Imagine a large major hazard facility with lots of pipes. Now imagine you have to do a environmental and health risk assessment on the site. Think of all the ways chemicals can enter the environment — groundwater, air, soil, marine, freshwater. Think of all the different effects it can have on ecosystems, people’s health, irrigation, animal drinking water, industrial water use.

Okay. Now draw a picture of these pathways and impacts.

This is what I’ve been doing for the past week. I’ve been doing conceptual modelling of one of the biggest chemical processing plants in the southern hemisphere. These flowcharts have taken up maybe 20 A3 pieces of paper.

The logic and breadth of the task has hurt my brain but finally I have settled on seven exposure pathways.

Now I have to translate my pencil scribblings into something pretty for a report. I called the IT department to ask if the company had any flowcharting software. “Well, some people use Microsoft Visio,” they told me, “but we’ve run out of licences for it.”

Oh.

I hopped on the internet to look for open source or freeware flowcharting programs. If someone had programmed The Gimp (graphics editor), Inkscape (vector drawing program) and Freemind (mind mapping software) — all of which are installed on my computer at work — surely someone had put together something that lets me connect boxes together, right?

Well, no. I spent two hours looking for something, anything that would help me avoid the hell of creating diagrams in Microsoft Word. It turns out any satisfactory software out requires purchase (the trials create advertising watermarks on the flowcharts). There is the open source Dia for Windows, which I was excited to discover. However, the program resizes text in unpredictable ways. The errors in the latest version was far more trouble that it was worth.

In the end, I bashed my way through Microsoft Word. It’s not the most efficient way to create flowcharts but at least I know how it behaves.

Sigh.

The irony is that because I’m charged out to clients at almost $100 an hour, the two hours I spent looking for efficient software was $200 that could have been spent on buying a Visio licence or other software, which I could have used in future risk assessments.

Apologies for the dull post.