A few comments as promised.
The shots are shot Sunday morning which is very telling. Sunday morning is personal CSP (Clean Ship Project = cleaning and hygiene time), which means these are people who are in personal lower conditions, ordered in early on a Sunday morning. These are all Gold crew, no other org personnel (not that there is much left of the other orgs anyway), and include Cine crew, such as the Shoot Prod Dir and video shoot team members. That means that no major Cine shoot is going on, or that these particular Cine staff are not allowed to leave the base for an external shoot, or both.
Also, these are not people from the RPF nor the SP Room, these are Gold staff who are on post (not in these pictures, of course, but in general.) Not posting any names, as they are not significant to anyone else but who knows them and they can be seen in the photos, unless someone specifically wants to know.
The razor wire and the cameras are still there; I don’t know any good reason they would be gone, not even PR reasons: You can always say they are to protect the area and expensive equipment etc., which is at least partially true. (As you saw from Pomfritz post above, ultrabarrier is pointed in both directions, inward and outward, by design.)
The landscaping: The area, especially inside the fences, is usually fairly well maintained, with green grounds, flowerbeds, brushes and trees groomed. This is taken care by Estates crew and “all” crew Saturday renos (which, for a large part, consists of grounds upgrades) -- “all” in quotes since 50% of the people are off renos on some production-related flap. It is actually a very nice looking place, if you would go there for a one-day guided tour, not knowing anything about what is going on in the place. PR.
Barbz, I don’t see the burned pine trees, which pictures do you mean? I only see the swamp area with dried up trees. Fires are pretty frequent around the place but mostly towards the end of summer.
Pomfritz, the shot at the end with the blue container is around the OGH (Old Gilman’s House) and Maintenance Man’s house. OGH at one time was the area were people on decks and on offload lines lived and worked and were Sec Checked. The HGC also used to be there in the 90ies. The SP Room is (or at least was) in the building shown in photos #130 and 131, also known as the “CMOI trailer,” when there was a CMOI. That is also where Exec Strata used to be, as well as where the WDC conference room is – where the “musical chairs” incident took place. The building that is captioned “RTC Building” became the “CMOI Building” in 2005 or so, but in reality only AVC (Authorization, Verification and Correction unit) ever moved there.
One of the items I recall reading was the installation of buried piezoelectric cables around the perimeter which (when hooked up to the proper control equipment) can detect both ground pressure variations and sound. This type of sensor system is normally used around high security military installations.
If each section of the perimeter has it's own set of sensors, security personnel may be dispatched directly to the location where a perimeter breach may be in progress. The ground pressure sensors can distinguish small animals from man-sized creatures and vehicles from both.
An
extremely expensive and paranoid setup, if that's what they have.
The Sneakster
Damn, I didn’t even know about the ground sensors. I would be impressed if it wasn’t for the fact that they still have trouble distinguishing “little bears” from other small animals.
Kookaburra, I understand your feelings and know many who had the same feeling of entrapment. I never felt particularly trapped until that day some someone got the brilliant idea of restricting me to the base. That was the day I started considering leaving.
And finally, highway cleaning is a
sure sign that either COB is returning to the base or that a VIP tour is about to take place -- highway cleaning is
only done before one of those two.
Let the cameras roll...