Atlantic Station a joke in more ways than one

By KEVIN DUFFY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/29/08

The water problems at Atlantic Station are more complicated than just a failure of expansion joints in concrete, the buildings' general contractor said Tuesday.

The property owner, Atlantic Town Center, said last week that improperly installed joints caused leaks in three buildings in the heart of the development, affecting several businesses. The joints are gaps that allow concrete to expand and contract with temperature changes so cracks don't occur.

After investigating, Atlantic Town Center decided 10 buildings should be repaired, a process that will continue into next year and cost millions of dollars.

But Jeff Johnson of Vratsinas Construction Co., the general contractor, said the problems go beyond expansion joints.

"It's much more complicated and complex than the joints in the walls," Johnson said.

In an earlier e-mail he said: "While VCC has worked closely with Atlantic Town Center on this issue, there has been no agreement on either the cause or the most appropriate solution to resolve the owner's concerns."

Johnson would not elaborate on what the additional issues are but said consultants produced a detailed technical report that shows broader problems.

"In working with Atlantic Town Center, VCC has shared its observations about existing design issues and we agreed with the majority of the owner's consultants' findings," Johnson's e-mail said.

Responding to Johnson's comments, Brian Leary, vice president with AIG Global Real Estate Investment, an Atlantic Town Center partner, said in an e-mail: "While we've identified some isolated issues related to a few buildings, we've identified no structural or other significant issues that will keep us from expeditiously repairing and upgrading the buildings. We've brought in some of the best consultants in the industry to help us identify the issues and best-practice solutions, which we are now implementing."

He also said: "This situation is not uncommon in developments of this size, and identifying its existence, source and solution takes time. We are working to fix the situation in the buildings in question while proactively inspecting and upgrading adjacent buildings to prevent future issues."

Atlantic Station is a nationally renowned mixed-use development on what used to be a steel plant site in Midtown at the I-75/I-85 junction. It opened in October 2005 and was celebrated for turning unsightly industrial land into a popular place to live, work and shop.

Balconies and building facades have to be repaired and work on each building will take about four months.

The buildings represent a small percentage of the total structures on the 138-acre site, Atlantic Town Center says.

Scaffolding already is up in the entertainment and residential area known as the District. Six of the buildings are a mix of retail and residential that include ATLofts and 17 Street Lofts. The other buildings are businesses.

Doc Green's Salads and Grill, one of Atlantic Station's original restaurants, sits under a concrete balcony that leaks. After a rain, part of the restaurant has to be closed off because of drips, said John Griffin, director of operations and business partner in Doc Green's.

Al Corry, an ATLofts resident and real estate agent, said balconies on his building collect water under the concrete and will have to be fixed. Atlantic Town Center told homeowners at a meeting last week repair costs already have topped $1 million, Corry said. Atlantic Town Center has not publicly disclosed a price.

Johnson was asked if the problems could involve more than 10 buildings. "We are not aware of other buildings within the project that will require repairs," his e-mail said.

Neither Atlantic Town Center nor Johnson would assign blame for the leaks.

"Most of the attention has been focused on fixing the problem as opposed to fixing the blame," Johnson said. "VCC expects that this will be resolved through continued discussions between all of the parties involved."

Racket exposed by John Sugg CL

It would be the most ironic of ironies, but we'd probably be too dehydrated to laugh.

Should Atlanta plum run out of water – even though the state says we've prayed enough to avoid it – we'd most likely turn to the dolled-up, overpriced, bottled variety. And how rich it'll be when folks learn that often what swishes around in the plastic container is a slightly altered version of what we were watching dwindle away all along.

Like Dasani. The Coca-Cola brand is the second best-selling bottled water product in the United States, right behind Pepsi's Aquafina. And both are, essentially, glorified tap water. Dasani, for example, is the product of what the company calls "reverse osmosis." According to a dazzling animation on the product's website, water is taken from a municipal source – which usually means it's the same water the local community also uses. It is then filtered, purified, treated and tinged with trace minerals such as potassium chloride, salt and magnesium sulfate. Voila – Dasani.

