Poetry as Disaster Literature

Can poetry and disaster lessons go together? This genre would fill a rather small shelf, but one of my favorites is Rudyard Kipling's Ballad of the Bolivar (1892). Upon first reading, it sounds like a basic adventure story: a ship goes out and is trapped in a storm. The men barely get their cargo to port, all the while cursing their old bucket of bolts. There's more to it, but it's not obvious to the modern eye, given Kipling's use of irony and arcane nautical terms. What was happening here? I'll offer some details on the other side. For now, enjoy his lyrical skills:

Ballad of the Bolivar, by Rudyard Kipling

Seven men from all the world, back to Docks again,
Rolling down the Ratcliffe Road drunk and raising Cain:
Give the girls another drink 'fore we sign away--
We that took the 'Bolivar' out across the Bay!

We put out from Sunderland loaded down with rails;
We put back to Sunderland 'cause our cargo shifted;
We put out from Sunderland--met the winter gales--
Seven days and seven nights to the Start we drifted.

Racketing her rivets loose, smoke-stack white as snow,
All the coals adrift a deck, half the rails below
Leaking like a lobster-pot, steering like a dray--
Out we took the 'Bolivar,' out across the Bay!

One by one the Lights came up, winked and let us by;
Mile by mile we waddled on, coal and fo'c'sle short;
Met a blow that laid us down, heard a bulkhead fly;
Left The Wolf behind us with a two-foot list to port.

Trailing like a wounded duck, working out her soul;
Clanging like a smithy-shop after every roll;
Just a funnel and a mast lurching through the spray--
So we threshed the 'Bolivar' out across the Bay!

Felt her hog and felt her sag, betted when she'd break;
Wondered every time she raced if she'd stand the shock;
Heard the seas like drunken men pounding at her strake;
Hoped the Lord 'ud keep his thumb on the plummer-block.

Banged against the iron decks, bilges choked with coal;
Flayed and frozen foot and hand, sick of heart and soul;
'Last we prayed she'd buck herself into Judgment Day--
Hi! we cursed the 'Bolivar' knocking round the Bay!

Oh! her nose flung up to sky, groaning to be still--
Up and down and back we went, never time for breath;
Then the money paid at Lloyd's caught her by the heel,
And the stars ran round and round dancin' at our death.

Aching for an hour's sleep, dozing off between;
Heard the rotten rivets draw when she took it green;
Watched the compass chase its tail like a cat at play--
That was on the 'Bolivar,' south across the Bay.

Once we saw between the squalls, lyin' head to swell--
Mad with work and weariness, wishin' they was we--
Some damned Liner's lights go by like a grand hotel;
Cheered her from the 'Bolivar,' swampin' in the sea.

Then a greyback cleared us out, then the skipper laughed;
'Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell--rig the winches aft!
'Yoke the kicking rudder-head--get her under way!'
So we steered her, pulley-haul, out across the Bay!

Just a pack o' rotten plates puttied up with tar,
In we came, an' time enough 'cross Bilbao Bar.
Overloaded, undermanned, meant to founder, we
Euchred God Almighty's storm, bluffed the Eternal Sea!

Seven men from all the world, back to town again,
Rollin' down the Ratcliffe Road drunk and raising Cain:
Seven men from out of Hell. Ain't the owners gay,
'Cause we took the 'Bolivar' safe across the Bay?

It's a story of men and machines persisting against great odds, and has the spirit of the "Flight of the Phoenix" movie (the original one, anyway). To summarize: the owners had insured the old steamer and sent it out in bad shape under the worst conditions, hoping it would sink so they could collect on the policy from Lloyd's. But the crew (much smaller than it should have been for a tramp steamer) keeps it afloat, causing consternation among the owners upon its arrival in Spain.

The voyage starts in Sunderland, on the northeast tip of England. At the time it was a major shipbuilding center. The ship heads south, then across the Bay of Biscay to Bilbao on Spain's north coast, near Portugal. The season is winter, the worst time to cross the bay because of storms that arrive unhindered off the North Atlantic.

