Typical Day

I brought a 110 volt alarm clock with me, valueless of course: everything here is 220. Doesn’t matter though. I haven’t needed one. I get to sleep most nights by 9 pm, and I wake up around 5:15. Maybe 2 nights per week I get to sleep by 8, which means I wake up to the 4 AM edition of the muezzin as they call the faithful to prayer in the Pioneer Camp mosques. This ancient tradition was pretty otherworldly the first few times I heard it, especially just coming out of a sound sleep. The Koranic verses are sung all wobbly-voiced like in the movies. This first of five adhans of the day is an alarm clock for about 5 thousand Muslims on this project. The Hawk (Yemeni civil engineering company) camp and the PetroJet (Egyptian pressure vessel firm) are near enough that I can now recognize one from the other. It is actually pretty cool to lie and listen to ululating muezzins in the still of the early morning air before the construction noise begins.

I shower, dress and head to breakfast at the European canteen. The food is fair, a French firm runs the kitchen. Fruit, granola, yogurt, croissants. They try to do hot stuff, but it is awful. Hot dogs in lieu of sausage. Macaroni and ham with béchamel sauce. (the European canteen gets ham and bacon, but it is otherwise pretty much forbidden - and unwanted - in the other canteens). There is a reason the French stick to Continental breakfast.

Typically I meet one of my direct reports after breakfast and we drive to the office about a mile away from the camps. There are two Toyota trucks to use among my four-person team, and it works out pretty well.

I am the ranking environmental engineer on this project. I have two HVEs and two Yemenis that work directly for me, and each of the 14 Subcontractors have environmental staff that more or less report to me.

The major responsibilities assigned to me are: keeping the corals alive; oversight of a marginally performing, extended aeration sewer treatment plant; waste management via a combination of incineration and off-site recycling; oversight of the Reverse Osmosis units (ie, potable water). Other assigned areas of responsibility include camp and work place inspections. This includes hygiene inspections of the Subcontractor dining halls, kitchens, billets, ablutions. No, these are not terms I used much in Austin. Ablutions are places to wash up before going to bang one’s head on the ground in deference to the higher being.

In this connection I have to make a sidebar comment – some of the Muslims wear their religion on their sleeve, so to speak. Actually they wear it on their forehead – these guys favor asphalt for prayer, and they clang their heads on the pavement hard enough that it develops a blackened callous. You can see these guys walking around with blackened circles on their foreheads. Lots of the Egyptians do this, but I’m not sure it is restricted to them.

Anyway, a typical day for me is today – Nov 28, 2007. I started the day resolving an argument between a Subcontractor camp boss and my Yemeni inspector, who had given him a low score on a kitchen inspection. The kitchen inspections are pretty important – the word I get from our Yemgas doctor is that a salmonella outbreak would suspend the project for several weeks. Anyway, a low score on a kitchen inspection is serious business for a HVE camp manager, in this case a Turk, who looks at his relatively high salary as a godsend, not to be trifled with, especially by a Yemeni inspector.

Dispute resolved, I wrote up a couple of incident reports, which require a root cause analysis, and corrective actions to be implemented. One involved a tug boat that drove over a silt curtain which protects one of the very sensitive coral reefs (this was Muhibbah, a Malaysian firm). Another incident was Punj Lloyd, an Indian utilities firm, who bulldozed into a concrete septic tank causing the release of 5000 liters of raw sewage, which flowed downhill and pooled in a laydown yard of utility pipes.

I spent most of the afternoon coordinating over long distance with a French firm that is coming onsite next week to provide Marine Large Spill training. They will train some of the shorefront and barge personnel how to contain a large spill using huge oil booms that are towed into place with a tug boat, and oil skimmers that ride over the surface sucking up the petro. The training will actually simulate a spill using a drum of hydraulic oil that will be dumped into the ocean (under controlled conditions, hopefully).

No question this is the most responsible, and most accountable position I have held in my professional career. It has pros and cons, of course. There is absolutely zero QA/QC of the decisions I make, no one has time or expertise to do it. When things go right, it is an exhilarating feeling to see my projects come to fruition. On the other hand, I imagine that bad decisions will result in spectacular flame outs, with little compassion from management. I haven’t seen this yet, and don’t plan to.