And right up in Marietta, just before where U.S. 41 crosses Canton Road, the soda-pop giant has a plant where humdrum municipal water, pulled from Lake Allatoona and the Chattahoochee River, is morphed through the process, bottled and then shipped throughout the Southeast.

"If people in Atlanta knew that they need to go to the store to buy bottled water because they're asked to conserve, and find out they're buying [municipal water] that's bottled in a Marietta plant ..." says Gigi Kellett of Corporate Accountability International, a big-business watchdog group. "And then these corporations are turning around and selling it to these individuals when they're taking it directly from their source."

This summer, Kellett's group influenced Pepsi to agree to change its labels to more accurately reflect the water's origin. Coca-Cola has said it doesn't think Dasani consumers are confused about the source and continues simply to label the water as "purified."

According to Marietta Power and Water, the Marietta facility at 1091 Industrial Park Drive used nearly 8.4 million gallons of water in November. That's a huge improvement from the same month last year, when it gulped 9.8 million gallons, and a far cry from the Pepsi Gatorade plant in southwest Atlanta – the city's biggest water user – which gobbled up 70.8 million gallons in September alone. The only customer in the Marietta district to top Dasani's consumption was Tip-Top Poultry, a chicken plant three miles down the road. Wellstar-owned Kennestone Hospital followed.

Commercial water users in Marietta get a sweet deal by paying less the more water they use. There is a graduated grid of rates. The first 2,000 gallons a commercial user such as Coca-Cola uses cost a total of $10.61; once that usage reaches a million gallons or more a month, the company pays $2.02 per 1,000 gallons.

Use more, pay less. It's a pricing structure that stands to change later this month when Marietta Power and Water's board considers doing away with the different block systems and charging a flat rate to commercial customers. The Metropolitan North Georgia Water District has urged municipalities to adopt such conservation pricing, but most of them are just now getting around to doing so.

Bottled water is one of marketing's great success stories. According to the Pacific Institute, an Oregon-based environmental-policy center, the $15 billion industry is enjoying tremendous annual growth: 10 percent every year, far outpacing paltry gains for fruit drinks and soda. And water's a moneymaker, too; it doesn't cost much to buy and industry analysts have predicted that after advertising and production, bottled water makes double the profit of carbonated beverages. A 1.25-pint bottle of Dasani costs $1.19 at a local gas station. Compare that with the $2.02 Coca-Cola pays for 1,000 gallons of municipal water to bottle it.

"We have to ask ourselves," says Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, "is it fair to subsidize a company with public water supplies that they then turn around and market, at a time when those public water supplies are at crisis levels?"

The drought has hit at a time when Coke already is embroiled in an international controversy over water rights and findings that global warming may be exacerbated by the plastic industry's energy-intensive business plan. That recently added to a backlash from water works in the United States that launched a massive PR campaign aimed at informing the public that tap water wasn't just safe to drink, but vitally important in terms of health, quality of life and economic development.

And while Gov. Sonny Perdue in late October ordered municipal water providers to cut back 10 percent compared with their average consumption prior to the drought restrictions – a goal that Atlanta and DeKalb County failed to meet – there's still neither a deadline for compliance nor a penalty for missing the cuts.

But records show Dasani cut back and did its part. Coca-Cola, as well as big water users, already are cutting cut back. The company says it's done so at the Dasani plant and across the board, claiming conservation programs since 2002 have cut its water use worldwide by 19 percent. Coke spokeswoman Michele McKillip says the Marietta facility – which also bottles Coca-Cola Classic, Sprite and other drinks – had already reduced water use by 8 percent from 2005 to 2006 and was continuing to cut back by using air-powered rinsers, fixing leaky pipes, ceasing truck washes, and using "dry lubes" on the conveyance line.

"Coca-Cola takes the drought very seriously," McKillip says. "And we share the state and community's concerns. The issue of water is something we've been looking at for a long, long time."

Late Thursday night last week, visible through a plate-glass window to motorists driving by, the bottling operation was humming along. The bottles were in motion. And in the parking lot sat another idling tractor trailer, ready to roll out more of that purified water.

