In her mirrors, she could see the truck with steel plates coming along behind her, and see the crews covering the cable and pipes at the street crossings.
It took all day to get the cable and pipes laid, but it was still an hour before sunset when Murphy turned the truck around and headed the five miles back to the powerplant. She took it easy over the rough ground, because she had the work crews on the back, hitching a lift back to the powerplant to stow their tools and check in.
It would take a while to get everything set up and operational, but maybe they would have power and plumbing at the hospital sometime tomorrow or the next day.
To get everybody out of the permanent buildings – especially the hospital – and moved into the inflatable houses meant one had to deal with water and septic out in the neighborhoods as well. Meals could be taken in mess tents set up downtown and catered from the big kitchens in the permanent buildings. Showers, too, could be available there. But water and toilet facilities had to be distributed to the neighborhoods.
Eventually, buried infrastructure in the form of electric, water, and sewer would be installed throughout the city. But to get people out of the permanent buildings, temporary facilities would have to serve.
Chen LiQiang, GangHai, and the older Chinese men of the Chen-Jasic group found themselves in the group distributing portable toilets to the neighborhoods. The warehouse had thirty containers of portable toilets – almost five thousand of them – enough to place six at every street intersection of the residential neighborhood.
They would have to be continuously pumped out, and the contents processed at the powerplant, but, with six at every intersection, there would always be units available for use even while others were being pumped. Once buried infrastructure was in place, the plastic units could be recycled.
Chen was almost sixty years old now, and GangHai had been going to object to the Chen being on a work gang. But Chen had wagged an admonishing finger at his son.
“Everyone works. No one sits.”
“But, grandfather, this is manual labor.”
Chen looked surprised.
“Harder than farm?”
He smiled and shook his head.
“I don’t think so. Come.”
“Yes, grandfather.”
Once they had their work boots, a truck with a container met them at the hospital portico entrance, and they followed it out into the residential areas. The first stops were the intersections where other work crews were beginning to set up the first houses.
They were a small crew, because the truck had a boom on it. They didn’t have to actually wrestle the portable toilets off the truck, just guide them down into place.
When they got to the first location, the driver came out of the cab to operate the boom.
“We’re going to set them on the street side against the building line. Two there, two there, one there, one there,” he said, pointing at the four corners.
“A suggestion, if I may,” Chen said.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“Set them three feet from building line, with doors facing away from street.”
“Why?”
“Puddles. Splashing from trucks.”
“Ah. Good idea,” the driver said, nodding. “I’ll let the other drivers know, too.”
The driver pulled up his heads-up display and sent a message to the other drivers setting toilets.
“All right. You wave me into position, OK?”
“Yes. I wave.”
The driver got up into the boom operator’s chair and pulled a portable toilet stall straight up out of the open top of the container. Chen waved him over, looked the spot over, and waved him down as the rest of his crew straightened it out and guided it down.
While they were setting toilets, a truck came by and dropped a case of chemicals, a box of hand sanitizer, and a bail of toilet paper at the corner.
With the toilets set, the Chen-Jasic crew poured two bottles of chemicals in each toilet and stocked eight rolls of toilet paper and a bottle of hand sanitizer in each stall.
The truck moved on to the next corner, and they walked on after it.
Late in the day, they were setting the last of the one hundred and sixty portable toilets in the container. They were now out in the far north of the residential area.
The housing crew on this block had been making good time. They would have twenty or more houses up today.
“Grandfather, this is our spot,” GangHai said.
Chen nodded. He looked at the houses, arranged around the outside of the space, facing in, with the wings walling off the gaps between the backs of the houses.
“Excellent, Robert. Excellent,” Chen said to himself.
Betsy Reynolds, Maureen Griffith, Chen PingLi, and others were working in the huge kitchens of the hospital. Another container at the loading dock was kitchenware and the first food items, mostly unrefrigerated staples in vacuum-sealed packaging. The first job was to start carrying all these items in. First out of the container were thousands upon thousands of plastic dishes. Tens of thousands.
As they came in, others began putting them away in cabinets. Bill Thompson’s wife Rita Lamb had been a cafeteria manager in Carolina, so she started organizing everything, making sure the cabinets were stocked in a logical way. The ultimate cafeteria manager for the hospital might change her setup later, but at least they would be operational while they spun up the colony.
Late in the afternoon, as they were getting toward the end of the container and all the kitchenware and staples had been put away, they started pulling out completed food items that were normally served at room temperature. Racks of bread, cases of peanut butter and jelly, vacuum-sealed pre-cooked bacon, some vacuum-sealed smoked meats and sausages.
“Hey, everybody. What do you say to some real food tonight for a change?” Lamb asked.
She got cheers in return.
