Speaker 1: Calarugu shark media.
Speaker 2: Now, if you've been listening to these tales, you might
be wondering what happened after Tommy fixed that first flood.
Did the administration learn their lesson? Did they start consulting
with folks who actually knew something about living in a swamp?
Did they maybe take a step back and reconsider their
approach to running a detention facility in the middle of
the Everglades. Well, if you're wondering that, then you ain't
never worked for the government. See, there's something about bureaucrats
that's a lot like alligators. They got tiny brains and
they don't learn from experience. The difference is alligators been
prefer afecting their approach for about two hundred million years,
so they got an excuse. Bureaucrats just got stubbornness and
a powerful belief that if something don't work the first time,
you just need to do it harder. And so when
Warden Buckley Fitzpatrick got his next call from Washington asking
how things were going at his innovative new facility, and
he didn't mention the flooding, or the alligators, or the
fact that his security system was being operated by raccoons. Instead,
he talked about adaptive problem solving protocols and integrated crisis management,
which is government speak for one of the prisoners fixed
our plumbing. But Washington was impressed, so impressed, in fact,
that they decided Alligator Alcatraz needed more structure, more oversight,
more committees. And that's where our story really got. It's interesting.
This is episode two the Committee. About two weeks after
Tommy solved the Great Flood of July, a memo came
down from the Warden's office announcing the formation of the
Facility Optimization Committee. This committee was going to be responsible
for maximizing operational efficiency through systematic process improvement and strategic
resource allocation, which is a fifty dollars way of saying
they were going to hold meetings about why nothing worked right.
The committee was going to be chaired by Deputy Warden
chet mackenzie, who was still riding high on his success
with the adaptive intake protocols, which is what he was
calling the day we all got processed in ankle deep
water while an alligator watched. Also on the committee was
Assistant Warden Delilah May Crenshaw, who'd arrived the week before
with a briefcase full of improvement plans and a head
full of business school theories. And the newest member was
someone called an efficiency expert, a young man named Brad
Thornton who driven down from Tallahassee with a laptop full
of spreadsheets and a sincere belief that any problem could
be solved with a right PowerPoint presentation. Now, Brad Thornton
was what you might call a professional problem solver, which
means he'd never actually solved any problems, but he had
a degree that said he could. He was about twenty
eight years old, wore suits that cost more than most
folks make in a month, and had the kind of
confidence that only comes from never being wrong about anything
because you never actually done anything. He'd been hired by
the state to optimize detention facility operations across US Florida,
and Alligator Alcatraz was going to be his first success story.
He was planning to write a paper about it, maybe
get himself promoted to a bigger job in Atlanta or Washington.
The problem was, Brad Thornton had never seen a swamp,
never worked with his hands, and never met a practical
problem that couldn't be solved with a flow chart and
a mission statement. But he had enthusiasm. Lord, did he
have enthusiasm. The first meeting of the Facility Optimization Committee
was held in the conference room of the Administrative Building
on a Tuesday morning that was already hot enough to
fry eggs on the sidewalk if there had been a sidewalk,
which there Wasn't I know about this meeting because Tommy
was there, not as a member, you understand, but as
what they called a resource consultant, which meant they wanted
him to explain how he'd fix their drainage problem so
they could put it in their report and take credit
for it. Tommy didn't mind. He'd already figured out that
these folks were going to do whatever they were going
to do, regardless of what made sense, and his job
was to work around them, not through them. So when
they asked him to attend their committee meeting, he showed
up in his cleanest work clothes and sat politely in
the back while they conducted their strategic planning session. According
to Tommy, and he told me all this later that evening,
while we were sitting on the porch of our housing
unit watching the Alligator's cruise by in the canal. The
meeting started with Brad Thornton giving a presentation about systematic
operational enhancement through integrated process management. For forty five minutes,
this boy, with his fancy degree and his expensive suit
explained to a room full of people how they were
going to improve the facility by implementing best practices and
standardized procedures and efficiency metrics. He had charts showing how
detention centers were supposed to work, graphs proving that their
current methods were suboptimal, and a detailed timeline for achieving
peak operational effectiveness. It was real impressive, Tommy said, professional scientific,
complete nonsense, but presented real well. The centerpiece of Brad's
plan was something he called Operation dry Ground, a comprehensive
drainage and land reclamation project that would transform the facility
from a challenging aquatic environment into a properly terrestrial detention complex.