Refrain: this tramp steamer is woefully undermanned. A crew of 20-30 would be more like it.

First stanza: the Bolivar is cursed with carrying one of the most dangerous cargoes of the era, steel rails. Steel rails are massive and slippery, and therefore tend to break loose from their fastenings in a storm. Then they try to bash their way out of the hull. I gave an example of this in Chapter 12 of Inviting Disaster: in 1886 five ships left Liverpool in one week, carrying steel beams and rails, westbound across the Atlantic. Three sunk on the way. In this stanza, the crew realizes their danger in time and returns to Sunderland to rework the fastenings.

Second stanza: Seawater is coming through the riveted joints and the weather deck. Ships often carried extra steam coal on the deck in burlap bags or in temporary wooden bunkers, and this is coming loose. The smokestack is turning white, either from frozen spray or salt crust.

Third stanza: After seven days the ship is clearing the lighthouses on the southern tip of England. The Wolf is Wolf Rock Lighthouse at Land's End, in Cornwall. The Start" is Start Point. It's now exposed to the gales on the starboard beam, so it is leaning to the left. "Coal and fo'c'sle short" means that the ship is moving so slowly it's running low on coal. It's also short of deckhands to cope with the emergency.

Fourth stanza: Now the weather deck can't be seen for the foam and spray.

Fifth stanza: "Wondered every time she raced if she'd stand the shock:" this refers to a general problem for steamships in storms. The propeller speeds up as the stern comes out of the water, then slows abruptly as it re-enters the water. This puts great stress on the propeller shaft and the journal bearings that carry the shaft from the engine room to the stern gland, unless the engineer backs off the throttle with every roll. The problem is described in Farley Mowat's classic book about deep sea salvage, Grey Seas Under. "Plummer block" is one of those bearings. To keep a thumb on the block is to make sure it's not vibrating or overheating.

Sixth stanza: "Bilges choked with coal" means that coal dust is about to foul the intakes of the bilge pumps. If not cleaned the pumps will fail and the ship will get lower in the water with every hour.

Seventh stanza: A reference to the owners' insurance policy at Lloyd's of London. "Felt her hog and felt her sag" means that the ship is flexing with every wave, the midships section rising one moment and sagging the next.

Eighth stanza: "Shipping green:" Now the ship is taking waves over the bow and starboard rails. It's so deep over the deck that the water is green, rather than spray or foam.

Ninth stanza: a salute to a big liner that is having no trouble handling the weather.

Tenth stanza: The chains that connect the steam engine to the rudder head have broken under the impact of the waves, and the crew has to jury rig the rudder with block and tackle. Having control over the ship's heading is essential to staying afloat in such a storm.

Eleventh stanza: Reference to the gambling game called euchre.

Closing refrain: the men have made it back to Sunderland, and are celebrating in the bars of Ratcliffe Road. Ironically, the men cursed the ship but it brought them to shore, against all odds.

My rating: two thumbs up, for technical accuracy and great storytelling. More details are available at the Kipling Society, here.

Pipe Bursting, and San Bruno

Several articles have mentioned the NTSB's interest in sewer work done in 2008 at the intersection where Line 132 blew up.

The work included a method called "pipe bursting," which replaced an old six-inch sewer pipe with a new ten-inch pipe, without having to dig a trench for the job. The news mentioned a 2001 study for the Corps of Engineers on the uses of, and cautions about, pipe bursting. You can find that study here.

The word “bursting” might suggest underground blasting but it's just a slow, chugging mole-like machine that uses power from the surface, and causes the ground to vibrate with each cycle as it scoots along. We don't know all the details in San Bruno, but normally pipe bursting works like this, typically over spans of 300-400 feet (the distance between manholes). Say there's an old sewer pipe that's become too leaky to tolerate, and it's made of sections of vitreous clay connected with pitch at each joint. Such pipe is relatively strong but brittle.

