Zama Zama: Fighting and dying in the Witwatersrand

Another reminder about the danger of abandoned mines - headlines today about a collapse in the East Rand field of South Africa that has trapped dozens or even hundreds of illegal gold miners in a shaft, under a rockfall.

Just going into a neglected quarry or shaft is hazardous; imagine going into one that hasn't been tended for years, then using rock drills and explosives to chase the last bits of gold.
 
Here's a more detailed status report on rescue work from The Citizen in South Africa.

Authorities haven't been able to shut all the illegal mines down, since the zama zamas live underground for months at a time, often adjacent to legal mines and sometimes connected to them. Many of the zama zamas are illegal immigrants, barred from holding regular jobs; expenses are paid by syndicates up top.
 
For a dramatic angle, here's a trailer for Zama Zama, a thriller about illegal miners of the Witwatersrand:

DEFCON Diaries: List of alerts and close calls

Following up on my DEFCON article for Air&Space, following is a working outline I put together during my research. It catalogs dozens of Cold War alerts and false alarms along with the small number (four) of global DEFCON scares.

 

Out of all the events listed below, I regard five as particularly chilling: the "Black Forest Incident" of 1961; Soviet concerns about NATO's Able Archer exercise in 1983; several showdowns during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; a US-Soviet naval faceoff during the 1973 Yom Kippur War; and a false alert at Cheyenne Mountain in November 1979.

 

The takeaway for me: DEFCON alerts are not the whole story, although it was the focus of my article. Among the incidents that came closest to nuclear war, in several the events moved so quickly (spanning less than ten minutes) that no DEFCON change was ordered.

 

 

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     A. Significant Cold War alerts that happened prior to adoption of the five-level DEFCON scale in 1959 by Canada and the US

• June 25, 1950: Joint Chiefs of Staff called a general alert for the USAF, based on concerns that invasion of North Korea could be part of general war plan by Soviets

• May 6, 1955: Yellow Alert triggered (air defense emergency, attack considered likely), when a flight of 13 B-47s returning from Canada were thought to be enemy bombers

• November 1956: Some US nuclear forces in Europe were activated during the Hungarian revolution, coincidentally as the Suez Crisis was winding down

     B. Times when the US raised global DEFCON levels at direction of National Command Authority (NCA)

• May 1960: US forces went to DEFCON Three, at direction of the Secretary of Defense; most likely as a signal to the Soviets in response to failure of four-power talks in Paris

• October 1962, Cuban Missile Crisis: SAC went to DEFCON Two, other global US forces went to DEFCON Three, except for US nuclear forces in Europe

• October 1973, “Middle East Contingency Alert”: US forces went to “DEFCON Three Worldwide, no exceptions”: US Sixth Fleet sustained the higher readiness into November due to tensions near Crete with Soviet Fifth Eskadra

• Attacks on September 11, 2001: DEFCON Three called, national emergency declared, and FPCON raised to Delta. Modified SCATANA procedures (aka ESCAT) authorized military to direct FAA to ground all unauthorized domestic flights

     C. Events during which regional US forces raised their DEFCON levels (Partial list)

• Vietnam War: US Navy in Western Pacific went to DEFCON Three for duration

• August 1976, “Panmunjom Incident:” killing of two US officers; US forces in Korea went to DEFCON Three; accompanied by military-backed action to cut down disputed tree in DMZ

• October 26, 1979, killing of South Korean President Park Chung Hee: US Forces in Korea increased readiness from DEFCON Four to DEFCON Three

• January 1991, Operation Desert Storm: DEFCON Two ordered by NCA (National Command Authority) for US forces near Iraq; at least one ship raised its level to DEFCON One

     D. Events since 1959 that triggered a higher alert or readiness precaution, but apparently not a DEFCON change

• July 1962: Berlin Crisis, call-up of infantry reserves

• March 1963: Overflight of Alaska by two Soviet TU-16s prompted an attempt at interception by nuclear-armed US interceptors

• November 1963, day of JFK assassination: Anecdotally, some SAC bases went to higher level of defense posture, even launching bombers to avoid being destroyed on the ground