What this meant in regular English was that they were
going to drain the swamp. Now. When Brad Thornton announced
his plan to drain the everglades around Alligator Alcatraz, the
response in that conference room was everything you'd expect from
folks who'd spent their careers in government work. Chet mackenzie
immediately started talking about how this aligned with his strategic
vision for adaptive facility management. Assistant Warden Crenshaw mentioned something
about environmental optimization and sustainable detention practices, and Warden Fitzpatrick
started calculating how good this was going to look in
his next report to Washington. The only person in that
room who understood what they were actually talking about was Tommy,
and they weren't asking for his opinion. They were asking
for his technical input on how to implement their brilliant plan.
So when Brad turned to him and said, mister Esperanza,
based on your experience with our drainage systems, what would
you estimate as the timeline for achieving comprehensive water management
in our operational area? Tommy just looked at him for
a long moment. Then he said, real polite, how much
of the swamp you planning to drain? Brad consulted his charts.
Our preliminary assessment indicates that optimal functionality requires water table
reduction across approximately two hundred acres of our immediate operational environment.
Tommy nodded like that made perfect sense, and where you
planning to put all that water well, said Brad, warming
up to his subject. Our engineering consultants have identified several
options for water displacement and redistribution that would maximize our
land utilization efficiency, which was Brad's way of saying he
had no idea where the water was going to go,
but he was sure somebody could figure that out. Later,
Tommy asked a few more questions, real technical ones about
soil composition and water table levels and seasonal flooding patterns,
and with each question, Brad's answers got longer and more
complicated and less connected to anything that might actually work
in the real world. Finally, Tommy said, well, that sounds
real interesting. When y'all planning to start Phase one implementation
begins Monday morning, Brad announced proudly, we've contracted with Superior
Earth Moving Solutions to begin the initial excavation and water
displacement procedures. Tommy just nodded, I'll make sure to watch
for that, he said. Now, while the facility Optimization committee
was busy planning to rearrange the Everglades, Tommy was conducting
his own kind of committee meeting, except his committee met
in places like the maintenance shed, the kitchen, and the
little covered area behind housing Unit B where folks gathered
to smoke cigarettes and complain about the heat. Tommy's committee
didn't have a fancy name, or official authority or PowerPoint presentations.
What it had was people who understood how the things
actually worked and what needed to be done to keep
everyone alive and reasonably comfortable in a place that had
been designed by people who clearly never lived anywhere without
central air conditioning. There was Luis Morales, who'd been a
landscaper in Orlando and knew more about Florida collegy than
all the environmental consultants in Tallahassee. Lewis could look at
a piece of ground and tell you what would grow there,
what would flood there, and what kind of critters would
call it home. There was Maria Santos, who'd manage the
kitchen at a restaurant in Miami that served three hundred
people a day with equipment that was older than she was.
Maria could organize anything food distribution, work schedules, supply logistics,
and make it run smooth as a Swiss watch. There
was old Pete Tran, who'd been a fisherman down in
homestead until they changed the regulations and put him out
of business. Pete knew water, how it moved, where it went,
what lived in it. He could read the weather two
days out just by watching how the birds behaved. And
there were others, folks who'd been mechanics and cooks and
construction workers, people who'd spent their lives making things work
with whatever they had available. Not a college degree among them,
but more practical wisdom than you'd find in a whole university.
They didn't hold formal meetings. They just talked during work detail,
during meals, during the long hot evenings when the air
conditioning in the housing units struggled against the Florida humidity.
