Road Safety

This posting is for the DOT folks out there. The paving contractor is working on a new section of road that the previous FET designed. They tried to snake the road between buildings, trees and other obstructions. We have been told since we got here that you can not take down trees. The road design was completed by an architect and he chose to save the tree and build the road around it. The contractor started to grade it this week and we started to question the safety of the tree in the middle of the road. That's what happens when you turn the road project over to a couple of DOT engineers. My boss is a Missouri DOT employee when he is not working for the Missouri Air Guard.

Even though the speed limit on base is 20 mph, we had a few concerns with a tree in the middle of the road. First this is a black out base so all vehicle headlights are covered with plastic, so there isn't much lighting the way for the driver, and we have seen fence posts hit in the middl of the day. Second, there are no curbs to hit to let you know you are off the road. Third, many of the vehicles are large MRAPs (don't know what it stands for, see the convoy picture in a previous posting) they are tall and have a gunner that sits above the roof and many antennaes. We figured the gunners would not like the branches in the face.

So we decided to remove the tree, we could not find anything in writing that said trees are sacred and could not find anyone on the base that was the tree czar. We decided to go with safety over the tree. The equipment operators had the tree down in less than 15 minutes and hauled away before anyone could notice. We'll see if there is any fall out.

Trees are important in Afghanistan as much of the country has been de-forested and few new trees have been planted. Many of the trees are cut down for fuel for the fires to keep warm in the winter and for cooking fires. If you search the internet you will find several organizations that are working to help the Afghani's bring the forests back to their country.