Every time we talked, Dunmire emphasized that he’s just a cog in a wheel. He always deflected attention elsewhere; said the administration deserves any credit. He’s just a bureaucrat, he says, proud to be a bureaucrat. “All I do is facilitate.” More than once, he suggested I not write too much about him. “Shorter is better, you know.” He advised I make his profile pithy. Occasionally, he expressed astonishment that he ever made it into the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which he calls Nirvana. He’s grateful that his position is not at the status of political appointee. “You think I would ever get confirmed by the Senate?” he asked rhetorically. “You think the White House would nominate me?” Of his presence in LeVar 5, he said, “The only reason I put myself in this movie was because you’re talking about the creation of the department. I didn’t wanna be in the movie. It’s like I have a big ego. But I want it timeless. I want it to have long legs. I want it to be history.”
Presented with a podium, though, Dunmire always climbs up and revels in the position. In the DOD’s maze of strong personalities and giant egos, he competes in his own way. Tony Stampone, a logistician in the Office of the Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Materiel Readiness, has known Dunmire since 1989, when both were GS-13s. Dunmire and Stampone hail from opposite sides of Pennsylvania and worked on opposite sides of the Pentagon. Dunmire, Stampone recalled, always seemed a little bit on the edge. “I never saw it until the corrosion stuff,” he said. “Dan took a shoebox and a small budget and through sheer force of personality made what he could.” Stampone said, “I’m a logistician. I pay for this stuff in the long run. Nobody gives a shit what happens. So we care about corrosion. That’s what Dan’s been preaching. No one had heard of corrosion before. No one cared. Dan got the word on the radar. If you can do that in the Pentagon, that’s half the battle.”
Rich Hays, Dunmire’s deputy, said that as a result of Dunmire’s work, where program managers once didn’t want to get called out on 60 Minutes for putting lead paint on a ship, now they don’t want to get called out on 60 Minutes for designing a ship that lasted ten years instead of twenty.
When Alan Moghissi, a respected scientist, professor, and author who’s advised the CDC, the EPA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, first met Dunmire in Alexandria, Virginia, he liked what he saw. Moghissi has a doctorate in physical chemistry. His son Oliver has served as the president of NACE. He knows corrosion well. “Dan is perfect,” he said. Educated in Switzerland and Germany, he retains a strong German accent. “Very often, engineers don’t see the forest for the trees. But Dan, he’s seeing the forest,” Moghissi said. “The Ford CEO is not an automotive engineer. DuPont’s CEO is not a chemist.” Dunmire, he said, knows that engineers don’t consider him a peer, but he also knows what he doesn’t know. Moghissi said it was easy to figure out Dunmire.
Halfway through his drive south, in the middle of sideways South Carolina rain, Dunmire called me and said, “I’m sixty years old. I’m crazy! But I’ll do anything for the warrior. Anything for the warrior.” His devotion he sees as sacrificial service. A dozen times, he expressed his devotion, as if I were a priest. “I care about the warrior. I love the warrior. I do this job for one reason.” For a decade running the Office of Corrosion Policy and Oversight, he’s put up with the burdens of government contracting on behalf of the life of the warrior. At the start of that decade, his wife said to him, “You’re going to die a lonely man because all you care about is the warrior.” Acknowledging as much, he’s called her a saint. “Without the warrior, we don’t have a country,” he said. “Any discomfort that comes up, when you think about people giving up life and limb for this country, you think I give a shit what I have to go through? I’ll put up with any bureaucratic bullshit that anybody puts in front of me. I love the United States of America. Go ahead and challenge me. I ain’t fucking leaving.”
On a March evening in 2008, Dunmire almost left. Headed home on I-95 in his PT Cruiser—the two-ton helmet—he fell asleep and hit an exit pole and three trees. He’d been going over sixty. He never braked. An emergency crew cut him out of the car and took him to a hospital. He had a severe concussion and shattered ribs. Dunmire spent four days in the hospital, and when he woke up, doctors told him that he’d actually died.