They talked about what worked and what didn't, about problems
they'd noticed and solutions they'd tried in other places, and slowly, quietly,
without any official recognition or bureaucratic approval, they started making
things better. Monday morning came around, and with it came
Superior Earth Moving Solutions. Three men in a pickup truck
with a small excavator that looked like it had seen
better decades. The company was owned by Billy Coowalski, whose
main qualification for this job was that he'd submitted the
lowest bid and knew somebody who knew somebody in the
state Procurement office. Billy had never worked in the Everglades before,
but he figured dirt was dirt and water was water,
and if the government wanted him to move some of
each around, well that was their business. He set up
his excavator near the administrative building and started digging what
brad Thornton's engineering consultants had identified as Primary Drainage Channel Alpha,
a ditch that was supposed to carry water away from
the facility and into the existing canal system. What Billy
didn't know, and what brad Thornton's engineering consultants hadn't bothered
to find out, was that the existing canal system wasn't
really a system at all. It was just a collection
of drainage ditches that previous contractors had dug without much
coordination or planning. Some of them led to the main
waterway that connected to the Everglades, others led to low
lying areas that filled up during the rainy season and
turned into ponds, and a few just sort of ended.
Billy started digging his channel bright and early Monday morning,
and by lunchtime. He'd created a nice straight ditch about
two hundred feet long and four feet deep, real professional
looking work, the kind of thing that would look good
in brad Thornton's progress photos. The problem became apparent Tuesday
morning when Billy came back to continue his work and
found that his nice straight ditch was now a nice
straight creek running in the exact opposite direction from what
he'd intended. Instead of draining water away from the facility,
his channel was bringing water in, lots of water, and
with the water came every that lived in the water, fish, turtles, snakes,
and a couple of alligators who seemed real pleased to
have a new highway leading directly to the heart of
the detention center. Oohoo. Now, you might think that when
brad Thornton saw his drainage channel running backwards and delivering
wildlife directly to the administrative parking lot, he might have
reconsidered his approach. May be consulted with some local experts,
or asked someone who actually lived in the area how
water moved through the everglades. But that ain't how efficiency
experts work. When reality doesn't match their plans, they don't
change the plans, they changed their interpretation of reality. Brad
called an emergency meeting of the Facility Optimization Committee and
announced that what they were seeing was actually phase two
of the water management plan happening ahead of a schedule.
The temporary flow reversal was creating enhanced aquatic access corridors
that would ultimately optimize the natural drainage gradient, which was
Brad's way of saying he had no idea what was happening,
but he was going to act like he'd meant for
it to happen. Chet mackenzie immediately started talking about how
this demonstrated their adaptive engineering protocols and their ability to
leverage dynamic environmental conditions. Assistant Warden Crenshaw mentioned something about
nature based infrastructure solutions and sustainable detention facility design. Meanwhile,
outside the conference room window, Billy Kowalski was trying to
figure out how to get his excavator out of a
sinkhole that had opened up when he tried to dig
a second drainage channel, and in the new that was
flowing through the middle of their facility. A family of
otters had moved in and was having what appeared to
be the time of their lives. But the real entertainment
was watching the committee try to explain this to Warden Fitzpatrick,
who was getting increasingly nervous about his next conference call
with Washington. So you're telling me, the warden said, looking
out at the expanding waterways that were turning his detention
facility into something resembling a very disorganized venice. That this
is all part of the plan. Absolutely, said Brad, with
a kind of confidence that only comes from never having
been held accountable for results. We're implementing an integrated aquatic
management system that leverages natural hydrological processes to achieve optimal
environmental balance. Fitzpatrick nodded like that made sense, because in
his experience, when smart people used enough big words, they
were probably right about something. While the Facility Optimization Committee
was busy explaining how their plan was working perfectly, Tommy's
unofficial committee was busy keeping the place from falling apart completely.
See when you dig channels and ditches without understanding how
water actually works, you don't just change where the water goes.
You change everything. The soil composition, the bug population, the
way the heat and humidity move around. You create new
problems faster than you can solve the old ones. The
first thing that happened was the mosquitos. Lord the mosquitoes.
Turns out, when you create a bunch of new standing
water in the middle of a swamp, you're basically setting
up a breeding ground for every blood sucking insect in
South Florida. Within three days, the mosquito population around Alligator
Alcatraz had probably doubled. The guards started wearing long sleeves
and pants, even in the ninety five degree heat. The
administrative staff began conducting meetings indoors with the windows closed,
and the prisoners who didn't have the option of staying
inside started looking like they'd been in a fight with
a swarm of tiny vampires. That's when Maria stepped in.
