After a night in jail, Drummond and Rutherford were charged with criminal trespassing and damaging government property, to the tune of $80,000. By then, Moffitt had studied the statue through his binoculars, and discovered the same holes that Drummond had. He’d also sent one of his maintenance guys up the statue to inspect the damage from the inside. He discovered that the holes were everywhere, and weren’t the result of pounding pitons, or spikes of any kind, into the copper. They were places where the rivets, which held the statue’s copper skin to her iron frame, had popped out. The holes in the statue hadn’t been created by Drummond at all. They’d been created by corrosion.
So Ed Drummond was right. Liberty was framed, and her frame was rusting.
What had been interpreted as an act of vandalism turned out to be a much bigger headache for Moffitt. Sure, there was graffiti on the inside of the statue, but nobody had ever damaged the outside. At least Moffitt was pretty sure. Perplexed, he dug through a file cabinet, in search of reports on the statue’s condition. He found none. So he had a short section of scaffolding put up to inspect the damage on the statue. Scuff marks, and small spots where Drummond’s rope had worn away the green patina, were discovered. He also called the National Park Service’s design/construction firm in Denver, and asked their engineers to examine the statue and report on its condition. Two engineers came out a few weeks later, and investigated. They wrote a memo, and gave it to Moffitt. It concluded that the statue was basically sound, corrosion notwithstanding, and did not recommend any repairs. Moffitt was relieved they’d found no damage, but was disappointed that the inspection was solely visual. He was hoping for something more. He’d seen the damage himself, and he wanted answers. So on May 20 Moffitt had two of his staff ask the Winterthur Museum, which had examined the Liberty Bell, to determine the “causes of the severe corrosion and make suggestions to stabilize the system to avoid catastrophic destruction.” They sent two copper samples from Lady Liberty’s torch to the museum, and the museum put them in front of Norman Nielsen, a metallurgist at DuPont.
Nielsen’s report wasn’t much more illuminating than the one from Denver. “It was hoped,” he wrote, “that such a study would define the corrosion processes that appear to be causing the copper to deteriorate at an alarming rate and which might suggest measures that might be taken to stabilize the corrosion process.” Instead, his investigation, achieved via X-ray fluorescence, merely identified the chemical composition of the copper, its patina, and some of the impurities within, including antimony, lead, silver, zinc, and mercury.
Two days before Nielsen finished his report, Drummond’s case was heard. It was obvious, by then, that Drummond hadn’t put the holes in the statue, and the damage charges were dismissed. After all, Drummond had brought no pitons, and no hammer—as was recorded in the report of his arrest, during which his backpack was searched. The banging sound, it turned out, had come from a police officer rapping the butt of his gun on the inside of the statue. But Drummond was convicted of trespassing, a misdemeanor for which he was sentenced to six months of probation and twenty-four hours of community service.
A few months later, Moffitt received a phone call from a lawyer representing a couple of French engineers who’d just completed the restoration of a similar copper and iron statue, called Vercingetorix. They offered to do a more thorough investigation of the Statue of Liberty, which, after all, had been a gift from France. (It’s not surprising that France beat us to the punch; France’s history with metal structures is generations older than America’s.) Moffitt was all for it, as his questions remained unanswered, and he knew further inquiry would be limited by severely restricted NPS funds. The coincidence was serendipitous, to say the least, as Moffitt had twice suggested the formation of a commission to plan for the statue’s upcoming hundredth anniversary, but gotten nowhere, because of budget constraints under President Jimmy Carter. He knew the statue would need to be spiffed up, but nobody, it seemed, wanted to hear about it, much less pay for it. So Moffitt met the engineers at Liberty Island, and arranged for them to meet with the director of the Park Service. A year after Drummond’s ascent, they agreed to form a partnership to restore the Statue of Liberty. The years of “neglect and deterioration,” as the Park Service referred to the 1960s and 1970s at the statue, were about to end. Amazingly, what had begun as an obscure attention-getting stunt by two protesters ended with the most symbolic rust battle in this nation’s history.
