought in ( real engineer ) in early 2026, she found out what went wrong and who's fault it was, and then was mysteriously put on administrative leave .You can't make this stuff up.
ReplyDeleteI remember an activist who was using a drone to film some of that construction, their concerns were being ignored, and look at that, now it's finished & it's already failing.
ReplyDeleteAnd *thank you* for the shout-out to the NW Examiner, always standing-up for the 'hood (& all Portlanders). Everybody needs to go read about the "cottage clusters", there, if you haven't already. That's just "infill" 2.0 with a cutesy name. There's nothing cute about it.
The Portland Water Bureau spent only $216 million on the project to cover the reservoirs . Did people expect them to be leak-free for that measly price?
ReplyDeleteAnd the contractor was Hoffman Construction, which practically specializes in emptying the capital construction bank accounts of Oregon's local governments.
It’d be interesting to see who came up with the “liner design “
ReplyDeleteProbably the same people who 'fixed' the DC reflecting pool for Trump (the first time).
DeleteIt was fine until it was vandalized by far-left radicals that hate our country and want lesbian barbershops to dominate the landscape.
ReplyDeleteArrest Melissa Etheridge!
DeleteAnd let us not forget that this all came about because of a non-existent problem of cow poop in the water supply. When Milwaukie WI had it's water supply contaminated with cryptosporidium from farm runoff, it made people sick. So the Feds made a one-size fits all rule that all city water supplies had to include expensive filter systems and no open reservoirs. NYC got an exception because it's senators actually did something. Portland has a very similar gravity fed water system as NYC and there are no ways farm runoff can get into our system (Crypto from beavers is not a problem). But our senators didn't lift a finger. And one of the writers of the legislation was working for an engineering company that Portland almost always uses for those famous no-bid contracts. Now they've spent billions and billions of dollars on unneeded storage tanks, filter systems and the dismantling of the reservoirs.
ReplyDeleteI thought our Senator was from New York...
DeleteHe's the one that doesn't do anything but doth protest too much...
DeleteHe says what his staff tells him to say.
DeleteOur Senator is from New York... which is why New York gt the exemption and Portland didn't!
DeleteDon't forget Novick. He was in on it. The child genius! That was before he lost an election to Chloe Eudaly.
DeleteGreat reminders, thank you. I also recall "terrorism" being brought into it, fears of something toxic being tossed-in, as an excuse to cover them (when the worst thing that had ever happened was the occasional drunk whizzing into one of them).
DeleteAnd now, The O acknowledges the importance of independent journalism -
ReplyDelete"But, until the NW Examiner’s questions a year later, water officials did not publicly acknowledge the severity of the leaking problem or the troubles they have faced to find a source and a fix..."
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2026/11/how-a-neighborhood-paper-exposed-portlands-68000-gallon-a-day-reflecting-pool-leak.html
I saw that. Maybe I shamed them into admitting it.
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