Cape Safety, Inc. - Where Problems Perish: Danger Dogs Series, #3

By Richard Hughes

Cape Safety, Inc. – Where Problems Perish continues the global adventures of the expert men and women of a fictitious top-notch safety consulting firm, internationally recognized as the "go-to" safety, industrial hygiene, and disaster specialists.

• Proud of your designer clothes? Look behind the scenes at the factory conditions in Pakistan who tire over your designer duds and rethink it.

• Read a layman's explanation of how religious extremism results in the long-term far-reaching effects of deforestation.

• See how the love of money is a sin, but not for the reasons you think.

• Eavesdrop on a conversation between experts about how and why the World Trade Center's construction exacerbated the quick fire spread on that fateful day of September 11, 2001.

• What are they really doing at New York state's Plum Island laboratory?

• Why the term "spelunker" is an insult.

• Explore the Japanese superstition of the Number 4.

• Backpacks for bees? It's so crazy it just might work.

• A serious warning about not being coy when giving your weight to the clerk at the airline counter.

 

Where Problems Perish chronicles the continued workplace excitement experienced by the best and brightest, their canine acquaintances, political allies, celebrity friends, and many Cape Cod connections at their headquarters in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Waquoit Wordsmith Press
• Release date: Dec 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201221911

Richard Hughes

Richard Hughes closed his 24-seat safety training center on Cape Cod to become a retired student of modern worldwide shipping operations. He graduated from Massachusetts Maritime Academy with a B.S. in Marine Transportation then obtained a Masters Degree in Business from Lesley University. While at MMA, he sailed on the Bay State, the Lightning, and the Mobil Lube. His books include the Cape Safety, Inc. – Danger Dogs Series—a collection of 9 novels detailing the exciting lives of a top-notch bi-coastal safety consulting firm. His popular non-fiction Deep Sea Decisions is an expose of maritime tragedies. He and his wife, Lavinia M. Hughes, have co-authored Newtucket Island, Training Ship, and Cape Car Blues. He lives and writes in the seaside village of Waquoit, MA, with his wife.

Book preview

FOREWORD

Cape Safety Inc., Where Problems Perish is about an unreal safety, industrial hygiene and environmental consulting firm and their battles in the real world in which we all live.

If the stories and adventures our heroes find themselves involved in sound familiar, understand that much of my inspiration comes from daily events unfolding at approximately the same time as the book is being written.

But my perspective on much of this familiar territory, articulated by my far more successful and talented characters is, regretfully, not so common.

A listen to today’s radio talk masters or a viewing of television’s CNN, MSNBC, or FOX cable news would lead one to believe that we as Americans are all smug and hurried capitalists just watching the screen anxiously for more pharmacology advertisements that will cure real or imagined afflictions.

That self-brokering of our individual stock portfolios is our only true passion.

That I’ve got mine, so go get your own is our prevailing attitude toward social betterment; and that our foreign policy perspective is to militarily deal with any country that can’t see things our way.

Maybe these talkmeisters are right.

Maybe we have become a country of selfish, self-indulgent people focused on nothing more profound than our kid’s soccer game or television geek shows with real people curvaceous super models or bow-flex studs competing to swallow the most rat tails.

Maybe we don’t give a crap about the factory that closed down because, hell, you never worked there.

Maybe the most important thing in this economy is our ability to get good stuff cheap.

Maybe somebody going to work healthy and coming home maimed, prematurely ill, or in a body bag isn’t something we need to think much about.

Maybe our need for 9/11 revenge should be our nation’s sole focus and reason to be.

But then again.

Maybe we see that the media is more focused on ratings than fairness, on graphic excitement over content understanding, and on partisan sloganeering over insightful commentary.

Maybe we do care about the land and the legacy we leave for future generations.

Maybe we don’t want to sell out our children’s and grandchildren’s chance for gainful and satisfying employment just for a higher dividend check next quarter.

Maybe we aren’t so jaded and inured to other working Americans being victimized and injured that we’ve lost our ability to be saddened and angered by it.

Maybe we do find it unacceptable that fellow Americans are being needlessly hurt and killed because readily available safety knowledge or equipment wasn’t in use.

And maybe you still relate to the hardworking, honest, smart, often troubled, politically ambitious, routinely outraged, cast of characters of Where Problems Perish.

The writing of the Cape Safety, Inc. series was a gamble. I gambled that I knew you better than the self-righteous radio and television pundits did. I gambled that you would invest your mind (and a few dollars!) in an enjoyable book series that will change the way you think about the path the western world is now taking.

As an active author, if you love me, hate me, or just want to debate me – send me an e-mail. I’d love to know how you enjoy the further adventures of Cape Safety, Inc.

