That Tricentennial was a long time ago now

I'm so old I remember when Mitch was going to cut the ribbon on a new airport to celebrate. He's moved on to his new career of not running for President now. And the airport is, well, there are problems.

KENNER, La. — Kenner's top building official says he warned contractors about the potential for plumbing problems when construction began on the new, billion-dollar terminal at Louis Armstrong International Airport.

An email exchange from 2016 shows that the contractor asked to cut back on plumbing hangers to keep costs down. A city inspector would later blame the plumbing problems on a shortage of those same hangers.

Typically when you build anything on top of the South Louisiana Jello soil, you've got to take certain precautions in order to compensate for the inevitable subsidence that is going to occur.  One can easily imagine that this is particularly true when you are building something the size of airport terminal.  Anyway, it's common enough knowledge among the layfolk.  There's no way an engineering firm would just ignore a problem like that out of ignorance. They could only do that as a deliberate cost-cutting measure.  

The audit was based largely on an interview with Mohamad and an email exchange between the contractor, a joint venture called Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro, and 2016 Kenner Code Enforcement Director Stephen Petit.

“Kenner officials insisted subsidence would in fact occur with the soil beneath the terminals, but were told the cost to support the pipelines every two feet would be cost prohibitive, and the national minimum standard of five feet per hanger should be upheld,” writes Adam Campo, Director of Risk, Insurance, Audit and Compliance for the City of Kenner, in his report.

Engineers put a shorter length of pipe in between hangers when they are trying to add extra support.

“It was costing too much to put them at two-foot centers. It was costing a lot of manpower to have those hangers tied into the slab as well,” Mohamad said.

HGBM’s construction manager did not return email seeking comment and a representative for Square Button Consulting, the plumbing subcontractor listed on inspection records, said they simply installed the hangers and pipes to HGBM and the architect’s specs.

Not to get too deep in the muck here (the pipes are doing that well enough on their own) but it's worth remembering that Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro became the contractor after a series of  acrimonious disputes, stops, starts, court challenges, etc. involving allegations of racial discrimination, conflicts of interest, and political side deals among other complaints.  Eventually they hammered something out where everyone could get paid whatever it was they thought they were owed.  Although it now looks like they also took a few shortcuts to get there.

There's no way for us to say what Square Button's role in the shortcutting might have been. But it is interesting to see their name come up given that the firm's specialty wasn't exactly plumbing so much as it was political networking.

Square, however, is not a plumber. He was Mayor Mitch Landrieu's chief information officer until 2014. He holds an MBA from Wharton, an Ivy League business school often regarded as the best in the country. He engineered wireless networks for companies like Verizon and was a corporate consultant for Boston-based Bain & Co.

Square Button Consulting became licensed to work as a plumbing and mechanical contractor in April 2015, just as construction companies began jockeying for a piece of the new Armstrong Airport terminal.

Square's company is getting into plumbing because he was handpicked by the 70-year-old New Orleans firm Gallo Mechanical for a subcontract on the airport project. Gallo describes the deal as a mentorship arrangement that's a win from many sides: Part of the airport's DBE goal is fulfilled, Square gets a mentorship that will show him how to succeed in building trades, and the community, hopefully, gets an African-American-owned business equipped to thrive in a competitive marketplace.