Bannon's Self-Enriching Trump-Style Folly: Engineers Say Privately Funded Border Fence Is on the Verge of Collapse
September 3, 2020
South side of the United States-Mexico border wall in Progreso Lakes, Texas (CC0)
By Gabe Ortiz
The multimillion-dollar privately funded border fencing near Mission, Texas isn’t just a legal disaster for the likes of newly indicted white nationalist creep and former Trump official Steve Bannon, it’s an actual physical disaster. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune write that new engineering reports say that if necessary repairs aren’t made, extensive erosion will cause the fencing to fail the next time the Rio Grande floods.
“Company president Tommy Fisher, a frequent guest on Fox News, had called the Rio Grande fence the ‘Lamborghini’ of border walls,” Jeremy Schwartz and Perla Trevizo report. “Instead, one engineer who reviewed the two reports on behalf of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune likened Fisher’s fence to a used Toyota Yaris.” Ouch.
The engineering reports, which are getting filed in federal court as part of ongoing litigation against contractor Fisher Sand and Gravel, confirm prior reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune on the fencing’s status as a hot mess, finding “that segments of the structure were in danger of overturning due to extensive erosion if not fixed and properly maintained. Fisher dismissed the concerns as normal post-construction issues.”
Not exactly. While it’s true that the only thing I’ve ever built is credit card debt, it seems clear from the reports that shoddy planning, shoddy work, and the company’s rush to build border fencing for purely political reasons benefitting the impeached president’s reelection chances could be now coming back to seriously bite it in the ass.
For instance, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune report that Fisher had “bragged that his company’s methods could help Trump reach his Election Day goal of about 500 new miles of barriers along the southern border.” Those methods don’t seem so great now: The fencing was placed very close to the river, when “the federal government usually builds sections of the wall miles inland on top of existing levees, partly due to erosion concerns,” ProPublica and The Texas Tribune said.
Schwartz and Trevizo write that one of the reports further found “concrete cracking, construction flaws and what the firm concluded was likely substandard construction material below the fence’s foundation.” On a project not even a year old in competition. A University of Texas at El Paso engineering professor who reviewed the reports told Schwartz and Trevizo that “[i]t seems like they are cutting corners everywhere. It’s not a Lamborghini, it’s a $500 used car.”
While Fisher Sand and Gravel has said that it plans quarterly inspections of the fencing, one of the reports calls the plan “completely inadequate.” It would be easy to laugh at this project’s literal collapse, but it would come at the expense of the Rio Grande and surrounding environment, which shouldn’t be littered with this physical monument to hate. It’s also hard to laugh when Fisher Sand and Gravel has been awarded not one, but two federal contracts to build fencing for the administration. But don’t forget, Mexico will totally pay for that.
Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson wrote last year that Trump had “been pushing for Fisher to get border contracts since 2018,” with Donald Jr. publicly praising the We Build The Wall scam that helped fund the fencing as “private enterprise at its finest.” Similarly, unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf also praised the scam as a “game changer.”
But as soon as the legal troubles and uh-ohs started, Trump Sr. began to distance himself from all of that. Funny how that happens. As Bannon now faces indictments on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering for his role in the We Build The Wall scam, one of the Fisher Sand and Gravel contracts now also faces audit by the Defense Department’s inspector general.
Posted with permission