Death Valley Bureaucrats
Cost
crunch forces sporadic garbage collection in Death Valley
National Park! What do they do with all the money? How about a barbed wire fence
to enclose DVNP's 3000 square miles? 55 squared = 3000 55(4)= 220
mile perimeter. The installed cost of a top of the line, state of the art,
no expense spared, cost plus barbed wire fence is what? $20/ft?
5280x220x20= $23,000,000.00?
But since it is a government project and extrapolating
from various subway projects, wouldn't $100,000,000.00 be much more realistic?
Aren't fences supposed to enclose something? Why does
this fence end? Perhaps they succeeded in using up all the money before the
fence was finished. Perhaps the DVNP bureaucrats decided kitchen remodeling with
granite countertops in their government provided housing would be a better way
to spend the money. Perhaps they lost interest or forgot about it.
Is this not a brand new 6'
high barbed wire fence with fresh wood posts and metal posts with perfect paint?
What is it's essential purpose?
1.To intimidate citizens that they are on the border of the high and mighty DVNP
and not just lowlife BLM land.
2. To make sure nonexistent hikers don't march into the elysian
landscape without paying a fee and getting permission.
3.How about using up the annual budget allocation so the DVNP bureaucrats can
claim an urgent need for more money for the next fiscal year? To justify hiring
more federal employees to maintain the expanding infrastructure? In
addition to installing more hardware there is also the practice of creating more
rules and regulations and hiring more federal employees to enforce the
additional rules. Maybe these DVNP bureaucrats are working toward being a
congressperson in a future life.
Now here is a marginal dirt
road that no one uses and instead of a gate the dirt road is flanked on both
sides for 100' with barbed wire fence. If a fence is needed why isn't a gate
needed? Why is there barbed wire on both sides of a dirt road for 100'?
Maybe a cost plus contractor was told to end the fence at a certain point and
had some extra material that needed to be used up. Of course the cost of labor
to install the fence dwarfs the cost of material.
BTW did the DVNP bureaucrats get an environmental impact statement approved
before building this fence enclosing 3,336,000 acres of the most priceless
desert terrain on the planet? Does not this fence adversely affect the habitat,
migratory patterns, and corridors of indigenous mule deer, white tailed
deer, pronghorn antelope, coyotes, bighorn sheep, the Mexican wolf, wild horses,
wild burros, mountain lions, and the endangered desert tortoise?
Where are all the lawsuits from various environmental groups protesting the
desecration of the wilderness?
Answer: The fence was installed during the Clinton years and no
environmental leftists would say boo to the Clinton administration or the NPS.
These photos were taken a
few miles west of Beatty, south of Bullfrog Mt., at the NE boundary of DVNP. But
perhaps this fence is planned for future use..........
In the "Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the
administrators of the camps are described as calculating that providing enough
rations to keep the average inmate alive for six weeks was the most economical.
In Death Valley solar
power can be used to kill the camp arrivals within 48
hours and from there
the bodies can provide fuel for a
thermal depolymerization (TDP) plant which would relieve the energy crises.
I would write my congressperson to complain about the fence but I
don't want to be on the short list for TDP fuel. But perhaps I'm there
already.