The rusting statue—once the world’s tallest iron structure—was a mystery. As seven architects and engineers from France and America began to research her past, they pieced together details. What was clear was that she had been managed, or mismanaged, in a variety of ways, by a mess of agencies. She’d been built in 1886, on top of Fort Wood, on Bedloe’s Island, and after two weeks of orphanage, was initially overseen by the US Light-House Board, which was part of the Treasury Department. She spent fifteen years in that agency’s care, and then twenty-three years under the War Department, before she was declared a national monument. Nine years later she was transferred to the National Park Service. In other words, a half century transpired before anyone with a sense of preservation took over caring for her. One of the first things the NPS did, with the Works Progress Administration, in 1937, was replace parts of her corroded iron frame. Good preservationists, they replaced iron bars with similar iron bars. But, because all of the work was done from the inside of the statue, they used self-tapping screws, rather than rivets. You could say they botched the job. Since then, the statue hadn’t received much better care; the monument hadn’t had an official superintendent since August 1964. There’d been a management assistant, three assistant superintendents, one acting assistant superintendent, a unit manager (none for more than two and a half years), and finally Moffitt, in January 1977.
The American half of the team—Richard Hayden, Thierry Despont, and Edward Cohen—wanted more detail about the statue’s past, so they visited other statues built by the statue’s architect, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, and its engineer, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. They went to the Bartholdi museum, in Colmar, France, to see notes, papers, models, and a journal from 1885. They found no drawings, but found out that Bartholdi never intended visitors to see the inside of the statue, which complicated things, because Americans loved that part of her. Elsewhere, they found Eiffel’s sketches, and nine handwritten pages from November 12, 1881, showing calculations for the statue’s frame—explaining how 270,000 pounds of iron could support 160,000 pounds of copper.
The frame’s design—an iron skeleton riveted to the copper skin—was ingenious, and risky, and Bartholdi had known it. In fact, he’d originally chosen another design, by Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, in which the statue was filled up to the hips with sand. But Viollet-le-Duc died in 1879, so Bartholdi went with Eiffel. Eiffel’s design was risky because the two metals couldn’t actually touch each other. Dissimilar metals, in contact, would corrode, as Luigi Galvani had discovered a century before. The corrosion had a name: galvanic corrosion. It’s how batteries work, actually. Electrons travel from the weaker, more electronegative, metal, to the stronger one—and in the process the weaker one is destroyed, which is why batteries don’t last forever. In the case of the Statue of Liberty, the voltage was only about a quarter of a volt—not enough to illuminate even the smallest lightbulb—but persistent, far more so than any battery. Eiffel was aware of the risk, and planned to manage it by separating the iron from the copper with shellac-impregnated asbestos. It was the best technology of the era, and he had faith. “In regard to the preservation of the work,” he wrote, “since all the elements of its construction are everywhere visible on the inside in all their details, it will be easily kept in good condition.” Scientific American saw it differently, and within a month of the statue’s completion, warned, “There are five dangers to be feared, namely, earthquake, wind, lightning, galvanic action, and man.” Bartholdi took up the defense. “I have no doubt that with care and looking
after, the monument will last as long as those built by the Egyptians,” he wrote, after the statue was built. Things turned out differently, partly because he had never planned for paint.
It’s not clear who first decided to paint the interior of the statue, but the job was done thoroughly in 1911, with a layer of black coal tar. On top of that, some other copycat in 1932 slathered a layer of aluminum paint, and someone else, in 1947 added enamel paint, specially formulated for removing graffiti. Before Moffitt arrived, at least six others ordered a layer of paint thrown on top of the others, for good measure. Intent on preserving the statue, Moffitt followed their lead. One of the first things he did as superintendent was paint the inside of the statue, with a light-green lead-based paint. Where there should have been a sign that said Caution: High Corrosion Risk, there was just layers of paint. All of that paint was almost as thick as the copper, and unfortunately, had trapped water between the iron frame and the copper skin—exactly what Eiffel and Bartholdi had wanted to avoid. Water between the copper and iron was as bad as having the two metals in contact with each other. Hence one of the American team’s first discoveries: the statue had become an enormous battery. As a result, corrosion had produced a lot of “wastage,” and in some places, paint was the only material holding things together.