Workers feed a torpedo-like “bursting head” in one end of the old pipe. Using hydraulic or air power, or else by being dragged from the other end, the bursting head proceeds down the old pipe, breaking it into little pieces as it goes and forcing the fragments into the soil surrounding the pipe. It also drags new pipe behind it, typically medium-density or high-density polyethylene. Remarkably, the new pipe can be bigger than the old pipe since the bursting head is powerful enough to shove aside the adjoining soil. (Of course the shifted soil has to go somewhere -- more on that below.)

Unless the old pipe has major sags or deviations in it, or is encased in concrete, the bursting head usually has no trouble following the old pipe and emerging at the next manhole, ready for another leg.

Bursting is one modern method of replacing old pipe: others include "pipe eating," "pipe reaming," and "pipe ejection." All these underground construction methods avoid having to scoop out a trench the length of the pipe run. Old-fashioned trenching work is very labor intensive, since most utility corridors also host other pipes running nearby that have to be protected from damage.

To visualize this, imagine a hallway: put in eight pipes and conduits of different sizes and ages; fill the hallway with sand and gravel; add a few decades of leaks, corrosion, and vibration to compact the soil, create voids, and generally shift things around. Now imagine having to empty that hallway and expose all the pipes without breaking anything ... like a gas line or a buried high-voltage line. There's no way to finish the job without hiring lots of guys to wield shovels in places too tight for backhoes, and to install temporary bracing.

Trenching also poses a collapse risk to workers and it's sure to mess up traffic on the street above. For major projects full-scale excavation is hard to avoid, but for a city looking to fix up portions of its buried infrastructure fast and affordably, “underground construction” methods can be be very attractive.

But every cloud comes with a dark lining, or at least a gray one. The old pipe fragments don't go far away and they can cause problems for the new pipe, by creating stress-concentration points. If the pipe to be replaced lies near the surface or is in a rock trench, the only place for the shifted soil to go is upward so the ground can bulge upwards as the bursting head chugs along. Think of the ridges of soil that moles or gophers make in one's lawn.

And pipe bursting can put stress on adjacent underground lines in some cases, which is one hypothesis for the Line 132 catastrophe. Guidelines say that – assuming average conditions – pipe bursting shouldn't cause damage to other pipes if the other pipes are two, preferably three, diameters away. That's just a rule of thumb, of course, and doesn't take into account the strength of the other pipe or soil conditions. Was there this much separation here? Sometimes that's hard for an underground-construction crew to know, because as-builts often differ substantially from construction blueprints. If remote-sensing methods were used to check this out in 2008, there might be electronic records from that work.

So we don't know at this point whether there was plenty of separation, or too little. We have read that the sewer line installed in 2008 was 10 inches across, so that would indicate a minimum safe separation of around two feet.

As the NTSB pointed out, even if pipe bursting did play a role there would have had to have been other contributing causes, since the sewer work happened two years before Line 132 blew apart. Other possible causes being considered are metal corrosion from liquids and/or bacteria, delayed repairs by PG&E, the fact that this line was too bendy for the use of diagnostic pigs, modifications to the gas line after construction, and temporary overpressure.

From Derail to Re-rail

A Burlington Northern Santa Fe coal train derailed in June near where I live so I went over to watch the response. Basically, a contractor works around the clock until the line is provisionally open. Delays on a main line are very disruptive, costing a railroad tens of thousands of dollars per hour, so derailment contractors are well paid.

Seventeen cars overturned or went off the rails on a Wednesday morning, ripping up a section of rail and sending it through the wall of an office building. The woman who normally uses that space was elsewhere at the moment -- a good thing.

The line was open for slow-speed traffic two days later. Reflecting on the many stops and starts at the Deepwater Horizon disaster site, it struck me how this company, Hulcher Services, knew what it needed to do and brought, or hired, everything it needed. There were no wasted motions and no press packets on how many people or machines were at work. They just worked.

