Twelve People at the Air Force’s Groom Lake Location Take Delivery of Four Thousand Gallons of Floor Wax Monthly
A routine janitorial-supply schedule for a remote Nevada installation was released to us, in part, in a plain envelope with no cover letter. Nineteen months later we have a coverage rate, a division problem, and a missing page five. We are not asking what is on the floors.
Editor's Note
This story was held for seventeen weeks while our Standards Desk sought comment from the Department of the Air Force, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the contractor of record named on the delivery order. Twelve written requests were sent. Four produced automated acknowledgments, all timestamped 3:41 a.m. None produced an answer.
We publish without response, as our policy requires after the twelfth request. We note that Mr. Wrenn's request for a single integer — the daily foot traffic at the destination, no names, no dates, no manifests — was neither granted nor denied. It was not answered at all, which is the category this newspaper finds most interesting. — M. Vandersloot
The document is not interesting. That is the first thing a reader has to understand about it, and it is almost certainly the reason that in eleven years nobody appears to have read it. It is a recurring-delivery schedule. It is four pages. It is printed in a monospaced typeface on a form whose revision block reads 1997, and what it lists, line after line, is soap.
Reality Daily has spent nineteen months on those four pages.
The pages concern a United States Air Force installation in southern Nevada, the one the federal government calls, in the single recurring document in which it acknowledges the place at all, "the Air Force's operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada." We use that phrase throughout this article, without variation, because it is the government's own phrase and not ours.
We wish to state at the outset what this story is not. It is not about aircraft. It is not about lights, or objects, or anything ever reported in the sky above Lincoln County by anybody at any hour. Reality Daily has no reporting on those subjects and has commissioned none. Our interest here is narrower, and we would argue considerably harder to talk your way out of.
Our interest is floor care.
The operating location near Groom Lake takes delivery of four thousand gallons of acrylic floor finish every month. It has done so on a standing schedule, without interruption and without a single documented change order, for at least the eleven fiscal years covered by the records in our possession. We ran the figure past three people who sell floor finish for a living. All three asked us to check it again. We checked it again.
"I have certified two thousand and forty custodians. Not one of them has ever worked in a building that needed a monthly strip." — Darlene Prickett, floor-care instructor, Elko, Nevada
I. The Schedule
The schedule reached us slowly and largely by accident. Our Document Desk filed a request last March for unclassified consumable-supply detail associated with product service code S201 — the federal government's own classification for custodial and janitorial work — at four Nevada delivery points. Three came back in nine weeks. The fourth came back in fourteen months, in a plain envelope postmarked Battle Creek, Michigan, with no cover letter and no indication of who had decided to send it.
What arrived is a Schedule C attachment to a recurring delivery order. It carries an order number, an obligation figure, a period of performance stated as "CONTINUING," and a destination field that in all eleven years reads the same eleven characters. It is not classified. There is no marking on it of any kind except a receiving stamp.
The line item at the center of this story is the eighth on page two:
7930-01-118-4448 FINISH, FLOOR, ACRYLIC, 20% SOLIDS CN/5GAL QTY 800 CYCLE MO
Eight hundred containers. Five gallons each. Four thousand gallons, monthly, recurring, delivered to a destination expressed as a code.
We want to be exact here, because this will be mischaracterized. There is nothing improper on the face of this document. Federal buildings buy floor finish, and they buy it in bulk, and a standing delivery order is the correct instrument for a recurring consumable. Nothing that follows should be read as an allegation that a form was filled out incorrectly.
The form was filled out correctly. That is the entire difficulty.
II. The Arithmetic, Performed Slowly
Darlene Prickett has trained and certified custodial crews for thirty-one years, the last nineteen for a purchasing cooperative serving eleven rural school districts out of Elko. She agreed to speak on one written condition: that we let her do the arithmetic out loud, in order, without skipping any of it, "because people skip." We have honored it. What follows is her calculation, in her sequence.
"Coverage rate first," she said. "Every finish has one and it's printed on the jug." A twenty-percent-solids acrylic floor finish is published by its manufacturers at fifteen hundred to two thousand square feet per gallon per coat. That is not a disputed range. It is on the technical data sheet, and it has been substantially the same range since the 1980s.
"Then coats. Nobody puts down one coat on a bare floor. Four is the floor, five is normal." So a single gallon, in real service on a stripped floor, finishes somewhere between three hundred and five hundred square feet.
"Then you multiply, and then you stop and check it, because the number's going to look wrong."
Prickett Worksheet, 8 February — reproduced in her sequence
Most generous reading to the government (2,000 sq ft per gallon, five coats): 4,000 gallons finishes 1,600,000 square feet.
