A Big Day
…In a Very Big Week!

The massive storm that soaked the nation has almost passed. East Coast residents are still advised to keep an eye on the sky. We’re seeing sunlight in Fairfax for the first time in over three days. We are hoping for a runnier if slightly smaller week ahead!

Yesterday in Manhattan, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian took the rostrum at the United Nations General Assembly, delivering what was characterized as an incendiary response to Mr. Trump’s remarks at the Assembly’s annual gathering. He claimed his government stands for human rights after the senior American diplomat in the Assembly rose and walked out of the chamber. It is the first public media exchange in which the aggressing nations shared a rostrum. Hopefully not the last.

Meanwhile, back here on the banks of the River , DC Water crews are building the 5½-mile-long, 100-foot-deep, 18-foot-wide Potomac River Tunnel with two massive boring machines grinding through dirt and rock. The machines are named for Emily and Mary Edmonson, sisters instrumental in making the District of Columbia an abolitionist stronghold—and in shaping the city where many of us spent our working lives.

This is the lead story in an incredibly busy week for organizational reasons. The reason it’s news is the failure last January of the old, 72-inch-diameter Potomac Interceptor. Its collapse five miles upstream from the capital released an estimated 240 to 300 million gallons of untreated wastewater—you know the better term for it, but this has been a busy week all around.

Some of us were sick earlier this year, with symptoms not unlike what’s been pouring out of the media streams this week.

That’s what drew our attention back from whoever was behind the microphones yesterday. The news is that a real, present, continuing threat to public health is on its way to being fixed. Here’s the deal, with a degree of public relations polish not usually associated with public works. This one is pretty amazing—and may help ensure that whoever shows up here next year won’t have to worry about being poisoned by the drinking water.

So, here we are: in the middle of two wars, an impending shift in the international balance of power that none of the participants is willing to discuss in public, and the collapse of the soiled backside of a system that has provided healthy, safe water to the six and a half million of us in Northern Virginia, Maryland, and DC.

We’ll have more for you later. For now, we’re still digging out from a very Big Week.

Anyway, that was the week through its midpoint, when it was still gaining steam and energy. The state dinner with the Chinese leadership is tonight. Here in Washington, the new ballroom—destined to sit atop the old East Wing—would have been ready for dinner. Instead, the much smaller old East Wing of the White House will have to do, rather than the Hilton, which has hosted high-profile, high-attendance events for years until that crazy man attempted to shoot up the White House Correspondent’s dinner this summer.

There is a lot of construction news in this large start of the Autumn season They’ve been thinking about landing spots for the new helicopter models that will whisk these folks around during the Big Weeks to come. Like the Potomac Interceptor just taught us, we need to act while we still can—before something collapses.

Worth a thought, you know? Perhaps we can avoid some of the Big Weeks whose size is immaterial to what we were thinking about—and trying to avoid—last week. And find some common-sense folks to warn us when the bricks are about to fall through the roof.

That’s Kennedy Center news, and regrettably, bandwidth means we’ll have to deal with it later. Maybe we should construct a new and better channel?

(The Administration had planned for the new East Wing Ballroom to be ready for PRC’s President Xi’s first visit to SC in a decade. That is not going to happen due to the legal storm about everything swirling here.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a lower-court order barring above-ground ballroom construction unless Congress authorizes the project. The below-ground bunker project has been allowed to continue as a matter of national security. More will come after the Supremes have time to schedule the matter. They are talking about a tunnel, BUT Emily is sort of busy at the momentT!)

That is it for this morning, and can you imagine? We didn’t even use the Greenland slide!

We didn’t even talk about
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www.vicsocotra.com