At our evening meeting I filled the girls in on my conversation I had with Eric. Marcy’s response was, as I thought “If they send us something to look at we will evaluate it 100%, just like everything else we do.” The discussion moved on to more pressing things at hand to deal with.

Our first discussion on this big endeavor was the starting and ending dates of the sessions. With that out of the way, the pecking order for each college was the next thing on this big to-do list. The hard part of the scheduling was who is to make up each rape prevention team? Then where were the teams sent? Setting the dates and times, along with the hotels, transportation, reservations to go to each college. Lorrie was a miracle worker making the scheduling work with our planes.

When time permitted MAAR audits were added to the mix. I wanted to include spot audits while at the eight colleges run by JBG Security – but I was afraid it would simply overload the process as complicated as it already was. It was a project I would just have to do on my own or with my administrators.

We had just finished up when Tony and Kathy came in to update us on the airport progress maps and reports. Both were both extremely upbeat. Even by taking the couple of extra days off for the holiday, they were still ahead of their self imposed schedule.

“Its amazing the progress one can make when you don’t have to wait on some state inspector to hold three meetings and 4 conference calls to determine if four inches of pipe sticking out of the ground is adequate,” he said with a laugh. “It made me realize that I have been doing state work too long without a break. This project is almost like taking a vacation on the job.”

“The water tower had the first complete coat of paint put on it today. We will give it a day to dry and then repeat the process for the final coat. Once it has dried we will finish the tower by adding the lettering. BJ are you sure that all you want are the gold and black JBG logo and Morton Field on it?” Tony said.

Our water tower was one of those short fat towers with four support legs instead of the newer poppy shape that everyone was using now. We had decided to go with that style to keep it below the tree line and not to create blind spots in the agencies Doppler radar. The main radar sweep was above the water tower. The top of the water tower was sixty feet.

The sweep of the Doppler was at 80 feet. I had overheard some of the installation techs talking that they should be able to see everything in the air at tree top level for over two hundred miles with this and the other radars in the area, depending how they chose to set the power level.

With the unit on Morton Field and the ones located at Dover AFB, Norfolk NAS and Wallops Island the entire Delmarva area could provide overlap early warning for submarine launched cruise missiles intended for the Baltimore-Washington corridor.

The real reason the agency wanted it located here was to get that overlap protection and provide backup for Wallops and Dover in case of an early strike attack on those two sites. Those two would be the first hit because they were only a few miles from the ocean and both were subject to interference from salt water mist from seasonally heavy ocean storms.

The short fat water tower presented another problem. Because of the height there was only fifty feet of head or twenty pounds of water pressure in the water system. That was not enough to make many appliances work correctly, such as ice makers, washers, flushes, urinals and automatic spigots.

To compensate for the fire hydrants Tony had put down eight inch water mains to guarantee plenty of flow, the fire company boosted the pressure to whatever they needed at the end of the fire hose with the pumps on the fire trucks.

All sprinkler systems used a variable boost pump to get the required pressure and flow to operate the sprinkler nozzles. To compensate in all the buildings and get the water pressure where it needed to be the plumbers were installing a small boost pump and bladder tanks to bring the water pressure to 60 pounds.

Tony brought us up to date on the de-icing system that the FAA was going to experiment with. The steel pipe had been installed completely around the NS runway, the terminal building, tarmac and our hangar. Installation of the nozzles on the runway had been completed.

The nozzles for the tarmac and our hangar had been installed but could not be positioned until all the concrete work was completed and the system tested under pressure. There were two 4 inch stand pipes at the edge of the tarmac for plane deicing that connected to de-icing tower trucks.

“De-icing trucks?” One more thing that would have to be maintained and parked in the maintenance building we had missed, I thought to myself.

The system was divided into six parts, each with a 200 hp electric driven pump to supply warm water to the nozzles at two thousand pounds of pressure and very high flow with 8 inch main piping.

The system was propane fired to heat the water to 70 degrees. I was surprised at that. I had in my mind hot water but no, it just had to be warm enough to melt snow. A lot of volume and 70 degrees would do that, the engineers promised. The runway concrete would be warm as well from the warmed water pumped on it and help melt the snow.

“Water pumped out of the ground is 54 degrees, the system is only adding 16 degrees to that,” Tony replied in answer to my surprised expression.

The concrete water heater was a ½ acre in size and 6 feet deep. The water moved over hot pipes on its way to the pumps and was capable of adding a lot more heat than 16 degrees if necessary.

The return water was from the two foot runway drains. The longer the system ran when snowing the warmer the return water would be to the monster heater, or so the engineers promised. That resulted in less gas being used.

Tony had poured the propane tank supports for the gas company yesterday. There were to be four 30,000 gallon propane gas tanks to run the heaters. I was glad someone else was paying for this experiment. When we started to pay I hoped that we would have winters with no snow or weak snow storms.

The tanks were coming by special convoy from the manufacturer with special routing, over-width permits, over-weight permits, and escorts vehicles, to be delivered and filled in a month.

I now understood why Tony built access roads on three sides of the property. There were so many things I had never considered as part of constructing something this big.

As I listened to Tony explain the system, I just shook my head. All this just to find out if an engineering theory would work in a real time scenario, before the millions it would cost to implement the system at a busy established airport.

If this deicing system really worked, thousands of flight delays caused by snowed in runways would practically be eliminated and airports could save hundreds of millions of dollars. O, great it also meant that every time snow was predicted there would be dozens of VIP’s in the Morton Terminal building evaluating the system.

Being that that was Monday night; Lorrie and I were together and I was looking forward to the relaxed loving she liked. Vicky on the other hand was with Jenny tonight. Poor Vicky would be dog tired tomorrow. Jenny still could not get enough sex to keep her satisfied for long. Sunday night she had awakened me not once but three times, even after a marathon session before going to sleep. We all silently hoped this stage soon passed but none of us would ever tell her no when we were with her.
Hmm maybe we should take another look at the sleeping arrangements. Having two of us sleeping with Jenny to help satisfy her sexual cravings at night would be easier on all of us. I will talk to the girls without Jenny around.

I wondered where Jenny was getting her energy from. But then I remembered all the big meals she was eating.

Edit by Alfmeister
Proof read by Joe H.