I can be reached at [e-mail].

REALITY CHECK

THIS BOOK IS A COMPLETE work of fiction although most events discussed probably happened. Unfortunately, this writer knows none of the celebrity characters and their words and actions spring forth solely from a creative mind.

CHAPTER ONE

I t’s the White House on line two, for you Bob.

Bob turned his large 6’ 3" frame away from his PC whiteboard, and swung into his ergonomic chair, a personal gift from Jacques Cousteau, then punched his phone’s speaker button.

Good morning. Bob Guard speaking.

A deliberate voice informed him that he was being connected to the President.

Bob.

Good morning, Mr. President. How is our country today, sir?

America is doing just fine today, Bob. Thanks for taking my call on no notice.

Bob appreciated the President’s polite manner, and thought it was probably a Texas trait. As though the President of the United States would ever have to stay on hold to talk with one of his, fellow Americans, as another Texan, President Johnson, always called the citizenry.

Anytime, anywhere, any place, sir, you know that about Cape Safety, Inc.

Indeed I do, Bob. It’s why you folks are still so prominent in my White House Rolodex.

Bob chuckled. We’re both dating ourselves if we remember Rolodexes. The Chief Operating Officer and Senior Safety Consultant of Cape Safety, Inc. was known to the President, more for his Massachusetts, spelled DEMOCRATIC, political leanings. But Bob was quite pleased that the Republican President considered his safety and environmental consulting firm above partisanship, and more than any political flavor, an American resource.

If truth be told, the relatively new President had never even considered removing C.S.I. from their well-earned place of prominence. Not a bad political move considering both men understood that the best and the brightest safety and health consulting firm in the world inevitably excelled whenever they were called into action. It never really mattered by whom, be it kings, presidents, corporate titans, shahs, emperors, environmentalists, or just some everyday folk.

Such national and international requests for help to Cape Safety, Inc. – whether they came by satellite phone, communications center contact or carrier pigeon; and whether from a Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, Green Party candidate or international Juan, Pierre, Heinreich, or Mutombo – always ended up reflecting well on the person shrewd enough to have made the call. In current parlance, using the significant expertise of the Woods Hole, Massachusetts-based company was a no-brainer although Bob would never consider using such a phrase with a residing Commander-In-Chief.

Glad to hear we’ve not fallen out of favor with our many clients in Washington, sir, including the Federal government.

No, just the contrary, Bob, since our war on terror began, your people have been nothing but a national asset. Now I need you to do a little quality control report for me of OSHA’s efforts at Ground Zero along with some recommendations on what they should do better if, God forbid, we have another major attack on America.

Yes sir, glad to do it. Carte blanche with the Director and his staff? I certainly want them to have every opportunity to explain what they did and why, and what they are already planning on doing differently the next time.

Absolutely, Bob. The Director welcomes a professional review that will be introspective and fair. You probably know that the media is beating the snot out of them for their handling of things a year or so ago. Maybe you can put some perspective on it for all interested parties, including your Commander-In-Chief.

Bob looked back at his whiteboard, loaded already with meetings, appointments, projects, personnel itineraries, and other commitments for the modest safety, health and environmental expert staff, but answered the leader of the free world with, will three weeks do, Mr. President?

Perfect. I’ll be looking for it then. And by the way, Bob, this will be the Ranger’s year so don’t get your hopes raised for a Red Sox miracle like the one the Patriots pulled off.

Bob guffawed. Sir, getting my hopes up for a Red Sox World Series win would be dumber than selling life insurance to Saddam Hussein.

This time it was the President’s turn to chortle and he did, heartily. An Iraqi fly on the wall might even have gotten a chill down his spine when he heard it.

Bob called down to Bill Heavy, the head of the Cape Safety, Inc. Communications Center and information resources guru. Half the time Bob swore to himself that Bill had moles in corners of the world where Bob was unaware they had corners. Dozens of times Bill, in his mid-fifties, and his two protégées, Meg and Sam, two young hand-holders in their 20’s, had provided C.S.I. consultants with vital facts and information that Bob knew for certain the FBI and CIA did not have available to them. Only once, and it had been years ago, had Bob asked Bill where his detailed information sources emanated. Only half kidding, or so Bob always claimed, Bill looked his boss in the eye and said, Bob, if I told you, then I’d have to kill you. To this day Bill had never followed up on that line of inquiry with Bill Heavy, correctly inferring that what he didn’t know he’d never have to worry about revealing to a Senate panel, a competitor, a client, or an unfriendly nation. Likewise, Bill could keep his network viable without fear of exposing a deep throat, as he was fond of calling his vast underground of information sources.

