Getting around Salt Lake during the Olympic Games may be easier than first thought, if the city’s work force heeds the request of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee to reduce 20 per cent of background traffic during the Games. Most are obeying the request and altering their work hours. Some Wells Fargo employees will start work at 7:30 a.m. and end by 2 p.m. Many of the Mormon Church’s 2,500 employees who work downtown will schedule their work day between 6 and 7 a.m. and leave by 3 p.m. and about 6,000 to 10,000 of the Utah’s 16,000 employees are expected to alter their schedules. But Administrators at LDS Hospital and the Qwest telephone company won’t change their hours.
Athletes with aches and pains during the Salt Lake Games will have a short walk to a new clinic, set up at the Olympic athletes’ village, formerly the University of Utah’s student housing on campus. X-ray machines, physical therapy gear, dental equipment and an eye clinic will be available free to the athletes. Doctors expect about 2,000 clinic visits during the Games, and as many as 100 per day at the height of competition. Most of the gear was donated by sponsors or is backup equipment at the University of Utah hospital. The cost of setting up the clinic is about $750,000.
According to a Los Angeles Times report, the cost of the Salt Lake Games are $1.9 billion (U.S.), more than five times the cost of the previous 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics. The report notes that the Salt Lake organizing committee is raising $1.3 billion, while taxpayers are picking up about a third of the costs, $622 million, much of it security-related. U.S. Senator John McCain called the spiraling costs “outrageous, disgraceful and obscene. It was very small in the beginning and then it got bigger”, he said. The $1.9 billion does not include another billion in government-funded road and rail projects in and around Salt Lake.
And finally, the best seats at the Games could be the ones provided by A-Company Inc. of Boise Idaho. They are portable potties. The job is so big that the company has had to partner with four other firms to supply the 2,600 portable toilets SLOC ordered for the Games. Larry Moore, chairman of A-Company Inc. said, “if our job isn’t taken seriously it will hurt the whole industry. Our goal is to make sue that portable restrooms and sanitation comes off as a high point in the Olympics.”
