If I Fail At My Job, People Will Die

The coronavirus nightmare plaguing facility managers.

Introduction

In the run up to reopening the economy, the Trump administration shelved guidance from the CDC for reopening facilities during the pandemic. AP did the initial investigation and report, with other news agencies following up and spreading the report.

After a ton of bad press, the administration finally asked for the guidance to be reviewed again.

So why am I writing about this? Because it’s my job.

Background

I’m an engineer by training and a facility manager by trade, and I work as the facilities director for a smaller Midwest city.

This pandemic has put the FM industry to the test, especially in the front line industries such as healthcare, grocery stores, and other essential businesses.

However, our biggest test will be the reopening of buildings around the country.

• How will we enforce social distancing?
• What physical barriers need to be installed to prevent infection?
• What disinfection protocols do we need to institute?
• How do we arrange the flow of customers, and what happens when people don’t follow the rules?

Everyone from Major League Baseball to Rockefeller Center and Washington D.C. is trying to answer these questions.

In my small neck of the woods, I have been tasked with creating a guide for reopening our own city facilities.

Now, I’m a smart guy, and I work with smart people. But we are not trained in pandemic response. We still have day jobs, such as keeping the fire stations open, the water running, the toilets flushing, and the cop cars running.

So I worked for days straight to create a reopening “guide” for my city facilities. My reading list looked like alphabet soup. I read every article I could find from government agencies (CDC, OSHA, DHS), trade publications (IFMA, BOMA), engineering groups (ASHRAE, ANSI), and private companies (Cushman & Wakefield, Simon Properties).

I have had innumerable conversations with facility managers in my and other cities, attended webinars, listened to congressional testimony, and read hundreds of articles from the dozen Google alerts on my email.

Even after all of that, I still stay up at night, desperate it’s enough.

I’ve been sweating bullets that I’ve missed something; worried sick that someone will contract the virus and die after visiting one of my buildings due to an oversight.

Betrayal by the White House

My dread turned to fury on May 7, when I first read that the Trump administration had shelved CDC guidance on reopening; the very advice that I was searching for.

Their reason for the burial? Being too prescriptive.

That’s a total bullshit argument.

I’ve read the preliminary documents, and they are far from prescriptive. Any facility manager with their salt would praise God, Allah, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster to have this guide.

My reaction was visceral.

My stomach roiled

My blood pressure spiked.

I remember yelling to (and possibly at) my wife, “Those assholes are going to get people killed!”

The truly hurtful thing is that this guide cost absolutely nothing.

Nothing!

It’s information that has already been written, analyzed, and compiled by experts whose salary is already budgeted.

The guidance was written by a group of expert scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, researchers, and analysts whose only jobs are studying disease.

This wasn’t above average, B-grade work from a group of very earnest but still spread-too-thin jack-of-all-trades facility managers.

This was truly exceptional, A+ work from a cadre of career professionals at the CDC who have a laser focus on solving the pandemic problem.

And this is not Jared Kushner’s claim that the ventilators in the national stockpile are part of “our stockpile”. There isn’t a limited supply of reopening guides.

It’s electronic.

It’s a pdf.

It’s free, for fuck’s sake.

No. Hiding this guide was out of a) politics and b) spite (with more politics). Let me explain.

Politics — After the White House got caught by the AP report, they re-requested the guidelines for re-review. The one caveat? They still refused to look at the guide on places of faith. This administration is so enamored with their fundamentalist, evangelical Christian base, that they are willing to let those same Christians kill themselves in the name of freedom instead of telling them that it’s a bad idea to congregate in large masses.

Spite (and more politics) — Trump has abdicated his authority on the pandemic to the states, since he and/or his administration knows that there is nothing they can do about it. So Trump wants as many people to die as possible while the states are in control, so he can swoop in a few months before the election and be the Great White Hope.

Some Semblance of Sanity

It has been almost a week since I first read the AP story, and I am still barely keeping my anger in check. The only thing preventing me from completely blowing my top is the fact that it would detract from my current mission: keeping both my employees and my residents safe.

And now, on May 13 (my birthday of all days), the AP produced the full 63-page guidance document (article link and document link).

I am overjoyed that this has been produced by a group of faithful reporters working a thankless job.

Yet, after reading the details of the CDC’s reopening plan, my anger has turned to sadness. I am sad that I and my FM colleagues spent our limited time and energy doing our own research, while this guide had been around since April 30.

I am also sad that businesses, non-profits, universities, governments, and other organizations, along with the American public at large were under the false pretense that a full reopening was just around the corner.

It’s not. Reopening is going to be a long slog, with plenty of hills and valleys.

But at least I have the roadmap I have been searching for, and facility managers around the country can now get to (accurate) work.