Twenty minutes after the phone call, Meg dropped a file of information on Bob’s desk outlining much of the governmental ineptitude that the President had talked about relating to the World Trade Center collapse, safety, health, and environmental response, monitoring and investigation immediately after the disaster. Cape Safety, Inc. was truthfully, an excellent selection to prepare a fair and comprehensive analysis of the government’s response initiatives after the attacks.

Bob, as the safety wiz, his longtime partner Gene Wing an industrial hygiene phenom, Sandra Byrneski, their primary scientific specialist, and several junior consultants had all found their ways to Manhattan’s Ground Zero soon after the horrific event. Many had worked hand-in-hand with governmental specialists during the earliest hours of the response.

Within days, however, it became clear that the government was pouring human resources into the Battery with far less of a battle plan than George Washington had when he evacuated the same spot on Thursday morning, August 29, 1776. That was the date that, thanks to two regiments of expert Massachusetts fishermen from Marblehead and Salem, Washington’s exhausted troops began pulling away from Brooklyn Ferry, the site of today’s Brooklyn Bridge. Then there were upwards of 10,000 men to sail off, and he did it in one night to save the revolutionary cause. George’s words to his troops that night were, We’ll fight another day. Not so different from the words spoken by another Commander-In-Chief named George in 2001, who told his civilian rescue soldiers, And soon the world will hear you, too.

For starters, the New York Port Authority was guilty of, as a minimum, extreme hubris for much of its unique engineering and fire safety practices in advance of the tragedy. For reasons only they could explain, no local or national building codes were closely followed during the design and construction of much of the Twin Towers, allowing, for just one example, a 6,000-gallon diesel tank to be installed on the ground floor of World Trade Tower Seven, directly beneath a long-span transfer beam—an installation location not condoned by any international, national, state, local or other building or fire code. The failure of this tank added considerable hazard to the rescue effort that, tragically, was soon understood to be merely a recovery effort.

During the recent House Committee on Science hearing, when asked who was in charge of the WTC collapse investigation, three hands on the panel, from three different agencies of inquiry went up. Not too much confusion.

Much of the paperwork that Bob was rifling through, while sipping his fifth or sixth cup of coffee of the morning, detailed the myriad NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) contaminants that had rained down on the Manhattan street-scape for more than three months after the event, with little baseline monitoring performed by federal, state or private interests for anything but asbestos dust. How asbestos could have been allowed as a structural material as late as this building was built was another example of questionable Port Authority oversight, for certainly the hazards of this material were well recognized even then.

During the aftermath Bob and one of his junior industrial hygiene consultants, Mike Rocco, had suggested to several OSHA and EPA authorities that more extensive monitoring be started but, typically, governmental cost considerations were cited as the reason not to document these other airborne concentrations, and there were many.

Mercury, dioxins, radioisotopes (from destroyed medical equipment), Americium 241 (from the planes’ fuel monitoring systems), depleted uranium (used as stabilizing weights in these airliners), HIV, Hepatitis B, and tuberculosis (from body fragments and aerosolized body fluids), VOC’s (or volatile organic compounds - from the massive amount of incinerated and crushed plastics used in furniture, equipment, and fixtures throughout the buildings), silica dust (crushed concrete), natural gas leaks, thousands of gallons of sulphuric acid that spilled from uninterruptable power supply system battery racks, Freon refrigeration gas (from a large leaking storage tank, CO gas pockets (where fires were continuing to smolder), graphite fibers (that replaced aluminum parts throughout these airplanes for weight reduction purposes), all were just some of the airborne contaminants following the collapses.

The money saved by not monitoring for these airborne contaminants would surely be paid out in the future when people working the pile became ill and filed lawsuits against the government attributing their health problems to this poorly controlled cleanup event.

Bob’s thoughts were interrupted by the voice of Heidi Hallett, a blonde Jr. Safety Consultant who had advanced in the firm from receptionist to one of their keenest young minds. Heidi brought not only a smart new perspective to many of the firm’s projects, but also a joyful enthusiasm for everything safety. She also provided the Woods Hole consulting firm with their mascot, a gangly Dalmatian, forever in trouble.

Get that out of here, Sparkplug, it’s disgusting.

With Heidi’s wave toward the dog, Plug took the signal as a sign that a game of catch was imminent and bounded away toward Bob’s office with a three-quarters dead seagull in his mouth.

Before he reached Bob’s door, Rocky, one of the elder consultants, saw the impending mayhem and shut Bob’s door with a loud thud, immediately followed by a second thud as Plug’s nose, bumpered by the seabird firmly in his mouth, slammed into the door for the second bang. The bird fell to the floor, surely doomed at this point, while Plug, now realizing he had done something wrong, ran out to the balcony overlooking the Woods Hole Ferry Terminal that transported thousands of people to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket throughout the year.