Two years later, on his way to a Steelers game, he slipped on a sidewalk and broke an ankle. He missed the game. Colleagues aren’t sure which was worse: the injury or the result. Since then, Dunmire has put on weight and stopped scrambling around outside like a Dormeyer. Velcro Dr. Scholl’s have become part of his uniform. Exhaustion seems to have latched onto him. At Corrosion Forum XXXI, Dunmire was so tired he didn’t stand up when people greeted him, and took hugs sitting down. I saw him rub his temples, slouch, shift positions, hunch his shoulders, yawn, wipe his face, twist, and rub his eyes. “I’m very enthusiastic on the inside,” he said. On the outside, he looked like a rusty asset.
The LeVar videos—which Dunmire calls “solid training videos”—make Dunmire jump up and down like a kid at Disney World but don’t have the same effect on the senior Pentagon officials. Reading Rainbow promoted childhood literacy. The corrosion videos promote . . . raising adults’ awareness. Shortly after LeVar 4 was produced, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense for AT&L told Dunmire’s deputy, “Nobody watches your videos.” At Corrosion Forum XXXI, Dave Pearson, a professor of engineering management at the Defense Acquisition University, said his bosses hadn’t bought off on the videos yet.
For all of his outreach efforts, Dunmire’s name rarely pops up in nonmilitary media. Waste & Recycling News picked up an army press release about a thermoplastic bridge that Dunmire’s office tested at Fort Bragg. BusinessWeek published eight paragraphs about the DOD’s massive rust headache and gave two short sentences to Dunmire. The author pointed out that with the money the military spends on rust in one year, it could buy two new aircraft carriers or four dozen fighter jets. He called Dunmire optimistic and left it at that.
Though the budget suggested by the White House has decreased steadily, to almost half of what it was in 2006, Congressional add-ons—earmarked for specific projects or not designated at all—have flowed toward Dunmire’s office in more than equal and opposite fashion. The office got an extra $13 million in 2008, as much in 2009, and slightly more in 2010. Congress sent more than $30 million in additional funds to Dunmire’s office in 2011 and in 2012, and nearly as much in 2013. As a result, the overall budget of the Office of Corrosion Policy and Oversight is now more than double what it was in the prerecession years of 2006 and 2007. Not surprisingly, Dunmire has allies in the House and Senate Armed Services and Defense Appropriations Committees. In the days of restrained budgets, furloughs, sequestration, and conference cutting, Dunmire’s tiny DOD office—among thousands—is one of the few that is growing. It’s growing because Dunmire gets results.
Pigging the Red Hill pipeline may have been a great success and pleased Senator Daniel Akaka, but it’s a little antenna gasket that Dunmire points to as a phenomenally successful early project. The US Coast Guard was the first to complain about corrosion where antennas protruded from Dolphin helicopters. Dunmire directed a few million dollars toward the trial of conductive gaskets made by a company called Av-DEC (Aviation Devices & Electronic Components). The coast guard tried them in 2005 and reported a twofold return on investment. Then the other branches signed up. The air force used them on C-130 Hercules military transport planes. The army put them on Apache helicopters. The navy used them on Prowler and Hornet planes, as well as Seahawk helicopters, and saved twenty thousand hours of maintenance per year. In 2007 the return on investment was 175-fold. Of the Av-DEC gasket project, Larry Lee called it “the most wonderful story you’ll find on a successful project.” Dunmire called the project a “home run golden-child money saver.” The return on investment was high, but not unusual for a project out of his office.
Dunmire knows he’s doing well because he rarely sees the s
ecretary of defense. Like a schoolkid, he aspires to stay out of the principal’s office. But he’s also doing well because his projects almost inevitably yield incredible returns on investment. What he’d been preaching for so long—that prevention was far smarter than repair—has panned out. It’s no longer prophecy. Water rinses and covers for helicopters have returned, respectively, elevenfold and twelvefold their initial investments. Sealants for cable connectors on Patriot missiles score 12:1. Dehumidifiers for the same missiles score the same. Induction heaters for repairing the nonskid on flight decks score 45:1. Paints tend to fare even better. The navy currently spends more than $100 million a year on deck coverings—aka nonskid. A spray-on nonskid funded by Dunmire’s office scored 33:1. Fast-cure stealth coatings scored 52:1. A quasi-crystalline coating that’s as slippery as Teflon and as hard as stainless steel scored 126:1. Overall, the GAO has predicted an average return on investment for projects in Dunmire’s office of 50:1. In other words, over the last decade, Dunmire’s office has saved billions.