The process works like this: after a wreck, the railroad calls Hulcher's HQ in Denton, Texas. HQ dispatches the nearest Hulcher crews. In this case the closest was Hudson, Wisconsin. Hulcher keeps its men on standby, something like firefighters, and guarantees to have its semis rolling in an hour.

First job for Hulcher: get the site organized. Hulcher hires extra heavy equipment as needed, trackhoes in this case. The wreckmaster notes which cars or engines are off the rails; how many of these are undamaged enough to use again, and how many have to be scrapped. This particular wreck involved a unit train of aluminum hopper cars, hauling 15,000 tons of Western coal. It was bound for Superior, Wisconsin.

Second job: drag wreckage off to the side and load up scattered freight. In this case, trackloaders and vacuum trucks moved heaps of coal into rear-dump semis. I'd guess a thousand tons of coal was on the ground.

Third: re-rail undamaged cars that have gone off at low speed, using side-boom tractors that can lift 50-80 tons short distances. A side-boom tractor features a compact boom and hook on one side, and a massive, hydraulically extendable counterweight on the other side. This keeps the machine from tipping. The side-booms substitute for the "big hook," which is railroad lingo for a wrecking crane. Hooks offered a lot of lifting power but could only operate from a track, so they were cumbersome and slow, and needed a lot of manpower to handle the rigging and lay temporary track.

Fourth: pick up damaged cars and engines and haul them off the right of way. Four side-booms working in close coordination can pick up a locomotive and set it back on the rails. Recovering locomotives is particularly challenging when a train has gone off the rails into a ravine, and crews have to work off a steep slope or a trestle.

Fifth: Using ballast brought in by the railroad, regrade the right of way and install sections of temporary panel track. Panel track comes in pre-assembled sections of rail and ties, like in a Lionel set, but forty feet long. It arrives stacked on a flatcar. Panel track can be a bit uneven but it gets low-speed traffic moving.

Since Hulcher is an emergency service, the railroad crews take over at this point, spending days or weeks to rehab the area. In August, BNSF said the cause was a track misalignment caused by summer heat.

Rescue Drilling, the Outer Limits

We're waiting for more news about the “Plan C” drilling rig moved to the San Jose Mine in Chile. The rig, which is normally used for oil and gas work, is owned by Precision Drilling, based in Calgary. The big rig will chew a hole 35 inches wide and 2,300 feet deep. If the bit doesn't run into a major fault or get stuck in mine debris along the way, and if Plans A and B don't get there first, it could open an escape route well before December. At that point a man-cage would be lowered on a wire rope to pull the men up one at a time.

This may sound like a whopping big borehole, and it is, but there have been much bigger and deeper ones. A pioneer in the field was Fenix & Scisson, now part of PB Energy Storage.

Beginning in the early 1950s it excavated deep rock caverns for compressed gas storage, typically located near pipeline hubs and refineries. Fenix used a drill rig to make a vertical hole that was hundreds of feet deep but just wide enough for a man to wield a rock drill. While suspended in this chimney, a few dozen feet off the bottom, he drilled and blasted enough rock to clear out a small cavern, with the muck going into the bottom of the borehole. (Yes, he was hauled out of range each time a shot was fired ...) Once the cavern was roomy enough, Fenix lowered a small front-end loader in pieces. Workers reassembled it and went to work, hollowing out caverns as big as football stadiums.

Fenix bored a really big hole to prepare for the Atomic Energy Commission's Cannikin underground nuclear test on Amchitka Island in 1971. Fenix's hole (before the concrete liner) was a vertigo-inducing 90 inches across and 5,875 feet deep. At an approximate yield of 5 megatons, Cannikin was the biggest underground shot ever fired in the US. Here's a link to snips of ground-wave effects from an AEC video on YouTube.

