Water Resources People and Issues
Northwest. There never was a shortage of lumber there, but there was a
shortage of brick and building stone.
Eventually I got to be chief of the Specifications Section, after the Anchorage,
Alaska, district was formed and my boss transferred up there. Beforethat, and
a lot of people have forgotten this, the Japanese had occupied Attu and Kiska
Islands out in the Aleutians, and it really was expected that there were going
to be a lot of casualties before we could win them back. There were not enough
hospital facilities to take care of a large number of casualties. So before we
were going to move in on the Japanese on Attu and Kiska, it was decided that
we needed some more hospital facilities to handle the casualties. The Corps of
Engineers leased the New Richmond Hotel, which was in a rather seedy area
of Seattle, down near the railroad station. The name," New Richmond,"
referred to the fact that it was built around 1910, maybe even earlier than that,
but was new compared to most of the rest of Seattle at that time.
I'm not sure whether the Corps leased the hotel or some other part of the Army
leased it, but the Corps was given the job of converting this hotel into a
hospital. Well, it was really one of the most interesting jobs that I had had
because I could actually go down there and look at it with the designers who
were designing the electrical layout and the plumbing and the structural work,
and then we drew up the specifications for a very specific job, which was much
more interesting than turning out specifications for cantonments and other
standard facilities which were taken right off the shelf. And, in many cases, the
specifications were being written after the project was built, as a record.
So on this job, I had a chance to use some ability, and we wrote the
specifications and put it out for bids, and the hotel was made into a hospital
with operating rooms and emergency power supply and lead-shielded x-ray
rooms and all the things that they put into a hospital in those days. Of course,
hospitals were not as complex then as they are now.
It was an interesting job, and we put it out for bids. My recollection is that the
job was done for .5 million, and it was finished in record time. The whole
job was finished within less than a year from the time we started to write the
specifications. That was the way the Army engineers did things. When they had
complete control of the job they could get it done on time. We had to get
waivers for the use of the critical materials involved, but we used the materials
we needed and we got the waivers
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