That Means No Touching Up

The best seats in the house give the best view of the action, the secrets of the stage you can only observe from up close.  Like the orchestra ring seats of a Broadway show, which allows a view of the pit while the rest of the house gets only the conductor’s wand.  Or a seat by the dugout steps or courtside for the Knicks, where you’re so close it blurs the line between spectator and participant.

Like these Knicks fans who sat so close they got put into the game.

That similar perspective may be coming to us here as our nation’s paint failures play out in real time, with us understanding our government’s incompetence better than most, as it’s broadcast in our vernacular.  The front row of a national paint trauma, which like most paint peeling, broadcasts a bigger problem. 

Most concerning at the #ReflectingPool is the absence of any process in specifying the coating to be used, which should always take into consideration the substrate’s makeup, condition, the exposure and any other mitigating factors which could impact coating life.  None of which seems to have happened before Atlantic Industry Coatings laid down eight acres of Pipeliner 5000, which as the name suggests is supposed to go inside the pipe. 

According to the product data sheet.    

Had it survived a myriad applications errors, this coating would have failed anyway, likely chalking and fading over the next few years before the topcoat cracked off in small pieces, exposing the epoxy primer.  Which would then go through the same process, though with its molecules buried in the substrate’s profile it would have taken longer to occur.

None of which will be allowed to happen according to our contractor-in-chief, who promises repair. 

And it’s the specification for the repair that I’d like to see, as there is no known way to “touch-up” a polyurea film, except within four hours of application.  After that time has passed there is no repair possible for a film designed to be monolithic, making every repair or touch up made, a failure on inspection. 

Duplicating this application’s original sin, praying this time that it works.

With so many application errors it’s likely that there are multiple failures at the pool, though only an on-site inspection will determine the truth.  Which I’d be willing to make while in DC next week, though a fence has been installed to protect us from that truth.  The act of an embarrassed president who chose the product and contractor himself in awarding the no-bid contract, hiding the truth claiming that vandals cut a 350-foot gash in the film causing the paint to peel.  An interesting narrative not even aligned with his own words, which just weeks earlier were that “if you have a knife you can’t even cut it.”

Making him right the first time.

Within this following is a sect of our tribe, stakeholders in paint whose interests lie in the coatings themselves rather than their sales and management, as does the larger sect.  Within that minority are the chemists, coatings inspectors and other lab and field rats of our trade with responsibility for specifying, testing, inspecting and reporting on coatings application and failures.  None of whom seem to be working in DC at the moment, or there would not be a plan to repair this film but rather one to replace it.

Which in the specification, would come right after cleaning.