Least generous reading (1,500 sq ft per gallon, four coats): 1,500,000 square feet.
Extremes of the full range: 1,200,000 square feet at worst, 2,000,000 at best. Midpoint of all four figures: 1,550,000.
"I ran it four times. Twice for you and twice after you left. It doesn't move much. That's the thing about it. It doesn't move."
One and a half million square feet of hard floor. For scale, and for scale only, the Pentagon is published at roughly six and a half million square feet of gross floor area, much of it carpeted. We supply the yardstick because a number this size is otherwise unreadable, and we ask that nobody excerpt it as a comparison, which it is not.
Then Mrs. Prickett asked the question that turned this from a curiosity into a nineteen-month file.
"Now. How often."
A full strip is not routine maintenance, and she was insistent on this to the point of irritation, which we report because the irritation is the finding. In ordinary institutional practice a hard floor is damp-mopped daily, scrubbed and recoated quarterly or semi-annually, and taken to bare tile once a year, sometimes less. A monthly full strip is not a schedule her industry recognizes. It is not in the manufacturer's guidance. It is not in the trade tables. Over a decade it would visibly consume the tile.
"And you can't stockpile it," she said. "Finish has a shelf life and it can't freeze and it can't cook. Whatever's arriving in Nevada is getting used in Nevada, that month, on something."
III. Twelve People
The publicly available personnel figure for the operating location near Groom Lake is twelve.
We want to be careful with that number, because it is a poor number and we know it is a poor number. It derives from a routine administrative filing. It is not a headcount. It does not distinguish federal employees from contractor personnel. It is almost certainly a floor rather than a ceiling. We used it anyway, for one reason: it is the only figure the government has published, and this newspaper's standing policy is to use the government's own number until the government supplies a better one. We have asked for a better one nine times.
Our Economics Desk applied the industry's standard hard-floor restoration production rates to Mrs. Prickett's midpoint. A full strip-and-recoat cycle — prep, apply, agitate, pick up, rinse, neutralize, dry, four coats, cure — runs at roughly five hundred square feet per labor hour for a trained crew with functioning equipment.
Bove Computation, Reality Daily Economics Desk, 11 pp.
1,550,000 sq ft ÷ 500 sq ft per labor hour = 3,100 labor hours per month.
3,100 ÷ 12 personnel = 258.3 hours per person, per month.
258.3 ÷ 4.33 weeks = 59.7 hours per week, on floors, per person, doing nothing else at all.
Note: the computation assumes functioning equipment, no travel between buildings, no setup, no breakdown, no supply runs, no illness, and no leave. Each of those assumptions is generous to the government. All of them are wrong in the same direction.
Fifty-nine point seven hours a week. Every week. Stripping and coating floors. Not answering a telephone, not attending a meeting, not eating a sandwich, not doing whatever else the operating location near Groom Lake exists in order to do.
This is not impossible and we are not saying it is impossible. Overtime is legal, compensable and ordinary, federal employees have worked harder weeks in worse conditions for less money, and Reality Daily is not in the business of telling anybody they are not working. We observe something narrower. If the twelve are doing the floors, the twelve are doing nothing but the floors. And if the twelve are not doing the floors, then the floors are being done in southern Nevada by somebody who is not the twelve.
IV. Thirty-One Thousand Mop Heads
Line eleven, page three:
7920-01-514-6273 MOP HEAD, WET, MICROFIBER, 18IN EA QTY 1300 CYCLE SEMI-MO
Semi-monthly. Thirteen hundred each cycle. Two thousand six hundred a month. Thirty-one thousand two hundred mop heads a year, to a facility with a published personnel figure of twelve.
Hollis Deitrick operates a commercial textile-services plant in Barstow, California, that launders for hotels, two hospitals and a casino group. He has been in the business since 1988 and has, as he put it, "no idea what goes on out there and no opinion about it." He was willing to talk about mop heads.
A microfiber wet mop head, he explained, is rated by its manufacturer for three hundred to five hundred launderings. A cotton loop-end is rated for thirty to fifty. The economics of every facility he serves rest on that rating: you buy a par stock, you rotate it through a laundry, you replace on wear. Replacement volume is a fraction of throughput, and it is always a fraction.
"Thirty-one thousand a year isn't a purchase pattern. That's a disposal pattern." — Hollis Deitrick, textile-services operator, Barstow, California
Mr. Deitrick asked that a caveat appear in the same paragraph as his quotation rather than three paragraphs later, and we honor the request as made. The caveat: there are ordinary reasons a facility buys rather than launders. Remote sites have no laundry. Water is expensive in the desert. "I'm telling you what the number describes," he said. "I'm not telling you why."