The French half of the team, meanwhile, began collecting scientific, rather than historic, data. They installed wind gauges on the outside of the statue, and 142 strain and acceleration gauges in it. They installed carbon dioxide and humidity gauges inside, too, to measure condensation from the breath of millions of visitors in an enclosed place that, in the summer, regularly climbed above 120 degrees. They X-rayed the frame to check for cracks, and at Cetim, the Technical Center for the Mechanical Industry, in Senlis, France, they ran fatigue and impact tests on samples of the puddled iron frame, to see how cracks formed and propagated, and how the metal reacted to dynamic stresses caused by wind. They used ultrasonic calipers to measure the thickness of the copper skin, and photographed every one of the three hundred copper plates.
By December 1981, the French-American Committee for the Restoration of the Statue of Liberty had produced a preliminary diagnosis report, confirming Moffitt’s suspicions that the statue was not, as Denver had declared, “basically sound.” On July 14, 1983, the French-American Committee published a thirty-six-page magazine-like report, offering four restoration proposals. The proposals varied only in the extent to which they would improve accessibility and conditions for visitors: stairs, elevators, resting platforms. Otherwise, the proposals included the same amount of structural repair, “to assure the integrity of the structure and avoid additional electrolysis”—by which they meant corrosion—“for the foreseeable future.”
Everywhere engineers had looked, in every part of the statue, they found corrosion, or a contributor to it. Only the exterior of the copper skin had withstood corrosion, and been deemed “normal,” rivet holes and other damage notwithstanding. Once the iron frame had begun to rust, the degradation spiraled out of control. When a spot on the frame rusted, it swelled, and inhibited movement of the flexible joint between the copper skin and the iron frame (which was there to allow for the slight expansion and contraction of the copper), which then warped the copper, and eventually pulled rivets out, putting yet more strain on the copper skin. It was called “jacking,” and it was like a chain reaction. More popped rivets meant more water getting in, especially because of the pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the statue. Lady Liberty almost sucked water in. One-third of the statue’s twelve thousand framing rivets were loose, damaged, or missing, and more or less half of the frame had corroded. The asbestos insulator—which actually wicked water, exacerbating the damage—had long since disintegrated. As a result, some of the ribs in the frame had lost two-thirds of their thickness. The lattice girders below the statue’s robe and feet were “particularly corroded”; in photos, it looks like some sort of metal beaver chewed away at them. The frame of the book in her left hand was “very corroded,” and beneath her crown it wasn’t much better. The staircase was rusted badly. The corrosion in the frame of her right arm was severe, in the torch it was “extensive.” Corrosion in the whole frame was so “deleterious” that the system was said not to function anymore. There was, according to the report, “definite risk of structural failure” in the torch, an event that would be embarrassing to say the least.
Water was entering the statue through the rivet holes, through badly designed weep holes (intended to let water out of the statue), from the lungs of millions of visitors, whose breath condensed inside the statue, and from a sizeable hole in the statue’s raised bicep, where one of her seven spikes was poking through. The statue’s lack of watertightness was most obvious in the winter, when it was easy to find snow inside the statue. Water was also coming in from the torch, which had been a disaster from the beginning.
