At home things slowly creep toward "normality"--or rather a different kind of "normal"

 

If you get all your “news” from Fox News, you wouldn’t have a clue about how really boring Seattle is these days. I mean even before the pandemic it was kind of boring. I was already bored with all those “touristy” places decades ago, and I had seen it all even before that during the few months I was stationed at Fort Lewis during my Army days, back when bus fare from the base to Seattle was only 50 cents. Things sure have changed since the 90s: no more book, record, video or computer software stores selling useless but cool stuff to look at—in other words, no reason to get out of the room, since I’m not into getting buzzed as an excuse to socialize, which I’m too old to care about doing now.

But if you listen to Fox News, it was really “hot” times in Seattle in 2020. You probably heard all last year from Fox News about how Seattle was under siege from BLM and Antifa “terrorists,” the CHOP zone which lasted a few weeks, the odd business owner shutting down, whining about allegedly crime-infested streets. The local right-wing media outlet MyNorthwest was (and is) playing the same tune, adding in complaints about homeless encampments. There were problems for sure, but a bit of fear-mongering propaganda didn’t hurt in the “telling.” To hear Fox News describe it, you’d think the whole city was ablaze, but the truth was that at its “worst,” there was the occasional small group of “black block” anarchists with their umbrellas who roamed around looking for things to bust-up or spray on, if the police were just there to watch and let the cameras role for the evening news.

The city can blame itself for complaints about the homeless camps in neighborhood parks; it cleared out the encampments in the out-of-sight and mind places like the mostly abandoned Spokane Street area beneath the unused overpasses, and where there are no shops and just a few businesses in old, windowless buildings. Is “crime” really the reason for the lack of foot traffic in stores in Seattle? No, it’s because there is either no place to “sit,” or the normal customer base is working “remotely” and getting lethargic and lazy, and the work-at-home crew prefers to “shop” at Amazon and the like. On the other hand, some business owners who were too busy looking for scapegoats just couldn’t tough it out; Brooks Brothers vacated its 5^th Ave. location, but Ben Bridge Jewelers moved right in after them.

But it isn’t all “bad.” After all, US News and World Report has declared that Washington is number one state to live in for its “quality of life,” praising its “superior,” tech-ready higher educational system, and insisting that the state is a national leader in “business incubation.” Of course not everything is “rosy,” since this glowing report is based on the state of things before the pandemic, and the expectation that the state will rebound to past glories. Personally, I really can’t compare this place to any other than I’ve lived in, since it isn’t cheap living here, and if you don’t have money your “entertainment” options are limited, which explains why I spend my entire “entertainment” budget on DVDs and Blu-ray discs. But it is a nice place to take a stroll in if that is all you can afford to do and isn’t raining.

More “good” news about how not so bad things are in the Pacific Northwest: The Week claims that Gov. Jay Inslee’s response to the COVID-19 was one of the best run in the country, and the statistics tend to bear that out, given that Washington was initially an “epicenter” of the pandemic. Seattle has the lowest death rate of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the country. Unlike some other states with poor or inconsistent leadership on the issue, the “progressive” population largely has cooperated with mandates and protocols; if you wear masks long enough, it gets as “natural” as putting on underwear.

Not that anyone doesn’t miss breathing some fresh air of course, and that still seems a little farther down the road, but Inslee has declared that beginning March 22, indoor spaces will be permitted 50 percent occupancy with the proper social distancing, and ball parks can start allowing a few customers in to watch sporting events. Although restaurants are included in the easement, few if any were actually open for seating before with 25 percent occupancy, so the change doesn’t necessarily mean the city will be “open for business.” From my perspective it will only be “open” when the central library opens; its website still makes no mention of offering anything other than “curbside” service, and it is likely that it won’t actually open its doors to the public until there is 100 percent occupancy permitted, because it doesn’t want to have the hassle of “controlling” the number of people going in and out, and how long they can “sit.”

Meanwhile, Amazon replaced Boeing as the top employer in the state, after the latter reduced its workforce locally by another 10 percent. The 737-Max has been “ungrounded” by the FAA, but for now only American carriers are actually taking any of the 450 that had been built but grounded for refitting. Here are some still waiting for a home in Everett:

Foreign airlines have apparently not approved them to resume flight, and Boeing doesn’t expect to deliver much more than 200 in 2021. Nevertheless there is a “backlog” of over 3,000 for the Max, meaning unfilled orders and an apparent desire of many airlines to at least include a few in their fleets, probably at a discount. Reportedly, queasy passengers are being allowed by airlines to change planes if they don’t want to fly on a Max. 

