By Chip Brown | Maynardville@gmail.com

Can anyone guess what the photo labeled (Figure 1) is? The answer is at the bottom of this article.

At some point in any project of the size of Paulette you reach a plateau. At this point tons of work is going on and people driving by see major changes to the structure each day. What looks like major changes is actually brought about by repeated operations. Little things done again and again and by the end of the day there is a big change.

Put up some steel, and tighten some bolts. Dig another foot off the bank and haul it off. Come back ten hours later and the work is the same. They're still tightening bolts and hauling off dirt. The march continues toward a new school for Union County.

I tend to be a man of action, as long as I don't have to work very hard. I'll take that back I am a man of other people's actions. I like to watch people work. I can sit for hours and watch the trackhoe load dump trucks one after another. I can sit and watch block after block being laid. What by the end of the day is simply another block for the mason, another loaded truck for the excavator is major change for me.

I have asked my wife to not let me go to the site more than once a week. If I go too often I see the work from the vantage point of the  worker, another block has been laid. But by limiting my exposure I get to see it from the vantage pint of the motorist driving by. I never go to the site that I am not in awe of the  amount of work that has been completed since the week before. I can sit there for an hour and watch a single piece of steel being hung. I leave and come back by two hours later and half the building is done. I secretly suspect they wait until the weird guy with the camera leaves to do the good stuff.

I could write, another piece of steel has been hung, another load of dirt has been removed, but that doesn't really represent  what has actually happened. Have a good look at (Figure 2) taken on July 26,2010 and compare it to (Figure 3) taken on July 30, 2010) The two photos were taken from the same position four days apart! I have expressed before how many different people are working on the site. I have conveyed how they all seem to be doing something totally different only to have their work link up later. Yes I could simply write that a bunch of steel was hung this week but it would not represent the real amount of work. Plus it would be just plain boring.

This week I want to talk about tornadoes. NOAA releases its tornado statistics every five years to the public. In 2005, according to NOAA, Tennessee experienced 23 tornadoes. In fact the count was probably higher. It is my experience that if someone doesn't get a video of the tornado the weather people deny it happened. You could call the local meteorologist and report your house just flew off and is currently circling East Town Mall and if there is no film footage they call it a straight line wind.

This was in some small part the representation of the need for a new school. Paulette will not in itself fix all the needs of Maynardville Elementary. That school is a topic for another day. But Paulette may help in one major way, getting kids out of those portables at MES. It is my hope that if nothing else happens once Paulette is opened there will be no more occupied portables at MES.

In the 1980's a tornado crossed Maynardville highway just three miles north of MES. Three miles is cutting it too close for me. This tornado destroyed a church and carried the church bell off. A Holloway man found a plow in a ditch line years later that he never discovered where it came from. I have been in these portables when the wind is strong and you can indeed feel them move. Fortunately, MES has in place plans to evacuate these portables in case of impending weather.

But where does Paulette stand in all of this?

Remember all those bolts that are being tightened?  Each one of those bolts hold two pieces of steel together. Each piece of steel hold two more pieces together with additional bolts. Unlike when MES was built this new building has a skeleton. The lower corner is connected to the upper corner by steel. It may well be possible to park a semi truck on top of Paulette and the kids inside would never know. I don't think I'd want to try that with MES.

But in the case of a tornado Paulette would be immeasurably safer than the other schools in our county. The way it is constructed would mean that to move one section one inch the whole building would have to move. Any impact on any square inch of Paulette would be absorbed by the entire building.