Yet rust sneaks below the radar. Because it’s more sluggish than hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, blizzards, and floods, rust ranks dead last in drama. There’s no rust channel. But rust is costlier than all other natural disasters combined, amounting to 3 percent of GDP, or $437 billion annually, more than the GDP of Sweden. That averages out to about $1500 per person every year. It’s more if you live in Ohio, more if you own a boat like Syzygy, much more if you command an aircraft carrier.
Nevertheless, rust is glossed over more than it’s taught, because neither engineering students nor professors are drawn to it. It’s just not sexy. John Scully, the editor of the journal Corrosion, told me corrosion gets no respect. “It’s like saying you work in mold or something,” he said. Ray Taylor, who runs the National Corrosion Center, an interdisciplinary agglomeration at Texas A&M that sounds bigger than it is, was more blunt. “We’re sort of the wart on the ass of the pig,” he said. A former rust industry executive said he and his colleagues always felt like the Rodney Dangerfields of the engineering community.
Sensing as much, we avoid the word. Residents of Rust, California, changed the town’s name, a century ago, to El Cerrito. Politicians, too, know better than to mention rust. Though a few presidents have mentioned infrastructure and maintenance, none has mentioned corrosion or rust in a State of the Union address. President Obama has, between 2011 and 2013, called America’s infrastructure failing, crumbling, aging, deteriorating, and deficient—but he didn’t call it rusty. That’s as close as a president has come to uttering the word. Like a condition between high cholesterol and hemorrhoids, rust is a nuisance that we’d prefer not to deal with, and certainly not talk about in public. Confidentially, industry representatives inquire with Luz Marina Calle, the director of the Corrosion Technology Laboratory at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, regarding their rust woes. Privately, Americans call John Carmona, the proprietor of the Rust Store, and ask for advice. Thanks to New York Times political columnist David Brooks, the threat of moral corrosion instills more fear than the threat of physical corrosion. But from those who ascribe no shame to talking about rust, stories emerge in the manner of scars and broken bones. People talk about the bottoms of their wells, their barbecue grills, their bicycle chains. They invoke a Neil Young line. Most often, stories begin with, “Oh man, I once had this car . . .” Was it, perhaps, a Ford?
As if to mask our reticence and apparent helplessness, most of us civilians fight rust like sailors. We attack with words. We’re attacking metal with Rust Fighter, Rust Destroyer, Rust Killer, Rust Bandit; garrisoning with Rust Defender, Rust-Shield, Rust Guard; using weapons like Rust Bomb, RustBlast, Corrosion Grenade, and Rust Bullet—the latter of which is available in a Rapid Fire model or in a Six Shooter Combo Pack. The products suggest that in our reaction we’re putting up a good fight. But flight also works. Consider a 1960s newspaper ad for United Airlines. It said, “Prevent Rust. Periodic application of our Sunbird jets keeps the rust off your golf game, clubs, and you. United Sunbirds nonstop it to San Diego . . . Where the skies are not cloudy all day.”
Golf clubs in San Diego still rust, as do ships at the naval base there. Jets in Tucson, Arizona, still rust, as do hammers in Oymyakon, Siberia, but five hundred times slower than they do at Punta Galeta, Panama.3 This, according to measurements compiled by corrosion consultant extraordinaire Robert Baboian in the NACE Corrosion Engineer’s Reference Book. Some fifteen thousand Americans working in corrosion have reason to consult this text. They range from linear and serious and introverted to scattered and rebellious and distractably sociable. Very few of them think of themselves as rust people. They work in “integrity management,” or as coatings specialists, or as engineers or chemists. Reclusive or not, they’re humble about their work. Many, I found, possess a keen awareness of their role in society, referring to themselves as members of the three “rusketeers” or of rust’s three amigos. Because the world of rust is pretty small, most know each other. When tank cars full of chlorine spill, for example, the three amigos collaborate.