• September 1963: US interceptors met Soviet bombers near US airspace

• June 1967, Six Day War: Israeli attack on USS Liberty led briefly to mistaken belief that attack was by Soviets

• January 1968: North Korean capture of the USS Pueblo; the commander of US Forces, Korea considered increasing from DEFCON Four to DEFCON Three, but didn't authorize it

• August 1968: Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; Soviets went on elevated alert fearing a NATO response

• April 1969: North Korean shoot-down of EC-121 intelligence-gathering plane

• September 1969: Libyan coup. Presence of Soviet fleet offshore Libya discouraged US or British intervention in support of deposed king

• October 1969: SAC forces went to higher alert in “JCS Joint Readiness Test”, apparently done to send a signal to Soviets and North Vietnam that they should negotiate about the Vietnam War. Coincidentally, earlier that year, Soviet and Chinese forces were skirmishing in a border dispute that could have led to a nuclear strike

• September 1970, Jordanian “Black September” crisis: US forces near Jordan and Syria on elevated alert

• December 1971, Indian-Pakistan Crisis: US and Soviet naval forces in Indian Ocean experienced friction

• August 1978: SAC bombers dispersed from regular bases after news that Soviet submarines were unusually close to US East Coast

• Attempted assassination of President Reagan, March 30, 1981: Secretary of Defense directed that SAC crews be kept closer to aircraft (apparently was a change in Defense Posture, not a change in DEFCON level)

• January to November 1983: Series of events and misunderstandings that apparently convinced Soviet leaders to fear a US first strike. Risk of accidental nuclear war peaked during November's Able Archer exercise by NATO

• May 1987: Iraqi jets attacked USS Stark

• November 2010 shelling of Yeonpyeong Island by North Korea, and retaliatory shelling by South Korea

     E. Short-lived alerts or false alarms that could have elevated into a nuclear strike

• October 5, 1960: BMEWS radar at Thule AFB registered rising moon as missile attack and B-47 crews were scrambled at some bases (possibly Coco-level alert)

• May 28, 1961: Radicals of the “American Republican Army” dynamited three microwave towers in Idaho and Montana, creating interruptions in SAC's alert network and briefly causing concerns that this could be pre-attack sabotage by the Soviets. (That would be significant, because most analysts predicted that any first strike would begin with sabotage by the enemy.) This attack could have fed into initial SAC concerns about the following event, a shutdown of strategic communications believed impossible:

• November 24, 1961, “Black Forest Incident": a telephone technician's error led to complete failure of a critical microwave link near Colorado Springs. This cut off NORAD-SAC communications and missile-warning data from Thule AFB to Ent AFB and other SAC installations. SAC sent an alert to bomber crews to prepare for takeoff, but also used short-wave radio links to determine no attack had taken place. (Why that name? The microwave relay that failed was located on Black Forest Road)

• False alerts during Cuban Missile Crisis: Radar display erroneously indicated missile launch from Cuba in the direction of Tampa, Florida; also, false reports of intruders breaking into SAC airbases

• 1965 Northeast Blackout: “Bomb Alert System” generated false signals indicating nuclear detonations in Arizona and South Carolina

• October 1979 through June 1980: false alerts at NORAD due to variety of problems with sensors, interpretation, and computers. These led to an elevated Defense Posture at SAC

• December 28, 1984: a Soviet sub-launched cruise missile overflew Norway, and triggered warnings in the West

DEFCON Diaries

Following is an expanded introduction to my article "Go to DEFCON 3," in the current issue of Air&Space/Smithsonian.

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DEFCON means Defense Readiness Condition and was strictly a military matter in the early years, but now a raised DEFCON level has become pop-culture shorthand for a situation that needs prompt, even extreme action. Here's a list of movie and TV shows that reference DEFCON levels, (not always correctly!)

 

What's “high?” Begin with this: the lower the DEFCON level, the higher the worry. DEFCON Five is peacetime, while DEFCON One is about preparing for imminent war. Hiking the DEFCON level activates a stack of pre-scripted plans intended for quick execution. It's comparable to “battle stations” on a warship facing combat, which tells each sailor to jump to a memorized set of actions: as in, put on helmet and flak jacket, go to this station, close the watertight hatches, and stand by for orders.

