Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  At 12:25, the techs put on yellow Tyvek suits and respirators. At 12:30, one fastened a winch cable to the door. At 12:53, they approached the door. A minute later, the bolt above the yoke began turning. The yoke began to open.

  The end of pipe went slowly from O to (O) to ( O ), such that there was room enough for them to pull the O out.

  At 12:58, the tray door opened a bit and stopped. Two technicians shined flashlights into the trap and then kept opening it. It took four minutes to pull the tray all the way out, but it seemed like forever.

  The first thing Neogi and everyone else noticed was that the pig wasn’t covered in wax. It was “the cleanest a pig’s ever been,” he said later. Only five cups—not barrels, but cups—of wax were removed. The nearest drums got carried away empty. Techs, on their knees, wiped the pig down with rags.

  Gibbs, meanwhile, examined the pig more closely. At first glance, he was relieved that the pig did not appear to have been hit by a freight train. It was intact. But as he looked closer, he discovered seven broken sensor heads. He called this typical, but still found it disappointing. At the butt of the pig, a blue light was blinking, and this was good news. The pig was still recording data. That all four odometer wheels were still present was also good news. Gibbs discovered no missing parts. A half hour later, though, he determined that the floating ring, an expensive two-part machined piece of aluminum to which the sensor arms are mounted, was bent, in the same way that a bicycle wheel may be tacoed. As a result, half of the pig’s sensors were no longer aligned axially. Perplexed, Gibbs called it “a unique injury.”

  Once the pig was clean, the techs tightened ratcheting straps around it and connected them to the overhead crane. At 1:39, they raised the pig and put it down on a tray. Immediately, the Baker Hughes crew began retrieving the pig’s data. The head of the crew, a cheery Colombian named Alejo Porras, plugged into it. Someone put a lid on an empty oil drum. Porras put his laptop on it and plugged in the other end of the six-foot cable. He began downloading 400 gigabytes of data. Then they waited. For the first time in days, the sun came out—but nobody noticed. The terminal crew was busy closing the trap door.

  Neogi and his team headed back to town. Most took naps, and still looked zonked at dinner. Neogi took a hot shower, and finally admitted that he (a) had been awake at 5:00 a.m. and (b) was worn out. That night, food and beer brought the team back to life, but it was mostly pride that did it. Wasson was overjoyed that through the endeavor, Alyeska employees and contractors suffered no accidents or incidents (other than one speeding ticket), experienced no fender benders, required no Band-Aids. He credited good weather south of Atigun Pass. With beer, he managed to make it past midnight. Neogi—who forwent even a celebratory drink—was proud of the convergence that the long, difficult pig run had brought to his team. “All of us were focused on one thing, like a team sport,” he said later. As a result, he felt melancholic. He was also proud of Alyeska’s cooperation with Baker Hughes, and warmed by the way the industry got a feel for what one operator needed while the operator got the tool of its desire. Later that night, at a smoky bar, Super Dave Brown leaned back in his chair, removed his black baseball hat, wiped his head, put his hat back on, grabbed his bottle of Budweiser, and denied the rumor that he was retiring after this pig run. “I was sayin’ I wouldn’t do that again,” he said, “but I’d do it again.”

  Porras finished downloading the data around two in the morning. He delivered it, on a black hard drive, to Matt Coghlan in his hotel room in Valdez. Then he returned to the terminal and began downloading a backup copy onto another drive. He fell asleep in his chair but woke up enough to confirm that the data were still moving.

  The first thing the next morning, Dave Brown—who had over the last month put four thousand miles on his truck—drove back to Anchorage, headed home to Soldotna, and put up his feet for a couple of months. Porras finished downloading the backup copy at ten o’clock. The backup copy he kept in his backpack, and his backpack he didn’t let out of his sight. The original data remained onboard the pig, but Porras took no chances.

  That afternoon, as the weather began to clear, Ben Wasson—who had spent the last month getting up hours before sunrise and squeezing in catnaps when time allowed—flew out, and then headed to Hawaii for two weeks.

  Before the Baker Hughes team left on Thursday morning, Devin Gibbs returned to the terminal and used his red paint marker to transform his hash mark on the pig receiver into a Canadian flag the size of a business card, thereby tagging the Alaska pipeline as he had tagged other pipelines on every continent but Australia. When Porras flew out, he told the attendants of the airport X-ray machine, unaware of how laborious it had been to gather the data on his drive, that it was “very sensitive.” Later that day, the unnamed pig was crated, loaded in a truck, and driven back to Calgary.

  On Thursday morning, Matt Coghlan finished his initial analysis and got word to Bhaskar Neogi that the tool had gathered data from 98 percent of the pipeline—confirming that it was indeed Alyeska’s best pig run by far in recent history. “We stuck to our guns; we did the best job we’ve ever done,” Neogi said. Alyeska’s CEO sent congratulations. Neogi felt some relief, but he learned that on Thompson Pass, the pig actually bounced back a few feet when it hit the slack oil. He figured that this was probably how the sensor heads and floating ring broke. It made him, an admitted perfectionist, want to solve this problem, so that in 2016 he could attain a perfect run. Nevertheless—though it would be a month before he could declare the chance of a rerun beyond “remote,” and a year before he’d be able to validate the pig data and conclusively say that it was a good run—he emailed his boss and preliminarily deemed the run “successful.” “That’s the beauty of sports,” he said. “You have a definite start time and a definite end time, and the real winner is clear. Pipe inspection doesn’t work like that.”

  Neogi didn’t leave until Thursday afternoon, and Hawaii was not in his future. He would spend the next weeks hiring a programmer, preparing for a PHMSA inspection, and heading to Calgary to check on the four-month analysis at Baker Hughes—which would determine where, over the next few years, Alyeska would have to dig up the pipe and carry out on the order of $40 million worth of work to prevent disasters like Enbridge, or BP, or Exxon, or San Bruno, or you name it, from occurring on TAPS. He would be managing the pipe’s integrity, and his obligations would stifle a tropical vacation. At most, he’d find time to pig his fish tank. Until then, Bhaskar Neogi—the only guy in that deadleg town not hung over, or wired on coffee, or reeking of cigarette smoke; the only guy there with no inkling to fish or to ski—remained holed up at his hotel, eating bananas, listening to the grumble and beeping of loaders pushing snow around. He was waiting for the data.

  * * *

  1. Pipeline ruptures around the country have also been caused by collisions with plows, barges, drag-racing cars, a runaway horse, a tugboat, a cement truck, and an air force jet. Ruptures have been caused by welders, construction workers, and by crews laying a new pipeline.

  2. TAPS has, though, leaked, and for the decade following two leaks caused by the settlement of the pipeline on June 10 and 15, 1979, Alyeska employees referred to the second week in June as Leak Week. The company’s integrity manager always scheduled his vacations then.

  3. ASME’s burst-pressure formula, called B31G, is more of a matrix. For a pipe of a given diameter and thickness, it reveals the size of a tolerable wound. On TAPS, for example, a pit 0.03 inches deep presents no hazard if it’s less than two feet long. A pit 0.1 inches deep presents no hazard as long as it’s less than a foot long.

  4. That’s why pipeline operators hired men to walk the length of pipelines and do vegetation surveys, hunting for clues that gas was leaking, and why others relied on dogs that sniffed out leaks and barked when they smelled something funny.

  5. Regulators at PHMSA now prefer that pipeline integrity be assessed from both magnetic flux pigs and ultrasonic pigs, the combination of which l
eaves no blind spots.

  10

  BETWEEN SNAKE OIL AND ROLEXES

  John Carmona, the proprietor of the Rust Store, once told me, “There’s a subset of society that says, ‘Hey, what I’ve got is pretty good, and I’m going to maintain it.’ I think that attitude is what led me to open the store. I wanted to fix things up.” He founded the Rust Store in January 2005. He was thirty. For a few months, Carmona ran the business from his home in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, storing products on two shelves in his garage, and packing them up for shipment on a tiny, folding card table. UPS picked up the packages from his front porch. Back then, he sold only four products: Boeshield Rust Free, Boeshield T-9, Evapo-Rust (in two sizes), and Sandflex Rust Eraser (in three grits). Business came so fast that he moved to an office in town. Within six months, he had twenty-five rust products in inventory—more than Home Depot currently stocks—and needed more space. The Rust Store moved into a building in Madison and, after a few years, moved to a larger building. Again, a few years passed, and business bulged. In the spring of 2012, Carmona relocated to a ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse in an industrial complex in Middleton, just outside Madison. From there, he now sells more than 250 rust products, tailored to tools, cars, boats, and so forth. He employs six staff, including his wife. The demand for rust products, he recently told me, is way steadier than the demand for football-themed products, which he also sells.

  “In some ways, it’s small and narrow, and in some others, it’s broad and huge. It’s in a thousand different places,” he said. Carmona’s voice is smooth, but he talks without finishing sentences, and then comes back and restarts, but not quickly. He just trails off and dutifully tries again. He’s not hyper, but sort of spastic in a slow way. He seems either nervous or overwhelmed; likely the latter. “When the phone rings,” he said, “you don’t have any idea what the customer is gonna have a problem with—something tiny or the side of a building.” Often, to diagnose a problem, he interrupts the customer, asking, Are you trying to remove the rust, or prevent it? Does the part need to be lubricated? Is it outdoors or inside? How large is it? Do you want a thin or thick coating? Does appearance matter?

  “Rust is such a . . .” He trailed off. “There’s not a lot of concrete answers.” But he knows what he has, and he tries to help.