The day after the shoot, Dunmire woke up late and looked and sounded worse than ever. He’d failed to recover from the all-night drive, let alone the draining video shoot—and had barely summoned the energy to go out to dinner with Burton and a few of the crew. “The spirit was willing,” he said, “but the body was weak.”
He opened up USA Today to coverage of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy. He said it was like Pearl Harbor without the firebombs. He worried about damaged military equipment, and, seeing a photo of a flooded New York City subway, said there was saltwater in all kinds of undiscovered places—that we’d find out about it years hence. “I just hope they consult us, include us in the contracts,” he said. He carried his things into his Ford Excursion—the V10 behemoth, he called it—and loaded them in the trunk. On his way to Florida, his trunk had been full of Star Trek paraphernalia: a McCoy model, a set of Star Trek Pez dispensers, a door chime à la Starship Enterprise, a big blue foam “live long and prosper” hand, and ten more figurines and scenes and toys from the show. He’d given them all to Stacey Cook for Christmas. Now he had a large 3-D television, for corrosion education purposes, in their place.
Dunmire dropped me off at the Orlando airport. The last I saw of the corrosion ambassador was his license plate, PGH 57—for Pittsburgh and Heinz—as he headed north, back into the maw of a natural disaster.
7
WHERE THE STREETS ARE PAVED WITH ZINC
A chunk of the rust market belongs to the galvanizing industry. To get a sense of that chunk, I met with Phil Rahrig, the executive director of the American Galvanizers Association. The AGA’s office is in an inelegant brick building in suburban Denver, alongside a dentist, orthodontist, chiropractor, and CPA. Inside, it’s reminiscent of a small environmental nonprofit but without the young, inspired people. When I arrived, on a hot August morning, Rahrig was on a conference call, so I admired the showiest wall of the office while I waited. It held framed shots of various award-winning galvanized structures: a New York City bus shelter, a natural-gas unloading facility in Texas, an air-traffic control tower in Memphis, a chair lift at Utah’s Park City, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a center for great apes in Florida, name plates at a Holocaust museum in Illinois. The Alaska pipeline should have been up there too. On the elevated sections of the pipeline, the insulation is shielded with galvanized steel. A plaque displayed the AGA’s motto: “Protecting steel for generations.”
Rahrig invited me into his office and went straight into the turf battle among galvanizers, painters, and weathering-steel advocates. “The paint guys have an army!” he began. “They’re loaded—they’re fifty times bigger than we are. They have distributors everywhere. The biggest paint company does six, eight billion dollars a year. The largest galvanizer does three hundred and fifty million a year.” Rahrig, of middle age and middle size, with a decent-sized neck, spent years working for U.S. Steel, and believes fiercely not just in steel, or American steel, but in American steel coated in zinc. “We use forty percent as much galvanized steel as Europe. They have a much higher sense of preservation than we do. They have that appreciation for making things last. In Europe, they’re not enamored with color—everything is just gray.”
Rahrig wore a white jacket, blue golf shirt, dark slacks. He’d have fit in on a stage in Vegas. He said, “The public doesn’t know anything about galvanizing. It’s an invisible product. I think they believe that rust is inevitable and unavoidable. If we had a budget of a gazillion dollars, we could convince ’em otherwise.” To convince ’em, or at least some of ’em, Rahrig told me we’d shortly be visiting the offices of the engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff in downtown Denver. The AGA regularly presents to architectural and engineering firms, because such firms need continuing-education credits.
Today’s presentation, Rahrig told me, would be by Kevin Irving of AZZ Galvanizing Services, the country’s largest galvanizer. AZZ runs thirty-three galvanizing plants throughout the country, including one just north of Denver. Rahrig explained the approach that Irving would take to convince engineers about the value of galvanizing. “We start with a definition of the problem, which is rust.” The extent of the problem would be conveyed via photos of rusty bridges, rusty railings, rusty posts, rusty beams. “We define the problem, give them data, let them make the decision,” he said. Of Irving, Rahrig promised, “He’s very enthusiastic. He’s like Tony Robbins.”
We got into Rahrig’s car and headed north on I-25. As he drove, Rahrig pointed out galvanized structures.
“Everything along the roadside is galvanized: signs, posts, guide rails. I don’t think people notice that.”
“All these overpasses were galvanized and painted. They wanted that green.”
