Tag: environmental

I was a fugitive from the NCIS (conclusion)

– Dorn concludes his adventure.

THE SCENE: In the Environmental Office of a nearly-abandoned Navy base, NCIS agents have just confronted the protagonist with what appears to be evidence of his guilt.

(You really should read part 1 and part 2 of this story first.)

I was a fugitive from the NCIS (conclusion)


Like all Navy bases, we had done a thorough environmental survey of the base property, and we had identified a small number of spill and dump sites that we were in the process of cleaning up. We gave each site a name. Some were just descriptive, like “maintenance garage parking lot” or “building 13”, and some were a bit more fanciful, like “the blackberry patch”. I reported on our progress cleaning these sites regularly to EPA, and we had press releases about them and regular well-attended public meetings for the neighboring community. 

The accusation they were following up on, the NCIS agents said, was that in addition to the list of six or eight contaminated sites that the public knew about, I was keeping a secret second list of other sites, that were never mentioned to EPA or the public. 

They showed me the evidence that was provided with by the accuser: a note in my handwriting, describing half a dozen contaminated sites in the kind of language we regularly use, but with descriptions that not only didn’t match anything we had told the public about, but which I didn’t recognize at all. 

It wasn’t hard for me to guess who had made the accusation–my document organizer. She had stumbled upon this note among the boxes and crates of reports, and convinced herself that she had found proof that we (or at least, I) were keeping deadly secrets about environmental contamination from the public. No wonder she had been acting so weird around me! She wasn’t lonesome, she saw herself as a crime-bustin’ reporter hot on a case! And I wasn’t a prospect, I was a SUSPECT!

I thought about this as I read through the list, trying to remember when I had written it and what it meant, when I saw a contamination site whose descriptive name I remembered, because it struck me as being so idyllic and picturesque, like a vacation destination. The name was “Hideaway Pond”, and it was one of the cleanup sites at a different Navy base. I took the investigators over to our Public Affairs office, where we dug up some of the public brochures about that base’s cleanup projects. All of the sites on the handwritten list were described there (phew!). I must have been taking notes at some meeting about their cleanup, and whoever had found those notes assumed I was writing about my own base.

This seemed to satisfy the agents that their work could be satisfactorily concluded, and they said they had one last question before they would be out of my hair forever: about four years earlier, one of my staff was writing up a report of a base inspection, in which they had said they found an old chemical drum out in a field, and I had edited that report, replacing the word “old” with “rusty”, and could I please tell them why I had made that change? 

I sort of remembered the report, but I didn’t have to rely on my memory because of the copious notes I had always taken. I eventually tracked down the message where I had suggested to drafter of the report that he ought to call it a rusty drum, because it was true (I said that in the message), and because it gave a more accurate picture of the situation out in that field. All those years of taking reams of notes, vindicated in one easy question!

I asked them if they would now exonerate me, but they said that their rules forbade them to pronounce me innocent and unjustly accused. They would be saying in their report that they found no evidence that I had engaged in any criminal wrongdoing, and hopefully I would be content with that. Having no other option, I was.

AND I NEVER SAW THEM AGAIN. 

The story has an epilog. I was told later that the document organizer had apparently decided that the Navy was colluding in my coverup of my secret contaminated sites, and had been stopped at our base’s gate trying to smuggle out boxes of my office’s documents, perhaps to break the story to the world. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but at the time I uncharitably felt that it served her right for suspecting me of being a criminal, instead of just hitting on me like a normal decent person would have done.

Thanks for reading!
Dorn
7/24/2019

I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 2)

– Dorn continues his tale.

THE SCENE: In a dimly-lit, nearly-abandoned Navy base, a skeleton crew is working to organize the base’s environmental records. Conspiracy theories are posited, secrets shared, triplicate forms collated and stapled.

(If you haven’t read part 1 of this story, you should start there.)

I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 2)

Poster of James Cagney movie, Public Enemy


One morning as the base shutdown was progressing, I welcomed into my office a couple of polite young beefy men in dark suits. They showed me their credentials: they were agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), and said they had some questions for me, and would like to look at some of my records. Our environmental office records (and indeed the whole base) got inspected regularly without advance notice by Navy, the state and the US EPA, but this was the first time I had entertained a criminal investigator in my office. 

Back then I was 25 years younger and had a much much cleaner conscience than I do now, and it literally didn’t occur to me that I could have done anything to attract the interest of NCIS. So I said sure!, and answered their questions, and gave them access to all of the records we were working on.

They came back repeatedly after that over several weeks, sometimes asking new questions about how the environmental office worked or about some record they had found, sometimes carting away whole boxes of notebooks or other documents. When I asked what this was all about, all they said was that they were not at liberty to say.

The weeks stretched into months, and the NCIS agents’ continued visits started to get under my skin. Sometimes they would take away documents we were in the middle of archiving, or active records that I would need to produce if an environmental inspector visited. And although they assured me I would get everything back, I had not seen a single page returned. Plus they still wouldn’t tell me anything about what they were looking for, and I was starting to feel the pressure. It was obvious that I was a “person of interest”.