In 1886, as the statue was assembled—or reassembled—in America, Bartholdi had wanted eight lights on the torch to illuminate the gilded copper flame. A week before the statue’s inauguration, on October 28, the US Army Corps of Engineers told him that the lights would interfere with boat navigation in the harbor, and that his design would have to be modified. Lieutenant John Millis, of the US Light-House Board, decided to cut two rows of portholes in the torch, and illuminate it from within. The illumination was pathetic, barely visible from Manhattan. Bartholdi said the flame was like the “light of a glow worm.” In 1892 the upper row of portholes was enlarged into an eighteen-inch band of glass, above which a skylight was added. Bartholdi remained unsatisfied. Twenty-four years later, a dozen years after he died, an artist named John Gutzon Borglum attacked the torch, sculpting away much of it. He cut out 250 rectangles, and put in 250 panes of amber glass. Borglum went on to attack Mount Rushmore. A metalworker later wrote that the torch resembled “a shapeless Chinese lantern,” though it also resembled a huge bird cage, inside and out. The windows leaked, and the ventilation holes below were perfect bird entrances. Hence all of the rust.
The torch—the highest, wettest, windiest, least inspected part of the statue—was also the most delicate part. It had been made of thinner metal, to allow for intricate details on the soffit above the handle, and the pendant below. Up above the Hudson, it was also the most desirable spot for birds to roost. As a result, it was the most damaged part of the statue. Early on in the restoration, Hayden and Despont, of the American restoration team, climbed into the torch with a few park rangers, to check it out. In the bottom of the torch pendant, there was a stagnant puddle of water and bird poop, which they called a “primordial soup.” The mixture was eating through the metal. If not for a threaded rod, with a large bolt, the pendant would have fallen off. They snapped a photo of themselves up there. At the next meeting, they passed it around. They were promptly advised by other engineers not to attempt that “daring feat” again, because the frame in the torch was seriously weakened. The frame, in fact, was missing. There was only a shadow of where it had been.
As the scale of the restoration became evident, the French-American Committee was superseded by an American commission and foundation for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty. The organizations raised money, investigated, prepared, and finally got around to fixing the Statue of Liberty. Since the research and planning alone had taken three years, the next three years of restoration were hectic. They formed subcommittees, coordinating committees, subgroups, advisory groups, and groupements before offshoot state-level commissions and foundations latched on. They held meetings at the Waldorf Astoria, and they took flights to Paris, for walks at Versailles. The work was accomplished by more than three hundred workers—consultants, compagnons, experts of all kinds—working for more than thirty contractors. Prominent companies helped with technical research, and so many companies offered to donate tools and materials that hundreds were turned down. Even NASA chipped in. The foundation ran the largest direct-mail campaign ever, and eventually the
most successful fund-raising campaign in American history. So that they could get materials to the island, they repaired a pier, then built a 1,200-foot bridge, from New Jersey to Ellis Island, because it was cheaper than transporting supplies on barges. Around the statue, they erected the world’s tallest freestanding scaffolding, and eventually they fixed the statue up properly, drastically increasing her life expectancy. It was all overseen by Lee Iacocca—the man who saved Chrysler—who was appointed chairman of the endeavor by President Ronald Reagan on May 17, 1982.
Iacocca said he’d raise $230 million, $300 million, $500 million, or $1 billion if he had to. The fund-raising effort began in New York, and soon spread to Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas, where fund-raising offices were opened. A gala at New York’s Lincoln Center, with Luciano Pavarotti and Bob Hope, raised $750,000. Gerald Ford appeared at an event in Tennessee, pulling in less money. A toll-free 800 number was purchased, for phone pledges. Congress authorized the minting of thirty-five million commemorative coins. American Express donated a portion of all Traveler’s Check sales.
Schoolkids all over the country collected pennies, sold muffins, and grew flowers for the cause. By July 4, 1986, kids at more than twenty thousand schools had raised over $5 million. A disabled six-year-old in Indianapolis raised $3,000. Ethnic organizations pledged money: Italian groups, Czechoslovakian groups, Greek, Polish, Serbian, Byelorussian groups. The Daughters of the American Revolution raised $500,000. A disabled-veterans group raised $1 million. Former employees of Bell Telephone raised $3 million. Employees from the State Farm Insurance Company raised $1 million. So did employees at Chrysler. Los Angeles threw in $50,000.
Rust: The Longest War Page 3