So Rescue Plans A-C at the San Jose Mine are not pushing the margin in either size or depth.

But they are trying to move fast because 33 men have already been down there six weeks. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we know from other trapped-miner incidents that even over shorter periods, the men can suffer from erratic behavior and severe depression, and a few have attempted suicide. You may have read recent reports that some of the miners were still driving around in mine vehicles, despite orders. I'm trusting that the foreman Luis Urzúa, who seems quite capable, has put any explosives out of reach.

Selling the Nuclear Nightmare

In a waiting room, looking through the October 2010 issue of Pop Sci.

One article was about people selling nuclear-free hideaways, such as space in the "Terra Vivos" line of underground retreats. One development so described is being remodeled from a bomb-resistant AT&T emergency operations center near Barstow, CA, dating to 1965. Amenities will include a gamma ray detector to activate shutters that will close the ventilation system. This was installed to detect H-bomb bursts up to 100 miles away. Projected price: $50,000 for adults, $25,000 for kids. Other companies named were Survival Condos (Kansas) and Hardened Structures (Colorado).

This talk of havoc in the homeland reminded me of one of the more thought-provoking factoids I've come across in 31 years of nonfiction writing. This was while researching an article for Air&Space on the Nike anti-aircraft missile system. The full text is reproduced here as a PDF. These smallish US Army bases ringed major cities and industrial complexes, so as to fight off Soviet bombers. The initial missiles were explosive-tipped Nike Ajax models, and the second generation were nuclear-tipped Nike Hercules. The latter had an adjustable warhead. Some were good for up to 40 kilotons.

Publicly, the story was that if they were ever used, the Nike Hercules fireball would occur at stratospheric altitudes, so the public would not be threatened by our defense measures. That seemed to make sense, given that the bombers we saw in the newsreels were all flying high and leaving contrails.

The reality could have been rather grim, and so was not part of the civics lesson. The reason is this: An enemy pilot was trained to drop as low as possible during the final bomb run, since that gave him a reasonable chance of evading our radar. If he had penetrated this far, one of the few ways for us to stop him from dropping a monstrously large H-bomb -- perhaps the only way -- was for the Army to launch a Nike atomic warhead to bring him down, down low, even if it meant taking out a suburb too. From my article:

In the event of a real attack, the Nike rules of engagement allowed officers considerable freedom of action. According to Dale Nichols, a commander could fire missiles without additional authorization from the AADCP if he saw evidence of hostile nuclear explosions, if the base was under direct attack, or if the radar track of an unidentified airplane showed that it met something called the 'pop-up criteria.'

'That means you exceed Mach 2 and you climb from 2,000 feet to 15,000 feet in less than three minutes,' Nichols says. Flying like that would indicate that an attacker had slipped under the radar screen and was about to loft a nuclear bomb toward the target, then make a climbing turn and flee. Shooting under those conditions was entirely possible, says Nichols, but only if the missiles were up at the time, and they hardly ever were. If a Hercules was launched, the fervent hope was that radiation from its blast would destroy all bombs, including those falling from an enemy aircraft's wreckage. Any fireballs created by the Nike warhead's explosion were supposed to occur tens of thousands of feet up. You didn't want to have the fireball touch the ground,' says Frank Evans; such contact would create a mushroom cloud of radioactive fallout.

'But there might be decisions to make, say if you had a lot of Russian bombers coming in, not just a couple. You might say "To hell with it" and accept some fallout. That's if you knew absolutely it was Russians and they had 25 megatons on board.' The awful decision to push a button overriding the 'minimum burst altitude' setting and triggering a nuclear fireball low enough to scorch American soil would have been the missile commander's alone to make.