Nine hundred gallons of neutral pH
Line four, page two, is a standing monthly order for one hundred and eighty five-gallon containers of a single branded neutral-pH floor cleaner — nine hundred gallons of concentrate, sold at a label dilution of one part to one hundred twenty-eight. At label dilution that is one hundred fifteen thousand two hundred gallons of ready-to-use solution, every month, of one product, in one brand, at one destination.
Bonnie Ruel Yarborough sold sanitary supply in Clark County for twenty-six years and carried the account, or something with the same tonnage and the same rhythm, for nine of them. She never made the delivery. Nobody in her company ever made the delivery. The freight went to a transfer lot in North Las Vegas and was signed for there by people who did not work for her and did not introduce themselves.
"In twenty-six years I never delivered anything to anybody out there. I delivered to a fence." — Bonnie Ruel Yarborough, retired sanitary-supply representative, Pahrump, Nevada
V. MATTING — SEE ATTACHED
Line nineteen, page four, reads in its entirety:
MATTING — SEE ATTACHED
There is no attachment. There is no continuation reference, no document control number, no quantity, no unit of issue, and no cycle. There is a line number, a description of eighteen characters, and six empty fields.
Readers of this newspaper will recognize the construction, and we would ask them to recognize it carefully. In our founding series we examined a partial federal interiors ledger containing a line that read TEXTILE — SEE ATTACHED, to which nothing was attached. We note the recurrence because our standards require disclosure of it, and we characterize it not at all. Two documents are two documents. They are not a pattern, and any reader who writes to say they are will receive a courteous letter explaining that they are not.
They are, however, two.
What is different this time is the cover form. Federal transmittal forms of this family carry a page-count field, filled in by the releasing office at the moment of release. On our copy that field reads 5.
We have four pages. We have written six times to request page five. We have been told, six times, in substantially identical language, that the release was complete.
Curtis Ambrose Lail spent twenty-six years as a federal contracting officer and retired to Sparks, Nevada, where he does not answer email but does answer his telephone. He had no knowledge of this order, this destination or this commodity, and said so before we finished the question. He would speak generally about the construction of a line item.
"A line that says SEE ATTACHED is not a line item. It's a promise. Somebody promised the file a piece of paper." — Curtis Ambrose Lail, retired contracting officer, Sparks, Nevada
VI. What We Declined to Investigate
Several thousand readers are, by this paragraph, thinking about the airplanes.
The airplanes are real, they are not a secret, and nothing about them is in dispute. A fleet of white Boeing 737s with a red stripe flies scheduled service from a dedicated terminal on the west side of Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas. The aircraft are registered to the United States Air Force. Any member of the public may stand in a parking structure and watch them depart, and a great many do.
Reality Daily has no reporting on who boards them, has sought none, and regards the question as outside the scope of a floor-care investigation. We raise the aircraft for exactly one reason, and we ask that the reason be quoted accurately when this section is excerpted, which it will be.
Foot traffic determines soil load. Soil load determines recoat frequency. That relationship is the most elementary in commercial floor maintenance, and it is the one variable in Mrs. Prickett's model that we were unable to populate.
"Give me a daily footfall and I'll tell you in ten minutes whether that schedule makes any sense," she said. "Without it I'd be guessing, and I don't guess. I teach people not to guess."
So we requested the daily footfall. We requested it as an integer. We stated in the first line of the request that we did not want names, manifests, destinations or dates, and would accept a single whole number written on a single line with no explanation attached to it.
We received no response of any kind. Not a denial. Not an exemption citation. Not an acknowledgment. We are obliged to note, as this newspaper always notes, that there is a difference between "no" and silence, and that in nineteen months we have been given the second one.
VII. Where the Stripper Goes
Every gallon of finish applied to a floor is, within thirty days on this schedule, a gallon of finish taken back off a floor. Line nine bears it out: a standing monthly order for six hundred and forty containers of heavy-duty non-butyl stripper, three thousand two hundred gallons of concentrate, and stripper is not applied neat.
Stripping produces effluent. It produces a great deal of it, and the effluent is alkaline, and it carries the dissolved polymer and whatever the polymer had been sitting on top of for the preceding month.
Ineke Postlewaite spent twenty-two years as an industrial pretreatment compliance officer for a county wastewater authority in the Southwest. She reviewed our figures, corrected one of them in the government's favor, and approved her quoted material in writing.
"That much stripper has to go somewhere. It goes down a drain or it goes into a drum. There is no third thing." — Ineke Postlewaite, retired pretreatment compliance officer
Here the record ends, and it ends in a documented and entirely lawful way that we want to describe precisely.