See Maria had grown up in a little town outside Havana,
where mosquitoes were a fact of life, and she knew
things about dealing with them that didn't involve expensive chemical
sprays or fancy electronic devices. She started gathering certain plants
that grew wide around the facility, plants that Billy Kowalski's
excavator hadn't managed to destroy yet, things like lemongrass and marigolds,
and a few others that I can't pronounce, but that
seemed to make the mosquitoes think twice about hanging around.
Within a week, she had little bundles of these plants
hanging around the housing units in the work areas, not
enough to eliminate the mosquitoes completely, but enough to make
life tolerable. And she did it so quietly that most
of the guards figured it was just some kind of
folk decoration. Meanwhile, Luis was dealing with a different problem.
All that new water was changing the plant life around
the facility. Some things were dying off, others were growing
like crazy, and a few invasive species were moving in
and taking over. The Landscaping around the administeron straitive building,
which had never been much to look at, was starting
to look like a scene from a jungle adventure movie.
Louis started a quiet campaign of plant management, removing the
stuff that was going to cause problems and encouraging the
stuff that would actually help. He couldn't do much about
the big picture. Billy Kowalski's earth moving project was still
creating new wetlands every day, but he could keep the
immediate area around the housing units from turning into an
impenetrable thicket. And then there was the food situation. The
new waterways that Brad Thornton's drainage project had created were
playing havoc with the facility supply deliveries. The access road,
which had never been much more than a dirt track
through the swamp, was now partially underwater. During high time
delivery trucks were getting stuck, supplies were getting wet, and
the whole logistics system was falling apart. The official food service,
still being provided by Patriot Nutrition Services, was having trouble
getting their trucks through to deliver the expired MREs and
processed food that passed for meals at Alligator Alcatraz. What
did get through was often spoiled by the humidity or
contaminated by swamp water. That's when Old Pete started what
he called his supplemental nutrition program. See all those new
waterways that were causing so many problems for the administration
were actually creating opportunities for someone who knew how to fish.
Pete had been studying the water since he arrived, watching
what lived in it and how to catch it. And
what he found was that the channels and ponds around
the facility were full of perfectly good fish that nobody
was bothering to catch. Pete started small, just a fishing
line and some hooks that he'd improvised from materials around
the maintenance shop. He'd fish during his free time, early
in the morning or late in the evening, and whatever
he caught would supplement the terrible official meals. But Pete
was smart about it. He didn't try to replace the
official food service or make a big show of what
he was doing. He just quietly made sure that the
folks in his housing unit had something decent to eat
now and then, fresh fish cooked over a small camp
stove that someone had liberated from a supply shipment. Word
got around, as word does in a place where everyone
knows everything about everyone else's business, and soon Pete had
a small network of people helping him. Folks who knew
about preparing fish, Others who could gather edible plants from
the areas that Luis was managing, People who could organize
cooking schedules and distribute food without attracting official attention. It
wasn't much, but it was real food, prepared by people
who cared whether it tasted good and whether anyone got
sick from eating it, which was more than you could
say for Patriot Nutrition Services. Meanwhile, the Facility Optimization Committee
was holding its second official meeting to assess the progress
of Operation Dry Ground. Brad Thornton had prepared another presentation,
complete with new charts and updated time lines and revised
definitions of success. According to Brad's latest analysis, the temporary
aquatic expansion phase was preceding ahead of schedule and they
were ready to move to Phase three, integrated water management implementation.
What this meant in practical terms was that Billy coo
Zwalski was going to dig more ditches. Billy, to his credit,
was starting to have some doubts about this project. He'd
been working in construction for twenty years and he'd never
seen anything quite like what was happening at Alligator Alcatraz.
Every time he dug a new channel, the water seemed
to find a way to go somewhere he didn't expect.
Every time he tried to redirect the flow, something unexpected happened.
But Billy was getting paid by the hour, and the
government had signed a contract for a specific amount of
drainage work. If they wanted him to keep digging he'd
keep digging. It wasn't his job to tell them their
plan didn't make sense. So Phase three began with Billy
excavating what Brad's engineers called Secondary Drainage Channel Beta, a
larger ditch that was supposed to connect the existing channels
and create a unified water menagement system. What it actually
created was something that looked like a moat around the
administrative building. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen
a government facility surrounded by a moat full of alligators
and water moccasins, but it's a site that tends to
make people nervous, especially the people who have to work
in that building every day. The guards started calling it
Fitzpatrick's Castle, which the warden did not find amusing. The
administrative staff began carrying umbrellas, not because of rain, but
because of the birds that had discovered the new waterway
and decided it was a perfect place to set up housekeeping.
And the alligators, well, the alligators thought they'd died and
gone to heaven. They had a nice, warm creek system,
plenty of food and human entertainment available twenty four hours
a day. Several of them took up permanent residence in them,
including one particularly large individual that the prisoners had started
calling the warden because he seemed to be running the
place more effectively than the actual warden. But the real
crisis came when Chet mackenzie tried to implement what he
called enhanced perimeter security protocols, which was his way of
trying to turn the water management disaster into a security feature.
See Chet had been reading about medieval castle defense systems
and he'd gotten the idea that having a mote around
the facility was actually a good thing. It would make
escape attempts more difficult, provide a natural barrier against outside threats,
and demonstrate their innovative approach to detention facility design. He
started talking about organic security infrastructure and nature based perimeter control.
He had Billy kowalsks dig connecting channels between the various
ponds and ditches, creating what he called a comprehensive aquatic
defense network. What he actually created was a system that
turned the entire facility into an island during high tide
and a muddy mess during low tide. The access road
was now under water half the time, Supply deliveries had
become impossible, and the guards were having to use boats
to get from the housing units to the administrative building,
but Chet was proud of his innovation. He gave a
presentation to the Facility Optimization Committee about how they'd leveraged
environmental challenges to create enhanced security solutions. He talked about
adaptive defense systems and integrated natural barriers. And then came
the day when Warden Fitzpatrick tried to leave for a
meeting in Tallahassee and discovered that his official vehicle was
parked on what was now effectively an island, surrounded by
water that was too deep to drive through and too
shallow for the boats they'd been using to get around.
That's when reality finally penetrated the committee's confidence in their
comprehensive planning process. The Warden was standing on the steps
of the administrative building, wearing his best suit and carrying
his briefcase, looking out at the moat that surrounded his
parking lot, and in that moat, the warden, the alligator,
not the human, was floating with just his eyes and
nostrils above water, watching the proceedings with what looked suspiciously
like amusement. Mackenzie Fitzpatrick called out how exactly am I
supposed to get to my car? Check consulted his clipboard, Sir,
this is an excellent opportunity to test our aquatic mobility protocols.
We have several watercraft available for administrative transportation needs, which
was Chet's way of saying the warden was going to
have to take a row boat to his meeting with
the state Corrections Department. Now, watching a warden in a
three piece suit trying to maintain his dignity while being
rowed across a moat by a corrections officer who'd never
been in a boat before was the kind of entertainment
that made all the mosquito bites and humidity seem worthwhile.
But it was also the moment when Tommy realized that
the administration was never going to solve their problems themselves.
They were too invested in their theories and their committees
and their belief that any situation could be improved with
enough meetings and planning. So Tommy decided it was time
for his committee to become a little more active. That evening,
after the warden had returned from his meeting, wet, embarrassed
and furious, Tommy called together Luise Maria Pete and a
few others for what he called a practical planning session.
They met behind the maintenance shed in the little area
where Tommy had been quietly working on various repair projects.
It wasn't an official meeting, just a few folks sitting
around talking about how to make things work better. These
folks running this place, Tommy said, they got good intentions.
They just don't know how to live in a place
like this, but we do. Luise nodded toward the administrative building,
which was now surrounded by water and glowing with artificial
light in the gathering dusk. They're never going to figure
it out, are they? Doesn't matter, Tommy said. What matters
is that we figure it out, and then we make
it work, whether they understand it or not. Maria asked
the question that was on everyone's mind. How smiled, same way.