Most corrosion engineers are men. In my rough estimation, something like two thirds of these rust guys are mustachioed. I have a two-part theory about it. I suspect that (1) such men recognize that fighting the growth of hair on their upper lips is futile, and that trimming, combing, and maintaining makes much more sense; and that (2) such men, many of them technically minded engineers who work within strict bounds, have few other artistic outlets. Even Baboian, back in the seventies, had a mustache. They talk about galling, spalling, necking, and jacking; holidays, tubercles, and tubulars; pigs, squids, and perfect ends. About rust, one wrote a decent poem, but not one has yet devised a decent joke. Many have unique perspectives. “You’re gonna be wrong a lot in corrosion,” one, in Alaska, told me. “You’re gonna think you have it pegged down, but you’ll get nailed in the ass. It’s a little adventure as you go along.”
Fighting rust is more than adventurous. Often it’s scandalous. For those trying to understand rust, prevent rust, detect rust, eliminate rust, yield to rust, find beauty in rust, capitalize on rust, raise awareness of rust, and teach about rust, work is riddled with scams, lawsuits, turf battles, and unwelcome oversight. Explosions, collisions, arrests, threats, and insults abound. So does war: rust and war have a long, tangled history, and together led to many fixtures of modern society. In addition to Big Auto, the following stories include Big Oil, whose products go toward Big Plastic and, in turn, Big Paint. A great deal of corrosion work entails studying how well paint sticks: to the Statue of Liberty, to the inside of a can, to the outside of a pipe, to the hull of a ship, to the hood of a Ford. The stories even include Hollywood and Big Tobacco. As the late senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, who on a warm March day in 1967 introduced the legislation that granted federal oversight of pipelines, would have said: they include all of the Big Boys.
Much of what follows explores our posture toward maintenance, and in that regard, reveals our humility (or lack thereof), willingness to compromise, and fundamental awareness. Rust represents the disordering of the modern, and it reveals many of our vices: greed, pride, arrogance, impatience, and sloth. It reveals the potency of our foresight, the weakness of our hubris, our grasp of risk, and our understanding of the role we fill in the world. What a predicament! Thus far, in the affairs of man and metal, our efforts have ranged from pathetic to ingenious, political to secretive. Of the many people I spoke to about rust, only one, an advisor to many federal science agencies named Alan Moghissi, saw rust as an opportunity. He imagined it could become as big as the environmental movement of the 1970s.
So easy to ignore, rust threatens our health, safety, security, environment, and future, and nearly got away with destroying our national symbol of liberty. Surrounded by stainless steel scissors, sinks, spoons, stoves, and escalator treads, we take nonrusting steel for granted—though it’s only a century old. Expecting solutions, we disregard the management that most metals require. Can’t we create a rust-free world?
A rust-free world would be a world without metal. In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman cleverly illustrates the short-lived nature of metalworks. After only twenty years sans humans, he writes, unabated corrosion would destroy many of the train bridges on Manhattan’s East Side; after a few hundred years all of New York’s bridges would fail; a few thousand years from now the only intact structures would be those deep underground; and seven million years from now vestiges of Mount Rushmore would be all that’s left to show that we’d once been here. Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, writes that, much to our dismay, massive concrete dams—millions of cubic yards’ worth—may be what we end up leaving for future archaeologists to ponder. I like to think that they’ll consider those dams the same way we consider the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Great Pyramid of Cholula, the Great Wall of China, and the Parthenon. Better yet, I like to imagine them finding the granite foundation on Liberty Island, the statue above long since v
anished, wondering, perhaps, if people once tried to dam the Hudson.
Like radioactive elements, most metals—the ones we rely on—have a half-life. But we don’t recognize it. “We seem not at all resigned to the idea of major engineering structures having the same mortality as we,” Henry Petroski writes in the classic To Engineer Is Human. “Somehow, as adults who forget their childhood, we expect our constructions to have evolved into monuments, not into mistakes. It is as if engineers, and nonengineers alike, being human, want their creations to be superhuman. And that may not seem to be an unrealistic aspiration, for the flesh and bone of steel and stone can seem immortal when compared with the likes of man.”
If most of America’s bridges, ships, cars, pipelines, and so on don’t bring to mind mortality, surely one structure in the middle of Pittsburgh does. It’s the U.S. Steel tower and eerily, almost menacingly, it looms above the city. It was built in 1970 of U.S. Steel’s latest stuff: a “weathering steel” called Cor-Ten that works like stainless steel but develops a brown patina. A protective layer of rust. As the steel weathered, the brown developed on more than just the building. Embarrassing the hell out of U.S. Steel, the building stained the sidewalks below, until they had a distinct reddish tinge a block in all directions. The sidewalks have since been cleaned, and the building has since darkened into a hue best described as Darth Vader Lite. It looks dead. The psychology building at Cornell is made of the same stuff. Students at Big Red call it Old Rusty.
