Most days, like today, I park my car in a semi-enclosed multistory
building designed specifically for the mass storage of automobiles.

Here in Michigan, as I think I mentioned, such a building is called a
"parking ramp"; in other places, it's a "parking structure" or "parking
garage"; in Canada, it's a "parkade".  There may be other terms.

Note that the car parking areas are not actually enclosed.  There is a
small parapet, and some railings, around each floor.  The floor plan is
rectangular, but spiral in concept: As you drive along the main aisle
around and around the building, you are ascending gradually to successive
stories.  The ceilings are very low, so if your vehicle is significantly
taller than the standard American full-size car, you might worry about
getting stuck under a beam.

One of the odd things about this particular parking ramp is the way it is
affected by rainfall.  On one recent dark and rainy day, I drove into the
building in the usual way, and was dazzled by how bright things were
inside.

New lighting, I thought.  But the sodium vapor light fixtures, though
plainly much newer than the original building, show signs of having been
there for a while.  The lighting had not been changed overnight.

What changed was the reflectivity.

Obviously, cars were tracking in water from the wet streets.  But that
alone couldn't explain why the floors and ceilings all had such a glossy
sheen.  The light from the headlights and the sodium vapor lighting was
bouncing off the wet floors and the wet ceilings and the wet cars,
creating a much brighter and seemingly more exciting environment than you
normally see in such a place.

From the basement up to the highest floor, essentially every ceiling in
the car parking areas (all unpainted concrete) were speckled densely with
little droplets of water, like the surface of a cold Coke bottle on a hot
Alabama afternoon.

Meanwhile, in the little corner section which includes the elevators and
stairway, where all the surfaces are painted, no comparable condensation
was seen.

Is this typical behavior for practically an entire unheated reinforced-
concrete building to be (literally) dripping with moisture after just a
small amount of rain? Or is this a symptom -- or cause -- of some deeper
problem?

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
Washtenaw County Commissioner, 4th District
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com
Ebay Page, http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/potifos/
Mailing address: P.O. Box 2563, Ann Arbor MI 48106