I started mentally reviewing all the environmental compliance training I had taken, and second-guessing my judgement calls about about what spills needed to be reported, or how to handle a pollutant or a hazardous material. Maybe I had done something after all, or failed to do something, and not realized it?

What if they demanded a vital record, but in my paperwork incompetence I mis-filed it somewhere and couldn’t find it? But surely if it was an accidental oversight, they wouldn’t send the criminal investigators in? What if I had inadvertently sent some Hazardous Waste to a shady disposal company, who dumped it at the side of the road?

Still from movie, Public Enemy


It was a stressful time. At least I was doing a good job of avoiding that document organizer and her amorous advances. Or maybe she was avoiding me, seeing the handwriting on the wall that my time as a free man was ending!

Finally one day, the agents announced that they had done all of the investigating that they intended to do. They said they hadn’t developed any new leads, so they were just going to ask me about it. They showed me their smoking gun–a list of place names on a yellow legal pad in my handwriting.

They had gotten a complaint that this note showed that I was keeping a secret set of records of polluted sites on the base. The Navy is governed by hazardous waste cleanup laws like everyone else, and one aspect of those laws is full public disclosure, so having a secret list of sites would have been a serious criminal offense on my part! I would be in deep trouble, not just because I was the base’s “designated jailee”, but because the secret records had clearly been written by me personally!

STORY IS CONCLUDED! . . . here!

I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 1)

– In which Dorn spins a work yarn.

This might be my best work story. It has all the elements of a blockbuster: sex, drugs, crime, UFOs, and my legendarily messy office at work. And it is ALL TRUE.

I call this story “I was a fugitive from the NCIS“. (Well okay, maybe the title isn’t literally true.)

Once upon a time, long before you were born, back in the 1990’s, I was the Environmental Coordinator for a Navy Base that will remain unnamed.

Back then, the government actually cared about environmental protection, and they were tired of corporate executives pointing fingers at each other so that no one person could be held responsible for environmental violations happening at their chemical factories and such. So they wrote environmental laws in a way that always identified an individual who could be held responsible for non-compliance. In the Navy, every base had a person who was responsible for on-site environmental compliance. This position is officially called the Environmental Coordinator, or by the fellowship of those who held the job, the “Designated Jailee”.

That was my job, and one thing you learn very quickly in that position is that you document everything you do and say. I  would fill notebooks with notes of all my conversations and decisions every day. I used up lab notebooks at about a dozen times my usage rate when I was a scientist. I tried to get all my staff to be just as diligent, so between all these notes, and the reams of official records we were required to keep, we generated an enormous amount of environmental documentation. 

The was back when the paperless office wasn’t even a pipe dream, and environmental documentation meant paper. Lots of it. Coping with these amounts of paper was quite a challenge, and I wasn’t much better at organizing paper back then than I am now. (If you’d ever gone to my office (aka “the Superfund site” ha ha), or seen my home office, you know what I mean.) And on top of all the stuff I and my staff generated every day, we had all the official and unofficial records of my predecessors in the job. We had a large documents room at least as big as our offices.

In the late nineties, Congress took steps to shut down a number of Navy bases around the country (which is another interesting story, though not as interesting as this one), and our base made the hit list. Hundreds of scientists who worked there were transferred to Missouri, but I and my staff were trimmed and repurposed, to stay on site and prepare the base to be cleaned up, closed down, and the real estate transferred off the Navy rolls. This included finding and disposing of all the hazardous chemicals left behind by the expelled researchers, cleaning up the outdoor sites where chemical spills or dumping had occurred over the past 50 years, and preparing and organizing all of the environmental documentation spanning the life of the base.

It wasn’t hard for me to figure out that organizing all that paperwork was beyond the capacity of me and my skeleton crew, so we hired a professional document-organizing firm to come in and get all the records ship-shape. The company sent down a couple of box wranglers, and a young woman who would be the on-site manager of all the work the company did. 

She was in charge of determining the overall organization of the files, so we’d spend some time together talking about what the records in various boxes were about and how they fit with other records. These were friendly, sometimes far-ranging chats, and in one of these she confided that she firmly believed that UFOs existed and the official records of them were being kept hidden from us. OK, I thought, to each his own, maybe there’s a reason she likes a career poking around in musty old document archives. By this point the Navy base was mostly abandoned, and one took one’s social interactions where one could get them.

I was doing a walkaround of the base one afternoon, and I went to check out how the work in the document room was going. It looked much like it had looked when the work started, but maybe the contents of each box was better organized and indexed now. 

But the place reeked of pot smoke. Maybe it was the document organizer, or her crew, or perhaps a disgruntled lone scientist not yet whisked off to Missouri, sneaking a smoke in this mostly undisturbed corner of the base. I didn’t bother pursuing it–by this point, we few left on the base were starting to feel a bit like a desperate lawless band of survivors, abandoned by the rest of humanity and waiting to die (organizationally speaking). 

One evening the file manager and I were working late, and she started talking casually about some esoterica of the files I had been keeping. But her voice and expression were odd, and she was kind of sidling up to me conspiratorially. It was only on the drive home that it hit me, slow that I am, that my God! She was coming on to me! I’d better avoid working late alone for a while!

CONTINUED in part 2 . . .