“Taking lighters away is security theater,”

Finally a sane voice in a sea of hysteria....


July 20, 2007

U.S. Will Allow Most Types of Lighters on Planes

By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, July 19 — Federal aviation authorities have decided to stop enforcing a two-year-old rule against taking cigarette lighters on airplanes, concluding that it was a waste of time to search for them before passengers boarded.

The ban was imposed at the insistence of Congress after a passenger, Richard Reed, tried to ignite a bomb in his shoe in 2001 on a flight from Paris to Miami.

Lawmakers said that if Mr. Reid had used a lighter, instead of matches, he might have been able to ignite the bomb, but Kip Hawley, assistant secretary for the Transportation Security Administration, said in an interview on Thursday that the ban had done little to improve aviation security because small batteries could be used to set off a bomb.

Matches have never been prohibited on flights.

“Taking lighters away is security theater,” Mr. Hawley said. “It trivializes the security process.”

The policy change, which is to go into effect on Aug. 4, applies to disposable butane lighters, like Bics, and refillable lighters, like Zippos. Torch lighters, which have thin, hotter flames, will continue to be banned.

Security officers have been collecting some 22,000 lighters a day nationwide, slowing down lines at check points. Even so, many smokers had found ways to sneak lighters through checkpoints, often by placing more than one in a carry-on bag. Disposing of the seized lighters has cost about $4 million a year.

By lifting the ban, Mr. Hawley said, security officers could spend more time looking for bombs or bomb parts. “The No. 1 threat for us is someone trying to bring bomb components through the security check point,” he said. “We don’t want anything that distracts concentration from searching for that.”

A provision in the 2007 Homeland Security Department spending bill allowed the security agency to stop enforcing the ban if it determined that “lighters are not a significant threat to civil aviation security.”

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who in 2004 helped lead the effort to ban lighters, has not objected to the change, a spokeswoman said.

