Ken Redmond had sent Juss Forsythe down to talk with Alice Murchison in Agriculture, thinking they were dealing with yet another irritating little problem. The sort of problem they’d been dealing with whack-a-mole fashion ever since the Expulsions. Way too many of the new greenhouses had been thrown together as fast as they could and maintain an acceptable standard of safety.
Instead, Juss had just texted him with the message that the leak was not just a bad fitting, like most of the leaks they’d been chasing down and fixing over the past several years. Instead, he was looking at several thousand meters of substandard plastic tubing that was breaking down. While there were some obvious leaks, complete with water spraying across the area, far more were a matter of slow seepage, which could easily be mistaken for condensation — and probably had been, given that most of them were in the greenhouses that were run with high levels of carbon dioxide to encourage more rapid plant growth.
Which goes to show just how much we need to increase the number of people around here who have the necessary certifications to work in those areas. As long as we’re really understaffed in those areas, it’s way too easy to hurry through the standard maintenance procedures, and not really look at everything. We’re damned lucky that it was “just” a bunch of irrigation lines.
However, all that was long-term. Right now, he had two problems he needed to deal with. First, he needed to find out how quickly his people could fabricate replacement tubing for the material that was immediately defective. Second, he needed to determine whether the tubing in question had been fabricated locally or brought in, and if the latter, where any additional tubing from that source had been used. If they’d gotten a bad batch of tubing from somewhere, they could have a ticking time bomb on their hands, and they might not find out about it until they had an accident on the level of the disaster back in ’96 that had left a whole section of the Roosa Barracks permanently sealed off.
Which meant he’d better start making some phone calls.