Since 1995, every President of the United States has signed, each September without exception, a determination exempting the Air Force's operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada, from any federal, state, interstate or local provision requiring the disclosure of information concerning hazardous waste at that location. The determinations are published. They are short. They have never once lapsed.
Reality Daily does not dispute the authority to sign them, does not suggest any signature was improper, and takes no position on whether the exemption is wise. We observe only the consequence, which is arithmetical rather than political: the question of where several thousand gallons a month of spent floor stripper end up is, as a matter of published federal determination renewed every autumn for three decades, a question nobody is required to answer.
Nobody has answered it.
VIII. What We Are Not Saying
Reality Daily wishes to be exact, because this story will be summarized by people who have not read it and excerpted by people who have read one section of it.
We are not saying anything about what is on the floors. We do not know what is on the floors. We have not asked, we have not retained anyone to determine it, and we will not entertain correspondence on the subject.
We are not saying the finish was diverted, misused, resold, or applied to anything other than floors. We have no evidence of that and would not print it if we suspected it, which we do not.
We are not saying twelve people cannot maintain 1,550,000 square feet. We are saying the industry's own production tables put the labor at 59.7 hours per person per week with no other duties, and that we have published the tables, the divisor and the assumptions so any reader may redo the work and tell us where we went wrong. Four have tried. None has.
We are not saying page five was withheld. We are saying the page-count field on the government's own cover form reads 5, that four pages were released, that we asked six times, and that we were told six times the release was complete. Both of those statements cannot be accurate. We are not the party in a position to reconcile them.
We are not saying there is a conspiracy. We are saying there is a floor of somewhere between one and a half and two million square feet in the Nevada desert, and that on the best evidence available in the public record it is stripped to bare substrate and recoated four to five times over, every thirty days, by twelve people, forever.
IX. Conclusion
The finding of this investigation is modest and we would like it stated modestly.
The floors at the Air Force's operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada, are extremely clean.
We can support that from the documents. Four thousand gallons of finish a month. Three thousand two hundred gallons of stripper. Nine hundred gallons of neutral-pH concentrate diluting out to a hundred and fifteen thousand gallons of working solution. Thirty-one thousand two hundred mop heads a year. Nineteen hundred and fifty stripping pads a month. Eleven years, no change order, no gap.
Every one of those figures came from a form the government filled out correctly, filed properly, and released to us in part. There is no leak in this story and no whistleblower in it. There is a schedule of consumables, a coverage rate printed on the side of a container, a division problem, and a page five that six letters could not produce.
We have no theory. We have a quotient.
■ ■ ■
Reality Daily invites the Department of the Air Force, the Defense Logistics Agency, and any contractor of record to respond to this article. We will print any response in full, unedited, at any length they choose, in the same typeface and at the same size as our own reporting, with no commentary from us whatsoever and no headline written by us.
We would also accept, in place of a response, page five. Not a summary of it. Not a description of what it contains. Page five, photocopied, redacted wherever redaction is warranted, with the exemptions cited in the margin in the ordinary way. We will publish it exactly as received, including the blank areas, and we will thank the office that sends it by name.
We have held the space since February. It remains open, and it will remain open, because this newspaper has never in fifteen years closed one.
Corrections & Clarifications
Update, 06:31 — An earlier version of this article used a coverage rate of 1,800 square feet per gallon per coat. The manufacturer's published upper figure is 2,000. We have corrected the rate and rerun the model. The implied floor area is larger than we originally reported. We regret the imprecision.
Update, 10:07 — We described the published personnel figure as twelve. A subsequent administrative filing gives eleven. We have retained twelve throughout as the figure more favorable to the government, and note only that the alternative figure produces a working week of 65.1 hours rather than 59.7.
Update, 14:26 — An earlier version described the mop-head order as monthly. It is semi-monthly. The annual figure is therefore 31,200 rather than 15,600. Mr. Deitrick was read the corrected figure and declined to revise his characterization of it, which was "a disposal pattern" and remains "a disposal pattern."
Sources & Documentation
- Defense Logistics Agency. Schedule C — Recurring Delivery Detail, Order 0031 (Period: Continuing), pp. 1–4 of a stated 5. Released in part; destination field withheld with no exemption cited.
- Envelope, plain, postmarked Battle Creek, Michigan. No cover letter, no transmittal sheet, no return address. Photographed front and back; retained.
- Prickett, D. Recorded interview, 8 February, and site visit, Elko, Nev. Transcript 63 pp., reviewed and approved by subject.
- Prickett, D. Coverage-Rate and Cycle-Frequency Worksheet, prepared for Reality Daily. 2 pp., handwritten, photographed and transmitted by subject. Calculation performed four times.
- Prickett, D. Written condition of participation: "Let me do the math out loud and don't cut it." 1 p. Honored in full.
- Manufacturer technical data sheet, 20-percent-solids acrylic floor finish. Published coverage 1,500–2,000 sq ft per gallon per coat. Two competing manufacturers' sheets also obtained; ranges materially identical.
- Industry standard cleaning-time and production-rate tables, hard-floor restoration series, tables 4.1–4.6.
- Deitrick, H. Recorded interview, 3 March. Textile-services operator, Barstow, Calif. Transcript 22 pp.
- Yarborough, B.R. Two recorded interviews, 14 and 19 April, Pahrump, Nev. Quoted material approved in writing.
- Postlewaite, I. Recorded interview, 6 May. Retired industrial pretreatment compliance officer. Corrected one Reality Daily figure in the government's favor; correction accepted and applied.
- Lail, C.A. Recorded telephone interview, 21 May. Retired federal contracting officer, Sparks, Nev. Declined email; answered on the first attempt.
- Reality Daily Economics Desk (H. Bove). Labor-Hour Derivation from Consumable Delivery Volume, Operating Location Schedule C. 11 pp., assumptions appendix attached.
- Product Service Code S201 (Housekeeping — Custodial Janitorial), federal classification schedule, current edition.
- Federal Supply Class 7930, Cleaning Equipment and Supplies, index of assigned national stock numbers, pp. 44–91.
- Federal Register. Annual Presidential Determination exempting the Air Force's operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada, from disclosure requirements concerning hazardous waste. Series consulted 1995 to present: 31 determinations, no lapse, no year omitted.
- Reality Daily Document Desk. Records Request Log RD-FOIA-0117 through -0161. 45 requests; 9 fulfilled in part; 0 fulfilled in full.
- Correspondence, releasing office, six letters, each stating that the release was complete. Language substantially identical in all six; two identical to the character.
- Photograph, page-count field, cover form, recto. 4,096 × 3,072 px, EXIF intact. The field reads 5.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Independent Re-Derivation of the Coverage Arithmetic by Two Staff Readers Without Conferral. Both agreed. Filed as anomalous under desk practice.
- Automated acknowledgments (4), received 3:41 a.m. on four separate dates across three calendar years. All timestamps identical. All unsigned.
- Reality Daily Reader Correspondence File RD-C-5518: 388 letters concerning aircraft, none of which this newspaper solicited, quoted, or answered.
- National Institute of Institutional Floor Maintenance. Bulletin 22: Full-Strip Frequency in Continuously Occupied Federal Facilities (rev. 4). 6 pp. Recommended interval: annual. Maximum defensible interval: semi-annual. Monthly: not addressed.
- Council of Vinyl Composition Substrate Assessors. Practice Note 9: Cumulative Substrate Loss Attributable to Repeated Chemical Stripping. 4 pp.
- Reality Daily Legal. Memorandum on Publication Following the Twelfth Unanswered Request. 2 pp.
- Reality Daily internal memorandum, P.A. Doggett, "On the Difference Between 'No' and Silence." Required reading for all staff. Not available to the public.
- The floors. They are being stripped and recoated. They are being stripped and recoated tonight.
Reader Response — 6,495 comments
Thirty-one thousand mop heads. For twelve people. I have read that sentence eleven times and it does not get any smaller.
Custodial supervisor, 900-bed hospital, 19 years. The strip frequency is the part nobody outside the trade will register. We strip our OR corridors once a year and that is considered aggressive. Monthly is not a maintenance schedule. Monthly is something else and I don't know what.
The page-count field says 5. They sent 4. Six letters. This is the whole thing right here, everything else is arithmetic.
Nineteen months, five sources, and a legal pad, to establish that a government building in the desert is well maintained. Congratulations to everyone involved.
@wendellsix — Correct on every point, including the legal pad, which was Mrs. Prickett's and which she photographed herself. The building is well maintained. It is maintained to a standard that the industry's own production tables cannot staff at the government's own headcount, using the government's own delivery schedule and the manufacturer's own coverage rate. That is the story. We have added your summary to the correspondence file, where it is now the shortest entry.
Everyone in the replies is talking about the planes and the article says four separate times that it is not about the planes. Read the mop heads. The mop heads are right there.
"I delivered to a fence." Mrs. Yarborough sold soap in Clark County for twenty-six years and delivered the single best line of the decade. Somebody give that woman a column.