Blood, Sweat and Tears at New US Embassy

Blood, Sweat and Tears at New US Embassy

by David Phinney

The US Justice Department is actively investigating allegations of forced labor and other abuses by the Kuwaiti contractor now rushing to complete the sprawling 592-million-dollar US embassy project in Baghdad, numerous sources have revealed. Justice Department trial attorneys Andrew Kline and Michael J. Frank with the civil rights division have been contacting former employees of First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting and other witnesses for interviews and documents, but declined to comment on the investigation other than to say they are looking into allegations of labor trafficking. The two investigators are said to be looking for actual workers around the world who claim they were misled or pressured to work in Iraq against their will by the company. Rumors of forced labor in Iraq have plagued First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting for several years, but US government officials have discounted such allegations by workers from Nepal and the Philippines in the past, even as the company continued to rack up contracts now totaling several billion dollars from the Pentagon and US State Department. Late last year, several US citizens also said they boarded separate chartered jets in Kuwait loaded with work crews from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and Africa holding boarding passes to Dubai, but the planes then flew directly to Baghdad. More recently, another US citizen told IPS that he was told by workers from Ghana on the embassy site that they thought they would have jobs in Dubai but were then taken to work in Iraq. First Kuwaiti's general manager, Wadih al Absi, flatly dismisses the accusations as unfounded and false. "I am telling you that First Kuwaiti has never violated any visa violations or forced people to work," he said during a telephone interview last January. "In the coming months you will see that First Kuwaiti is the best company working in the Middle East." Since landing the Baghdad project, First Kuwaiti has won additional contracts worth roughly 200 million dollars more for embassy projects in Africa, India and Indonesia. The company also is believed to be competing for another large new US embassy in Lebanon. Soon after the State Department awarded the Iraq embassy contract to First Kuwaiti in July 2005, thousands of low-paid migrant workers recruited from South Asia, the Philippines and other nations poured into Baghdad to begin building the gargantuan new embassy within two years time. When completed later this summer, it will be the most fortified US diplomatic mission ever constructed, spanning 104 acres on the banks of the ancient Tigris River and holding more than 20 buildings. It will be comparable in size to the Vatican. But during First Kuwaiti's frenzied rush to the finish the project on schedule, US managers and specialists involved with the project began protesting about the living and working conditions of lower-paid workers sequestered and largely unseen behind security walls bordering the embassy project inside the US-controlled Green Zone. Among those complaints: construction crews lived in crowded quarters, ate substandard food, and had little medical care. When drinking water was scarce in the blistering heat, coolers were filled at the banks of the Tigris, a river rife with waterborne disease, sewage and sometimes floating bodies. Others questioned why First Kuwaiti held the passports of workers. Was it to keep them from escaping? Some laborers had turned up "missing" with little investigation. One US citizen said laborers told him they had been misled about their job location. When recruited, they were unaware they were heading for war-torn Iraq. After hearing similar allegations during much of 2006, Howard J. Krongard, the State Department's inspector general, flew to Baghdad for what he describes as a "brief" review on Sep. 15. His review was recently made public after inquires from Al-Jazeera about the embassy for an upcoming hour-long documentary, and he reported that the complaints had no substance. "Nothing came to our attention," he wrote in a nine-page memorandum posted on the State Department's Web site. More importantly, after interviewing an unstated number of workers from the Philippines, India, Nepal and Pakistan, Krongard said no evidence was found of labor smuggling, trafficking or other abuses. Krongard makes no mention of an ongoing investigation by the US Justice Department of First Kuwaiti and others for such alleged practices and other matters. One former labor foreman at the embassy site who recently read Krongard's review called it "bulls**t." Another former First Kuwaiti employee viewed it as "a whitewash." Had Krongard visited earlier than last September and unannounced, he may have witnessed something very different then what his memorandum relates. "Most of the allegations (from the US citizens) were true before he arrived," claims Juvencio Lopez, who says he was a high-level project manager under the US State Department over the course of two years. During a telephone interview, he said that protests over First Kuwaiti's bad food, abusive treatment from managers and unsafe working conditions were routine among many of the 2,700 workers during much of 2005 and 2006. "There were strikes and sit-downs every month," Lopez said. He left Iraq in November 2006 and is now home in San Antonio, Texas. "Sometimes there were almost riots." Lopez vividly recalls a First Kuwaiti security guard unholstering his 9mm handgun and walking among the squatting protesters telling them to get back to work. Had the guard fallen or workers tackled him to the ground, the gun might have gone off. Lopez said he immediately reported the incident to First Kuwaiti. "Someone could gotten killed or injured," he said. On another occasion, a company manager roughed up a Filipino worker, sources say. All of the other Filipinos nearby began loudly protesting as bewildered workers from other countries watched. "The workers were from 36 different countries and everyone spoke a different language," Lopez said. Supplementing Krongard's review, the coalition Multi-National Force inspector general in Baghdad interviewed 36 workers from seven different countries at the new embassy site in December. The MNF-I IG claimed it found no evidence to indicate the presence of severe forms of labor trafficking, but did find that workers from Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka reported deceptive hiring practices by recruitment agencies in their home countries. They said they had been promised higher pay, shorter hours and days off. "A large majority of workers" from the Indian subcontinent incurred recruiting fees of up to one year's salary. Paul Chapman, a subcontractor working with First Kuwaiti, said he is also struck by the lack of interest in workers that First Kuwaiti had listed as "missing" on its company rosters. Now home in South Carolina, Chapman said seven workers from India, Pakistan and the Philippines "just disappeared." Fearing they may have been killed and dumped into the Tigris, he began pressing embassy officials overseeing the project to investigate. "They told me to forget about it because the workers had probably found other jobs." Chapman and others also claim that standard safety procedures on the project frequently went unobserved. Many worked without safety harnesses when off the ground and had no hardhats or boots. Work clothes were dirty and tattered. Those that had them had only one set of work clothes so they were rarely washed. They became dirty and tattered, causing rashes and sores. Some worked in sandals, others in bare feet. "They had their toes curled around the rebar like birds," Lopez remembers. "Every US labor law was broken," charged one US foreman, John Owens, who said that he never witnessed a single safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell and broke his back and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. "The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness," said Owen, who left the embassy project last June.