 

Unlike the widely derided terror color-codes adopted by Homeland Security shortly after the September 11 attacks, DEFCON levels are primarily for the military eyes and thus not the subject of press briefings beforehand. But the Cold War saw a multitude of DEFCON alerts and the evidence left behind tells us a good deal about the scripted procedures then in effect. Four alerts took effect across US forces worldwide, the most famous being the Cuban Missile Crisis, and there were at least a dozen smaller-scale ones called at the theater or regional level.

 

Begin with this: DEFCON levels are about readiness for war, not about fighting one. Were war to come to the homeland, more obscure alerts would come into play. (A presidential declaration of an “air defense emergency,” for example, amounts to DEFCON Zero. Enemy aircraft or missiles would be coming in, and war would be underway.)

The idea of a graded scale indicating combat readiness goes back at least to World War I. Such scales commonly had rungs that shifted gradually from peacetime conditions, first by raising the supply of equipment and troops (say, by canceling all weekend leaves); next, shifted materiel to the front and watched for sneak attacks; and finally, dug in for combat.

While that seems simple enough, confusion over numbers and their meaning help explain confusion at the command level just before December 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor. Our army and navy each had a three-rung readiness scale, but they used opposite numbering schemes: as fear of war went up, the Army's number scale also went up, and the Navy's went down.

Confusion about the conduct of alerts continued well into the Fifties, along with false alarms such as one nationwide “Yellow Alert” in May 1955 when air defense confused a formation of B-47 bombers as Soviet bombers. Following communication mixups during a joint military air-defense exercise called Top Hand in late 1958, the following year the US and Canada agreed to five “defense readiness conditions,” or DEFCONs. This would help clarify when, for example, US commanders had permission to send nuclear-armed aircraft into Canadian territory.

If there's interest, I'll add more DEFCON history in a later post.

Colossal, or Not?

According to this feature in the NY Times,  a “colossal bridge” will rise over the Hudson River, replacing the Tappan Zee (illustration, HDR):

The new, as-yet-unnamed bridge (actually two parallel cable-stayed spans, side by side) will be big in terms of traffic lanes, with tolls to match its ambitions, but I can't call it colossal, as in the Colossus of Rhodes. *

Perhaps to shore up the claim, the writer refers to the crane barge being summoned  from California, Left Coast Lifter, as "one of the world's largest." Another article called the barge "gargantuan." (Photo, American Bridge-Fluor Enterprises)

Impressive, yes, but with less than two thousand tons of lifting capacity, that barge isn't colossal either ... not when lined up against the much bigger ones used in the offshore oil and gas business, like the Saipem 7000. With the booms working in tandem, the S-7000 can lift 14,000 tons. 

So: what human-made object counts as a modern-day colossus? Ideas are welcome but in the meantime, how about the New Safe Containment, a giant arched shelter under construction near the wreck of Chernobyl Reactor 4. Once complete, it will cover the reactor and house a unique, remotely-operated bridge crane (Image, Wikimedia commons):

Here's an aerial image from Bing Maps. The Arch is the shiny object on the left side.

 

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* Awe-inspiring, if exaggerated. The real Colossus of Rhodes statue was probably a hundred feet high on its pedestal, which was huge for the time, but it didn't straddle the harbor mouth, as often illustrated.

Tales of the Copter: Last Man on the Ocean Express

Another story from The God Machine:

Commander John M. Lewis of the U.S. Coast Guard got the distress call at 8:00 p.m. on April 15, 1976, while at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station.

Ocean Express had been under tow when a gale came up but one of the tugs had been disabled, the others had released their lines under command from the barge, and now the rig was listing and about to sink.

Ocean Express was a “jackup” rig, meaning that it had three giant steel legs, something like crane booms (illustration, USCG investigative report).

 

The 312-foot-long legs had been raised from the sea floor and now towered high over the rig. These towers would loom in the darkness, like claws, for any aircraft attempting to get close.