* * *
1. Because corrosion is exothermic, the skin of a corroding Ford becomes hotter than the metal underlying it, and this thermal gradient generates local stress called electrostriction. Technically, with the right tools, you really could hear it.
2. Oddly enough, iron retains a trustworthy metaphoric reputation: an iron will, an iron fist, an iron hand, a mind like a steel trap. As for the Man of Steel, who needs Kryptonite when saltwater will do the trick?
3. Punta Galeta, Panama, wet six days a week, holds the world’s highest corrosion rates for steel, zinc, and copper, and is conveniently located at the Caribbean entrance to the Panama Canal. For aluminum, though, the most threatening place in the world is Auby, France.
1
A HIGH-MAINTENANCE LADY
On Saturday, May 10, 1980, her caretaker slept in. David Moffitt awoke around eight o’clock and put on civilian clothes. He had a cup of coffee, then went out to the garden on the south side of his brick house, on Liberty Island, and started pulling weeds. A trained floriculturist who’d worked on Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification efforts in Washington, DC, he had a spectacular vegetable garden. As the superintendent of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, he also had a spectacular backyard. As usual for a day off, he planned to do a little bit of gardening before going to Manhattan with his wife and three kids, to go shopping in the city or bike riding in Central Park. It was a clear day, about 50 degrees, with a steady light wind out of the southwest. Moffitt was on his knees, pruning roses, a couple of hours later, when Mike Tennent, his chief ranger, ran up and told him that two guys were climbing the outside of the statue. That was a first. Moffitt looked up, focused his hazel eyes, and confirmed the claim. So much for his day off.
It was about 150 yards from Moffitt’s house to the statue, and on the walk there, he could hear visitors yelling from the base of the pedestal up at the climbers. “Assholes!” they yelled. “Faggots!” Their visits were being interrupted, and they objected, because they knew the situation was unlikely to end in their favor. Moffitt was already as mad as the visitors, but not for the same reason. He thought the climbers were desecrating the statue, and probably damaging it. Moffitt, who was forty-one, with thick dark brown hair and a Houston accent, had gotten the job—considered a hardship assignment on account of the isolation—because of his good track record with maintenance. The island, and the statue, had fallen into disrepair; the National Park Service recognized that its maintenance programs were wholly deficient. Moffitt was the first full-time caretaker in a dozen years.
Halfway to the statue, Moffitt stopped, and watched the climbers unfurl a banner. Liberty Was Framed, it said in bold red letters, above Free Geronimo Pratt. Until then, he’d figured the climbers were just pranksters. Now, though he didn’t know who Geronimo Pratt was, he knew the duo were protesters. And he knew how to resolve the situation. The NYPD had a team skilled at removing people from high places—he’d seen footage on TV—and he would call them. So he turned around, walked to his office, and ordered the island evacuated. Inside the statue, an announcement blared over its PA system requesting that visitors proceed to the dock area due to an operational problem. In his office, Moffitt then called the National Park Service Regional Director’s Office in Boston. He’d done this a few times before, and was destined to do it many more times again.
On his watch, Puerto Rican nationals had occupied the statue for most of a day, and a handful of Iranian students had chained themselves to the statue, protesting America’s treatment of the Shah. On his watch, he dealt with about ten bomb threats a year. Before his time, the statue had been the site for college kids protesting President Richard Nixon, veterans protesting Vietnam, the American Revolutionary Students Brigade protesting the Iranian government, and the mayor of New York protesting the treatment of Soviet Jews. As Moffitt well recognized, the statue was the ideal place to protest any perceived wrong. So Moffitt called the NYPD, rather than the US Park Police—and this decision had ramifications for the climbers, and more importantly, the statue.