“License plates: galvanized sheet metal.”
We drove past chain-link fences and fence posts: galvanized. We drove past an electrical substation: galvanized. We stopped at a sandwich shop, and I pointed out the stainless steel countertops. Rahrig said, yeah, meat, fruit—anything acidic—needs stainless steel. Then he pointed at the bread racks. They were galvanized.
As we continued, Rahrig moaned about the ungalvanized things he saw.
“See that railing? Rusted.”
“Scaffolding—always painted yellow. It’s a disposable item. It costs more to repaint it than to build it in the first place.”
“The stairs in the parking garage at the airport—you seen them? There are four in the corners and one in the middle. DIA was built in ’ninety-four, so they were painted in ’ninety-four, sandblasted, and repainted in ’oh-one, and this year, they took ’em down and replaced ’em. They just looked awful. Now they’re galvanized. Garages are moist, even in arid Colorado, so it’s not a good environment for paint.” He said that paint only lasts a year if it’s always wet. Then he looked at me and asked if I had any idea how hard and expensive it is to paint and sandblast inside a parking garage at a busy airport.
“If the taxpayers knew what idiots . . .” He started over, holding back his Tea Party steam. Rahrig hates government, reserving a special loathing for DOT employees. He calls them myopic, lazy, not very smart. He says they’re reluctant to do things a new way, by which he means galvanize, rather than paint, paint, paint. “The DOT, they don’t care. It’s tax dollars, they don’t care. There’s six hundred and fifty thousand deficient bridges in this country. What does that tell you? They don’t have the budget to maintain ’em.” What he means is: they’re wasting their money on paint. Paint, he says, is government propaganda. “I’d rather have ten galvanized bridges than fifteen painted bridges.”
In its battle against paint, and its armies built by paint giants PPG Industries and Valspar, the AGA has produced a fact sheet called “Hot-Dip Galvanized Steel Vs. Paint.” It’s arranged like a rundown of two candidates from opposing political parties. Not unintentionally, the galvanizing party is represented in green; paint, in blue. On ten issues, a voter can compare their relative positions, and pick
the winner. Galvanizing, for example, doesn’t require special handling, or field touch-up, or good weather to apply. Not so for paint. Galvanized coatings are thick, hard and resistant to scratching, and bonded to steel with ten times more force than paint. Galvanized coatings can handle higher temperatures and last seventy-five years; paint, only fifteen.
The kicker, though, is the comparison of costs. Over thirty years, a 250-ton bridge on the East Coast, for example, primed and painted with epoxy or waterborne acrylic or urethane paint, will need at least one touch-up and repainting. Painted with three coats of latex paint, the bridge will require more than twice as much maintenance, all of which is costly. Galvanized, the bridge will require . . . nothing. Though the initial costs are comparable, the overall costs are not. According to NACE, which published the analysis, the overall cost of building and maintaining a galvanized structure is anywhere from one-half to one-third that of building and maintaining a painted one.
Rahrig later explained his strategy. “We’re increasing the size of the pie by going after concrete and trying to increase market share by going after paint,” he said. He said he wished that he could create the demand for galvanizing from the bottom up, from taxpayers, but said he’d need “the advertising budget of Procter and Gamble.” The AGA does not have the budget of P&G. The AGA places half-page ads in magazines such as Architectural Record, Civil Engineering, Structural Engineering, Engineering News-Record, and Modern Steel Construction. Joe Taxpayer does not read Modern Steel Construction. Rahrig, meanwhile, writes articles for Roads & Bridges, Bridge Builder, Parking Professional, Parking Today. It is hard to imagine Parking Today having a sizeable readership. He is a good salesman, through and through.
Though zinc was used more than a millennium ago in China, India, Europe, and ancient Greece—where it was known as “false silver”—galvanizing was not described until 1742. Paul Jacques Malouin, a French chemist, then told the Royal Academy of Sciences, “It is not as easy as one imagines.” According to a contemporaneous Welsh bishop, Richard Weston of Llandaff, the process wasn’t so tricky at all. Weston of Llandaff described galvanizing iron saucepans thus: “The vessels are first made very bright of salammoniac and afterward dipped into an iron pot full of melted zinc.” That’s pretty much still the procedure.
Rust: The Longest War Page 22
