Borderline Crazy

 

I just got a chance to watch Rory Kennedy's documentary The Fence on HBO. It's about 35 minutes long, and outlines pretty much every element of terrible project management that you can think of. The film is about the fence (or wall or whatever you want to call the structure) along the U.S.-Mexican border, running through California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas...kind of. You see, planning was a bit of a disaster, so the eponymous structure isn't exactly what you would call "continuous". I would describe it more as "sporadic" or "disjointed" or "preposterous".

The materials estimates were soooo close...

Some of the many, many problems not anticipated by the planners of this project include:

Existing natural habitats: The coyotes and roadrunners who chase each other around the desert don't know what side of the border they're on, and they don't care. They just want to get to that food source that is now on the other side of an 8-foot concrete barrier. Oh, and water tends to flow where it wants to as well...until you decide it needs a valid passport.

Nogales, 2008. That's the border fence. 
Water level in U.S. = 6 inches
Water level in Mexico = 20 feet

Where, exactly, is the border?: The Rio Grande is really, really twisty. No one wants to build a fence that snakes along that. Instead, the engineers put up a (much easier) fence in a relatively straight line to the north. Ahhh...wait. Now there's a bunch of land, including what looked like a lovely golf course) that sits somewhere between Mexico and the U.S. border fence. Limbo Pines or something.

People are smarter than your fence: Evidently, people who are desperate for a better life (or a chance to sell drugs north of the border), who have a lot of money invested in getting into the U.S. don't just turn around when they see a fence. They figure it out. So, while it's an inconvenience, it hasn't actually stopped anyone from crossing the border. There are just as many people entering the U.S. illegally from the south as there was before the fence went up.

It's gonna cost HOW much?: 1 mile = $1.9 million. And it doesn't go all the way across. And we still have to maintain it. Because parts of it are really not that strong, and people keep knocking it over when they're illegally crossing the border.

Kennedy makes the whole enterprise seem completely absurd and terribly, terribly executed. Which would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

Honestly, I'd love to hear what you project managers think of this film. Where did it start to go wrong? What was the single worst mistake made in the process? Could anything have been done to fix it? Putting aside the wisdom or efficacy of such a barrier, how would you have planned a project to seal a 2,000-border with a fence?

If you've got 35 minutes and HBO, take a look and tell me what you think.