When the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit arrived, its agents were cheered by the departing visitors. They quickly assessed the situation. A “removal,” they determined, would be too dangerous. They figured nets were needed. And helicopters. Given all of this, Moffitt figured that the situation might take a while to conclude and told his wife to go to Manhattan without him. Then he learned from the NYPD that Geronimo Pratt was a Black Panther convicted in the murder of a Santa Monica teacher, a crime for which he’d been imprisoned for a decade, and he remained angry. There was nothing admirable about desecrating the statue, no matter the cause. “I took the job of protecting this symbol of America very seriously,” Moffitt recalled.
Moffitt spent the day in his office, watching the climbers through a pair of government-issued binoculars. That afternoon, he took a call from a reporter at the New York Daily News. In the middle of the interview, he heard a banging sound coming from the statue. “God damn them!” someone below the statue yelled at the same time. “They’re busting my statue!” A ranger came in the office and said one of the climbers was driving pitons into the copper skin. Moffitt doesn’t recall how many bangs he heard, but he remembers being frantic. Now he was sure they were damaging his statue. He yelled at the reporter, then hung up.
Up on the statue, Ed Drummond, a thirty-four-year-old English poet from San Francisco with an arrest record for climbing buildings and hanging banners, was struggling. After traversing around the left foot, then up and left, the climbing became more difficult than he had expected, or had been prepared for. It had taken him two hours to get to the crook of Lady Liberty’s right knee, and now he was stuck on a small ledge, looking up at a short chimney in the folds of the robe on her back. The surface of the copper skin, in particular, was causing problems, rendering his two eight-inch suction cups useless. The skin was covered in millions of little bumps, almost like acne, the result of the French craftsmen who pounded the copper into shape a century before. Consequently, his suction cups stuck only for about ten seconds, even if he pushed with all of his might. “I realized that they were not going to work,” he recalled, describing the fatigue he began to feel in his arms. He slipped, slithered down a few feet, and barely caught himself with his other suction cup. He was aware of the consequences of falling. “You’d just go hurtling out into the air,” he recalled, “and end up two hundred feet down on the esplanade.” It was also almost certain that if that happened, he would pull his climbing partner, Steph
en Rutherford—a thirty-one-year-old teacher-in-training from Berkeley, California—off too.
As he climbed, he could see that between the plates of copper there was often a small gap. The plates had begun to lift for some reason, though the edge formed was not big enough to use for climbing. He also noticed many little holes in the statue, which he had not seen from the ground. Rumor had it, among Statue of Liberty buffs, that they were bullet holes. As the climbing grew more desperate, with his back on one wall of the chimney and both of his feet on the other, he tried placing a tiny S-hook, which he’d bought last minute, in one of the holes, for support. Using a sling, he weighted it, and under less than his full weight, it bent alarmingly.
Drummond had planned to climb up the statue’s back, and onto her left shoulder, then stay in a little cave under the lock of hair over her left ear. Sheltered from wind and rain, anchored to that lock of hair, he planned to keep a weeklong vigil. (He brought a sleeping bag, and a supply of cheese, dates, apples, canned salmon, and water bottles.) He planned to drape his banner across the statue’s chest, like a bra. But he never made it past the chimney. Instead, he decided to spend the night on the ledge, and descend in the morning. He told as much to the NYPD, who relayed the information to Moffitt. That night, Moffitt didn’t get much sleep. From his bed, through his window, he watched Drummond and Rutherford. His children complained about all of the hubbub and helicopters flying around.
The next morning—Mother’s Day—Drummond and Rutherford surrendered, more or less twenty-four hours after they’d started. By the time they’d rappelled to the statue’s feet, the press had shown up on the mezzanine. A reporter yelled up, “Did you use any pitons?” Immediately, Drummond yelled down, “No, we haven’t damaged the statue!” Then, below the small overhang formed by the little toe of the statue’s left foot, he yelled, “This is how we climbed the statue!” and pressed one of the suction cups against the metal. He and Rutherford hung from it. As they descended into the scrum of police waiting with handcuffs, Drummond insisted, again, that he hadn’t damaged the statue. Moffitt, though, later told the Associated Press reporter that the climbers were “driving small spikes” into the statue. As he was talking to reporters, someone handed Moffitt a note from the US Attorney’s Office. It said, “Do not offer them amnesty.” Moffitt wasn’t about to. He was furious.
Rust: The Longest War Page 2