NTSB on the case

Mentioned the National Transportation Safety Board on the ground at San Bruno. The board is there because the disaster involved a transportation system. The National Transportation Safety Board is not your conventional bureaucracy. It doesn't promote industries and it can't regulate them either. It's strictly there to make investigations on a wide range of public transportation incidents, then issue preliminary reports and final findings on probable cause. It also maintains a list of the most pressing safety issues. Here's a recent piece on the need for professionalism among regional carriers, highlighted by the NTSB and others. The Board can bring attention, but not force action. Sometimes the lack of an industry or congressional response is frustrating. But I'm glad the NTSB is on the job and it's a model for other nations.

The Chemical Safety Board has a similar mission when it comes to all kinds of plants that process reactive chemicals, not just refineries but factories.

A good description of the NTSB's process is in Bill Adair's book, Mystery of Flight 427, Inside a Crash Investigation. Here's a summary of his book. It's about how investigators puzzled out a mechanical flaw in the rudder actuator that caused a Boeing 737-3B7 to crash six miles from the Pittsburgh, PA airport in 1994.

While investigators head for the site of a disaster as quickly as they can (they keep "go bags" packed and ready) a complex investigation takes time. A year to two years is common, depending on workload and complexity. The principal parties in a major incident, which can be the airplane manufacturer and the pilots' union in the case of an airliner crash, designate representatives to participate in meetings and to review the evidence. Sometimes evidence takes months to locate, such as an engine part that comes off a plane and lands in in a cornfield short of a crash site.

While investigators do have to form hypotheses along the way, as they work toward a report to the board, their ethic is to keep an open mind and let the facts set the course. This can be tough because sometimes key parties get very nervous about what a rigorous investigation might turn up.

Still we can be confident in the board's neutrality. At one time it was connected to the Department of Transportation, but Congress cut those ties in 1975.

The board finishes its work with a "probable cause" finding. Sometimes there is a public hearing. Reporters benefit from the stacks of reports issued and available on the Net. And I think the board's work also benefits from the press's involvement, including the investigative pieces.

I had the chance to meet now-vice chairman Christopher Hart when we were presenting to the Chemical Safety Board staff and members. I was impressed. His specialty when an assistant administrator for system safety with the FAA was the promotion of statistical methods to pick up precursors well before they turn into failures: it's called GAIN, for Global Aviation Information Network. GAIN uses principles lined out by operational research in World War II, which improved military tactics with statistical analysis.

Here's a link to proceedings in 2003 on close-call analysis to improve railroad safety -- a summary of Chris Hart's talk on the application of GAIN principles starts on page 27.

What makes gas so smelly?

There have been neighborhood reports of gas smells in the weeks before the San Bruno explosion. Unknown at this time is whether such a smell was a precursor of the gas line break.

NTSB vice chair Chris Hart mentioned at a press conference referenced in the LA Times online that not all transmission lines for gas are required to have the odorant added beforehand.

Odorant is there mainly to flag leaks in the distribution lines. As far as I know the utilities are responsible for adding it, not pumping stations upstream. But the possibility that the pipeline gas was odorized and a leak was missed needs to be checked out. PG&E may well have had other precursors that the line (built in the 1950s) needed attention.

The odorant is commonly methanethiol (aka methyl mercaptan), smelly down to a few parts per billion. Since most natural gas as extracted is odorless -- one exception is sour gas, from hydrogen sulfide -- the thiols help people detect gas leaks before the cloud a flammable or explosive mixture with air.

A 1937 explosion caused by leaking, un-odorized raw gas at a public school in New London, Texas, helped firm up the practice of adding odorants to gas. This blast, which killed almost 300 people, launched the news career of Walter Cronkite.

Many biological processes produce methanethiol, such as the human digestion of broccoli. Another is the decomposition of algae. During WWI, there was a crash effort to obtain phosphates by harvesting and digesting giant bladder kelp off the California coast. The breakdown of kelp produced a smell so atrocious that one worker called it "enough to drive a dog off a gut wagon." Colorful expression! A gut wagon was an operation that sold outdated, funky sandwiches to workers during lunch breaks.