Lewis flew his Sikorsky HH-52, a single-engine helicopter optimized for open-water rescue, to the site 40 miles east of the Gulf Coast. Here's what it looks like in floating mode (Photo, Wikimedia Commons):

Just one man, Pete Vandicraft, the Barge Mover, was still on board.

Lewis made slow orbits  in the darkness, calculating his odds of getting in and out. Then he made two attempts to get a rescue basket within Vandicraft’s reach, each time having to dodge the three legs, which shifted as the rig slowly rolled over to a 45-degree angle. Salt spray from the storm waves blew into the helicopter. Capt. H.B. Thorsen, piloting another USCG helicopter, turned on his spotlight.

Lewis’s helicopter went out of sight in the spray and Thorsen thought the ocean had claimed it. The odds of survival were slim; this was an extraordinarily hazardous situation given the steelwork, turbulence from the gale, and a constantly tilting reference frame.

The scene may have called to mind the legendary credo of the United States Life-Saving Service, in the days of wooden lifeboats: “The regulations say you have to go out; they don’t say you have to come back.”

But Lewis's HH-52 appeared out of the spray like a surfacing submarine. Witnesses said they had never seen anything like it. On his third attempt, Lewis came away with Vandicraft in the rescue basket.

 

In departing Lewis used his controls like so: he pulled the collective lever up to gain altitude, he pushed the anti-torque pedals to maintain his direction as the main rotor dug in, and he nudged the cyclic stick to move horizontally away from the wreck.

 

“Piece of cake,” as pilots like to say. The rig sank thirty seconds later.

Hard landing, Wrong airport? Dial "AOG"

Headlines a week ago about the Southwest B-737 that landed at the wrong airport, six miles from the intended destination of Branson International. Passengers reported energetic braking to avoid running off the end, which would have sent the plane down a bluff and onto US-65 highway. The next day, after safety checks (hard braking can cause heat damage), and after police stopped traffic on the highway, the Boeing made an uneventful departure.  

Here's a photo of mechanics checking the landing gear (Photo: Valery Mosley, Springfield News-Leader for the AP):

The industry name for such work is AOG, short for Aircraft on Ground. In case of damage, AOG work requires a team of mechanics and engineers, and a depot that ships replacement parts on short notice.

One of the most dramatic AOG incidents in recent memory was the mistaken landing in 1997 of a Saudia Airlines B-747 at India's Tambaram Air Station, near Madras. The 747, which was scheduled to land at Chennai International, was carrying 330 passengers and their luggage and came to a halt with little room to spare (photo, Indian Express):

The airstrip in question was only for use by light training aircraft, and about 4,500 feet long. All the performance charts said Tambaram's runway was half that needed for a survivable takeoff. What to do?

During four days of intense and unhappy discussions between the airline and the Indian Air Force, which tallied damage and suspected espionage, technicians from Boeing and Saudia met at the scene. Options included: (1) pull the wings off and tow the fuselage to Chennai, where it would be further disassembled and flown in cargo jets to the Boeing factory; (2) abandon the airliner at the air base; or (3) fly it out in one piece.

The last would entail a good deal of risk, but experts determined that if the AOG team removed the air conditioning units, all passenger seats, and every gallon of fuel not needed for the short hop to Chennai, the plane could get off the ground.

And it worked. Saudia brought in its best pilot for the job -- Capt. Jam Joom -- waited for a strong headwind, and took off without incident (AFP article via Google News):

 

In Praise of Planes

Fracture planes, that is. Here's a low-res, Sketchbook-edited version of a photo I took earlier this winter. I added an inset offering a closeup of the detail:

 

In the obscure niche that is ice-photography, reflection is as important as refraction, and fracture planes can contribute a lot to the former.

A large chunk of ice always fractures with a loud crack when its surface temperature rises suddenly, but the fracture plane differs. From what I can tell the variables include the temperature gradients, the thickness of the ice slab, the chemistry of the water, and the air temperature at which the ice formed.

Most of the fracture planes I see are striated and rough like the one above. But sometimes the fracture has a checkerboard pattern:

More rarely the fracture planes are as smooth as a half-silvered mirror, but with unique and random details such as the yellow pattern below: