Beijing building blues & the U.S. embassy

McClatchy Blog
Posted by Jonathan Landay
November 20, 2008
Beijing building blues

We've written and posted a lot about problems with the State Department's embassy construction program. Well here's a case where something almost went very wrong, but didn't - where, in fact, the system worked.

Back on August 8, as the Beijing Olympics opened, President George W. Bush, along with his father (a former U.S. envoy in China), dedicated the new American Embassy in Beijing.

The dedication, it turns out, was mostly symbolic -- the Embassy was not scheduled to open until October 17. Well, as the real deadline for opening approached, we're told, some folks in the State Department's bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations were pressing to get the green light to occupy the new complex, even though there were concerns about whether the fire safety systems were fully ready for operation. (This will sound familiar to those of you who have followed our coverage of the construction of the new US Embassy in Baghdad.....)

Well, folks at State's upper echelons refused to issue what is known as a Certificate of Occupancy until more tests were done. Ambassador Clark T. Randt Jr., (that's him above, second from right), insisted on personally observing the test. And ... as Randt and others watched, the pump that provides water for the embassy's fire-fighting systems broke.

The problems were duly fixed, and today, U.S. diplomats and other government officials have moved into the New Embassy Compound, which consolidates 1,100 people who had been working at 22 locations across Beijing into a single site, with more than 600,000 feet of office space.

As they say, all's well that ends well.