Boeing also announced that it is ending 787 assembly production in the state, moving it all to South Carolina. As many have predicted, the 787 is beset with problems due to Boeing’s effort to “widen” the market for the jet by moving  bits and pieces of its manufacture to Europe and Asia; predictably, different quality control standards in different countries instead of a “central” authority led to problems maintaining uniform quality. For example, early on fuselage parts built in Italy had issues with rivets not “flush” with the surface, and continuing problems with the “smoothness” of fuselage sections has grounded some of the planes.

In Kent, the Boeing Space Center was known for its participation in developing the lunar rover, rockets for satellites and cruise missiles. As late as 2010 Boeing still occupied land there that covered the equivalent of 16 square blocks. But its demise has been fairly rapid since then, with at least half the site demolished, with an Amazon fulfillment center on one side and huge new warehouse on the other. This is pretty much is what is left of it:

Boeing claimed before the pandemic that it was considering moving 1,400 jobs to the Kent facility, but that seems unlikely now. Founded in 1964, it once employed 5,000 people, but by the end of 2018 that had been reduced to 500, and by the looks of things, there is hardly anyone working there now. The Kent location also has a rather “sinister” reputation, which I wrote about in a 2012 post. Back in the day, a waste disposal company, Western Processing, started taking in  hazardous waste from various companies, but mostly from Boeing, which was just across the street. The site still exists today, still a federal Super Fund site; this is what it looks like today:

When Western Processing was shut down in 1983, the EPA found 90 dangerous pollutants either stored above ground, or seeped into the soil, in the groundwater and the nearby Mill Creek. Looking at the site today, it seems incredible that it could actually cram 5,000 drums of leaking waste on to it. At one point, an unlined “lagoon” filled with 2 million gallons of waste was on the site, with high levels of chromium 200 times the legal limit of toxicity. The owner of Western Processing claimed at the time he had been “persuaded” by the state to accept Boeing waste, even though he admitted he knew next to nothing about how to store it safely. This was, however, seen as politically “expedient,” since Boeing had a reputation for dumping hazardous waste all over the state, including in Puget Sound and in the Duwamish River, which itself would become a Super Fund site. Here is the "leftovers" the river passes on to the Black River:

Today, the Washington Department of Ecology still views the Kent Space Center site itself (not the hazardous dumping sites) to be moderately “safe” to the public, not because they haven’t found any dangerous chemicals in the soil and water at the site (they have), but because Boeing controls access to the areas of concern, and the groundwater on the site is not used for drinking water.

There are other changes around here either because of the pandemic, or were accelerated because if it, or it was just used as a convenient excuse to change a business model. The REI headquarters located in Kent was first “temporarily” shutdown, then it was announced that REI would be consolidating its regional offices in a fancy new employee playground in Bellevue, and now sold that to Facebook and plans to just have a few smaller regional offices. More interestingly, the Kent Reporter states that the company likes this working at home stuff so much that “the company will lean into remote working as an engrained, supported and normalized for headquarters employees, offering flexibility for more employees to live and work outside of the Puget Sound region and shrinking the co-op’s carbon footprint.”

What this means, of course, is that thanks to the fact that the pandemic lockdown has lasted so long, a new “business model” has emerged that may (or may not) take hold elsewhere in the country, where people who just play around with computers or answer phones don’t have to report to an office anymore—they can just stay unsupervised at home, and companies won’t have to pay rent or utilities for big office buildings. How nice for them. Whether or not unsupervised workers eventually become less productive is another matter. And of course they don't have to be hired "locally," which is even more fun if you work "remotely" in another state. 

As for me, I still work in a 40-story building that has just enough bodies present to keep an eye on things, the some floors with refrigerators still filled with untouched cans of soda that are a year past their expiration dates, people with nothing to do but search for things that are not needed to throw away, like “emergency” rations and water that are over 10 years past their “best use” date. After a year, this pandemic thing has gotten pretty boring, and so many changes.