Case of the Missing Fire Truck Playground Station Has Been Solved!!!

by Prince Of Petworth August 24, 2016 at 2:41 pm 12 Comments

Has anyone seen me? I went missing sometime last week (most likely Friday). I miss my home in Walter Pierce Park!!! pic.twitter.com/kv2GmKuLq4

— Mindy Moretti (@mindymoretti) August 23, 2016

From an email:

“The Department of General Services’ (DGS) Contract Services Unit responded to community requests to repair the broken equipment. It had been reported to DGS that children were being injured due to a broken plank on the fire truck. After evaluating the equipment, it was determined that the fire truck could not be repaired. In effort to err on the side of safety, the fire truck was disposed of by DGS to ensure there would be no further injury to children.

The decision to remove and dispose of the fire truck to protect children should have been communicated to community members who purchased the apparatus and to the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR).

DGS regrets both the lack of communication to the community – specifically to those who worked together to purchase the fire truck – and DPR of the removal and disposal of the play equipment.

DGS apologizes for the communication oversight and will replace the equipment with a new fire truck in the next six to eight weeks.”

Ashy Oldlady

Now how are the neighborhood children supposed to learn about injury?
Truxton Thomas

Did they drive it off the lot, or did it have to be towed?
- lisavfr
  
  Was it booted first?
  - textdoc
    
    Badoom-tish!
Marty

Interesting that the DGS lady said in the tweet, specifically, that DGS didn’t remove it. Guess she didn’t actually look very hard, did she?
- textdoc
  
  As Andy notes below… she’s not the one who’d be looking; she’s just relaying whatever the head of the appropriate division of DGS claimed was the case.
  .
  I think the point here is that _DGS_ didn’t look very hard before telling all and sundry that they didn’t remove it, and that different groups within DGS aren’t communicating properly with each other.
textdoc

Jeez, talk about the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. I was just reading a Washington Post article that said that both DGS and DPR had stated that the didn’t have anything to do with the removal of the play firetruck.
- textdoc
  
  Oops — “they,” not “the.”
andy

Jackie Stanley is not a person within the organization who knows about operations. She is the outward facing person who either says what little she knows or has to ask others at DGS what is going on. So basically, unless she tells you who told her something, what she tells you doesn’t mean much.
- Shaw Neighbor
  
  Jackie Stanley is a wonderful, diplomatic, and extremely hardworking person who cares a great deal about this city. There is no need to write disparaging comments about her.
dcd

I am oddly sad about this. My daughter spent untold hours climbing on that fire truck. One of my favorite pictures ever is of her with my college roommate’s two kids in the cab.
d

DC government being DC government.

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