We've been doing it quietly, carefully, one problem at a time.
Let them have their committees and their plans. We'll just
make sure people don't die while they're figuring things out.
And that's when I realized what Tommy was really planning.
He wasn't trying to fix the administration's problems. He was
trying to work around them completely create a parallel system
that actually functioned, while letting the official system take credit
for whatever success they achieved. It was brilliant, it was patient,
and it was exactly the kind of approach that bureaucrats
would never see coming because they couldn't imagine that anyone
would solve problems without official authorization and proper documentation. Over
the next few weeks, while the Facility Optimization Committee continued
holding meetings about their integrated aquatic management success, Tommy's informal
network started quietly implementing what you might call practical solutions.
Louis began what he called environmental restoration, which meant removing
the invasive plants that were taking over and encouraging the
native species that would actually help with drainage and pest control.
He did it during his official work details, so it
looked like regular maintenance, but he was actually redesigning the
facility's landscaping to work with the water instead of against it.
Maria expanded her mosquito control program and started coordinating with
Pete's fishing operation to create what amounted to a parallel
food system. Nothing dramatic or obvious, just better for people
who were willing to help with the work. Pete started
teaching others how to read the water, which channels would
flood during heavy rain, which areas would dry out, where
the fish would be during different seasons, practical knowledge that
would help everyone adapt to living in what had become
a constantly changing aquatic environment. And Tommy coordinated it all,
making sure that nothing they did would interfere with the
official operations or attract unwonted attention from the administration. They
weren't trying to embarrass anyone or prove how smart they were.
They were just trying to make life bearable for everyone
stuck in this beautiful, chaotic, impossible place. The best part
was watching the facility Optimization Committee take credit for improvements
they didn't understand and couldn't have created themselves. When the
mosquito population dropped, brad thornpe and attributed it to the
ecological balance effects of their water management system. When the
food situation improved, Assistant Warden Crenshaw talked about the enhanced
nutritional efficiency they'd achieved through optimized supply chain management. When
the landscaping started looking better, Chet mackenzie explained it as
the result of their adaptive environmental protocols, and Tommy just
smiled and nodded and kept working because he understood something
that the committee never would, that real change doesn't happen
in conference rooms with PowerPoint presentations. It happens one problem
at a time, one solution at a time, one person
helping another person get through another day. By the end
of that first month, Alligator Alcatraz had settled into what
you might call a room, not the routine that anyone
had planned, but the routine that actually worked. The Facility
Optimization Committee held their weekly meetings and issued their progress
reports and talked about their innovative approaches to detention facility management.
Brad Thornton was already working on his paper about adaptive
aquatic infrastructure in correctional environments. Chet mackenzie was planning a
presentation for the annual Corrections Conference about leveraging natural systems
for enhanced security. And meanwhile, the facility actually functioned. People
ate decent food, lived in reasonably comfortable conditions, and managed
to coexist with the alligators and the bureaucrats and the
ever changing waterways that had become their new reality. It
wasn't the high tech, climate controlled maximum security operation that
had been planned. It was something more like a small
town that happened to be surrounded by water and wildlife
and people with official titles who didn't really understand what
was happening around them. But it worked, and that was
more than anyone had expected. When those first buses rolled
through the Everglades and delivered us to this impossible place.
Tommy had proved something important that you don't have to
be in charge to be a leader. You just have
to be willing to see what needs doing and do
it even when nobody gives you permission and nobody thanks
you for it. Course, the real test was still coming,
because success has a way of attracting attention, and attention
from government officials is not always the kind of attention
you want. But that's a story for next time. For now,
all you need to know is this. Sometimes the best
committee is the one that never calls itself a committee,
and sometimes the best plans are the ones that adapt
to reality instead of trying to force reality to adapt
to them. And sometimes the best leaders are the ones
who never ask for the title. Tommy Esperanza understood all
of that from the beginning. All the rest of us
were just lucky enough to watch him work, and the warden,
the alligator, not the human, well, he just kept floating
in his moat, watching over his domain with the patient
wisdom of a creature that had been perfecting his approach
to life since before humans invented committees. Somehow, I think
he approved