The second-in-command at engineering, Peter Judd, has been tapped, it appears, to replace Dave Rudberg as general manager for Olympics preparation. The news came as a surprise to him. There was no posting or even internal application. He was simply asked by city manager Penny Ballem to do it.

Peter, engineering’s very energetic and relatively young deputy, says he doesn’t have a huge amount to say about how he’s going to tackle the job yet since 1. Dave Rudberg, the former head of engineering who was doing the job and abruptly resigned two weeks ago, has put all the major pieces in place 2. Peter only found out himself that he’s been named the general manager and hasn’t had a chance to look over the operation yet and see what still needs to be done.

At this point, it largely consists of making sure that city teams are in place to do the kind of work that the city usually does, only for an extra 250,000 people who can’t afford to be stuck in traffic and don’t want to look at overflowing garbage cans. So it’s litter pick-up, traffic direction, signage, snow ploughing and the like.

As Peter says, it’s not at all what he was expecting to do with the next year of his life, but “I’ll give it my best shot.”

He won’t be replaced. Instead, other branch heads will pick up some extra work.