I’ve got the flying sea rat, Rocky said to Heidi, as he picked up the now surely dead bird and carried him outside. Plug, you are some piece of work.

Plug now effectively resided full-time during the summer at the firm, rather than continuing as a daily commuter with Heidi. The washed ashore seagull was actually one of the dog’s milder finds in recent days. Only about a week earlier the dog dragged into Mike’s workshop a quite live snapping turtle, which proceeded to crawl under a hard hat to camouflage his escape from the building as a very short consultant.

By now word had spread that Plug was at it again, and most of the firm’s staff that were not on assignment to some corner of the globe were discussing the dog’s morning catch. Bob even gave up on the WTC project too, for the moment, and ventured out of the office for a coffee refill in the boardroom. Combining fresh Arabian Mocha Java beans and Sulawesi beans together, he ground his own special blend. As Gene came into the room looking both wind-swept and harried, he called out, the usual for me, barkeep.

Bob took a fistful of Sumatra beans and jammed them into the same grinder for his partner’s morning defibrillation.

Guess who I was just on the phone with? asked Bob.

Too early, and I’m too tired for guessing. Was it a seagull whisperer wanting to yell at Plug?

No smart guy, it was the President, and we’re writing the performance assessment for the government’s WTC response.

Oh, Peachy! We’ll make tons of friends with that report, groaned Gene.

True, but when the White House asks us for a favor, we both know the asking part is just them being nice.

Have you gotten to the National Resources Defense Council report yet? asked Gene.

I’ve seen highlights from it already and I know it faults OSHA, big time, for its role in failing to protect most of the responding cleanup workers at that site.

Sure enough, when Bob returned to his desk, he grabbed the report that Gene had mentioned that stated, although the cleanup operations made remarkable progress despite difficult conditions, nevertheless, environmental health issues at Ground Zero represented an exception to this otherwise impressive performance, with many workplace safety standards loosely enforced, and considerable confusion regarding proper respirator use. This particular report went on to criticize the agency with, OSHA inspectors reportedly observed dozens of workplace safety violations on a daily basis in late September and early October at Ground Zero, but did not take action to ensure that employers were notified or work practice(s) and/or equipment use improvements were instituted."

Politics over people, muttered Bob to no one in particular, as he looked out his big bow window at Plug being chased across the parking lot by Sandra. It looked like Plug had stolen one of her fluorescent lime light sticks, and now had it firmly grasped between his drooling jowls, running toward a parked Verizon bucket truck.

God help us, Bob thought. The goofy dog was about to become a construction zone civilian flagger, or better, civilian flagger mutt.

CHAPTER TWO

Later that afternoon at a dock in nearby Hyannis Harbor, Rocky Pacheco surfaced alongside the high-speed ferry Flying Cloud , exhaled a snorkel full of water, and then gave a thumbs-up sign to five or so big shots who were located quite a respectable distance away. So far away, in fact, that one of the five was using binoculars to monitor Rocky’s emergence from beneath the multi-hull.

Rocky thought to himself that if he and this Nantucket commuter boat suddenly turned into a major Cape Cod waterspout, apparently Mr. Binoculars over there wanted to be sure he survived as a witness to all.

When the Commonwealth of Massachusetts bomb squad boys said that their union prohibited bomb inspections that the Coast Guard had jurisdiction over; and the Coast guard in turn said they lacked jurisdictional responsibility to bomb inspect a vessel that was tied up to a Massachusetts State Pier, the vessel owner turned to one of the few available private sources, Cape Safety, Inc.

Thankfully, there would be no explosive waterspout this day as Rocky’s hand signal indicated that he had found no incendiary device beneath the large ferry, as an e-mail to the ticket office had warned. These periodic inspections, more common now since the passage of the federal Patriot Act were a, let’s hope there’s no blast-from-the-past, for Rock who was C.S.I.’s senior statesman, ex-survivalist TV show runner-up, and most importantly for at least this assignment, ex-US Navy SEAL munitions expert.

In his gravelly voice, the greying flat-top consultant croaked all clear as the captain, and owner of the commuter ferry, the Hyannis Fire Chief, and two Massachusetts State Troopers from the bomb squad, somewhat haltingly headed down the ramp to assist Rocky’s climb back onto the concrete pier. Handing off his fins and mask, Rocky spryly hoisted himself up while reiterating that he had found nothing that even approximated an attached timer, plastique, or an incendiary device.

Probably just some jerk kid who didn’t get to the pier on time to get a seat for your last trip, said