McEvoy, a soft-featured engineer from Leicester whose soporific tone slowed any urgent meeting to a crawl. ‘In the past three months we’ve had over thirteen hundred fails. Mostly circuit breaks, burn-outs, shorts and blown transformers. Our margin for error is set at four hundred a month. I’m trying to explain the shortfall, and the best I can come up with is human error.’
‘It’s an electrical problem, pure and simple,’ said Jim Davenport, one of the hotel’s most senior engineers. ‘Something big is shorting. That means it’s either in the main substation, which is unlikely, or wrongly installed wiring below ground level.’
It was the worst news he could possibly have delivered; close to a million pounds’ worth of marble flooring had been laid over the electrical circuits and fibre-optic lines, which had been buried deep on the supposition that no one would have to touch them for at least a decade.
The arguments ran back and forth for over an hour. Roy rarely spoke, but when he did everyone listened. ‘You aren’t going to increase staff and you won’t delay the launch, so we have to take everything up, and that’ll mean imposing longer working periods. Do you think you can drive that through?’
McEvoy looked at the calculations on his tablet. ‘It’ll play right into the hands of the unions.’
Finally it was suggested that they break for more coffee. His back aching with cold from the air-con units, Roy rose and walked over to the vast windows that looked onto the site. He thought about the resort’s launch tomorrow night, and how much they could hide from public view. The smaller cosmetic elements like the exterior lights and the planting could be carried out hours before the opening, even though the big stuff would have to wait. The innovative wall-wash techniques involved geo-mapping the buildings, and the arboculturalists would require notice to airlift fully mature date palms into the humidity-controlled plant beds.
Yet he could still imagine these events roughly dovetailing. There would be further panics and slipped deadlines, but it was feasible that they might get everything locked down a week after the launch, providing there were no more outages.
‘Hey, Roy,’ Davenport called from the doorway. His grey, cadaverous appearance made him the living embodiment of deadline-stress. ‘The boys ran a pressure test on a section of pipe three millimetres thicker than the ones we’ve installed,’ he said, ‘blasted it the whole weekend and nothing, not so much as a hairline fracture. The trouble has to be somewhere else.’
‘Suppose it’s not a pipe at all?’ said Roy.
‘Then how would the sewage have reached the outfall?’
‘The tests showed it was untreated, right? That means it hadn’t passed through the primary or secondary clarifiers, the aeration tanks or the dryers, so the fault has to be way back, before contaminant removal even starts. The only junction there is the separator between the runoff and domestic channels.’
The Atlantica’s sewage control system was designed to be one of the most efficient in the world, with eight separate treatment processes in place, including solar-powered microfiltration and aerobic procedures in which bacteria and protozoa consumed biodegradable material. Ultimately, they would use an ultraviolet peroxide process to break down organic contaminants and destroy microbes. It meant that the hotel would be able to recycle previously used water with virtually no wastage. A model for all resorts to follow, not that the guests would ever know. When you sell people a dream, he thought, they don’t want to know how the dream works.
‘Have you got time to come down to the treatment station?’ Roy asked.
Davenport looked reluctant. ‘You know I mostly firefight PR these days, Roy. I’m not even cleared for that part of the installation.’ Davenport had trained as a structural engineer, but had found the job’s responsibilities too
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