  Carmona, who is tall, skinny, and goateed, studied business at the University of Wisconsin. Out of college, he did marketing for Gempler’s, a vast Midwestern catalog of farm and agricultural supplies. When the internet boom came, he switched to e-commerce. Rust first captured his attention via two hobbies: fixing up cars and woodworking. Regarding the presence of rust in cars, he figured that in Wisconsin, rust was just part of the equation. (Here’s guessing he worked on Fords.) Then the cast-iron tops of his jointer and table saw began to rust. “I thought, ‘If there’s two of my hobbies that deal with rust, there must be other applications that I don’t even know about yet,’ ” he said. Neither of his parents was handy; his dad designed air-conditioning systems, and his mom was a homemaker. So Carmona investigated on his own.

  I first called Carmona a week before the 2011 Super Bowl and asked if he’d received an email I’d sent with many rust-related questions. He said he had, and that there was a lot of stuff he hadn’t attended to, as he was busy selling cheeseheads. He said it was the busiest he’d ever been in his life. For a second I wondered what cheeseheads had to do with rust. Even Home Depot doesn’t sell cheeseheads.

  Carmona explained that in addition to the Rust Store, he also runs a store called Wisconsin Goods, which sells, among other Wisconsin-themed items, cheeseheads ($18.50 for the original hat; $20 for a sombrero). “It’s kind of a passion,” he said. The Wisconsin Goods website, which lists eleven varieties of cheesehead hats, as well as cheesehead shirts, books, and rearview mirror ornaments, makes that clear. “It just blew up,” Carmona went on. He described his cheesehead troubles, and his latest effort, on account of a national cheesehead shortage, to track down every last cheesehead from his suppliers’ warehouses in time for the big game, to which the Green Bay Packers were headed. Because he could fit only a hundred cheeseheads in his car—“They are exceeeeeeedingly bulky”—he’d rented a U-Haul and driven to Milwaukee. Now a blizzard—a record setter across the Midwest, bringing two feet of snow and winds that would render snowplows useless and ground a fifth of the nation’s flights—was threatening his ability to keep moving.

  He told me that the Rust Store is a much larger business, and that—lucky for him—things were quiet on that front right now, it being winter and all. During the winter, business at the Rust Store comes mainly from southeastern states. Until the rest of the country defrosts, Carmona stays busy by selling, in addition to cheeseheads: sharpening supplies, wool socks, muddlers (little wooden sticks for smashing fruit in cocktails), and beer hats, which are sombreros made from cardboard beer cases. When things warm up, Carmona sells antirust chemicals to grandmas with rusty cast-iron skillets and to drillers on Alaska’s North Slope. It certainly is curious, the life of this frenetic Midwestern entrepreneur.

  Home Depot’s rust expert is Cynthia Castillo. The handy daughter of a handy New Hampshire guy, she’s been working at one Home Depot or another for twenty years. While going to college, she began working in the paint department of a store in San Diego. She became a department head, an assistant store manager, a store manager. She became a district manager, and opened a few stores in the Bay Area. She met her husband at Home Depot, in the building materials department. Now, at Home Depot’s Atlanta mother ship, officially the Store Support Center, she works as the national paint merchant. To manage its tens of thousands of SKUs (stock-keeping units), Home Depot employs 150-odd merchants. Castillo oversees four hundred of those SKUs, including stains, paints, primers, waterproofers, solvents, cleaners, and rust converters and removers. She’s been managing these products since 2009. I met her on a rainy day a few days before Christmas in Atlanta. She’d been up since five thirty in the morning and was cheery.

  “I know about carpet, I know about tile, I know about draperies,” she told me. “I mean, you just learn, because that’s our business, home improvement.” She knows about kitchens, too. And about America’s rust habits.

  The way Castillo sees it, the Mason-Dixon Line demarcates two approaches to rust. North of it, Americans paint, paint, paint. “They’re constantly painting, so they’re covering it up all the time,” she said. South of it, Americans busy themselves removing rust and cleaning off resulting stains. “Rust is everywhere,” she said. “It’s in every city, every single town, every single home. There’s some form of rust, whether people know it or not, behind the wall, outside.” She also recognizes varying degrees of tolerance to it. Guys fixing up their motorcycles want it gone. Owners of rusty barns seem not to mind, and may even appreciate the look of rust. Castillo does not like the look of rust, especially not on the concrete around her backyard pool.

  “A lot of people will use primers just to cover some of the rust up,” she said. “Usually, if they don’t remove it, it’s gonna come back—but they still do it because they don’t wanna clean it, and it’s an extra step, so they use a primer. It’s good for a short period of time. Some of our consumers may not take all the steps that they should take for a project, because they’re in a hurry, so it’s our job to explain that so they know the risks, that if you don’t clean the rust off, Mrs. Smith, and you just paint a primer or a paint, it may come back.” She sounded like she’d get along with Phil Rahrig.

  Castillo said, “That’s what our associates are trained to do. If they didn’t tell ’em that, they’d be disappointed if six months down the road they look, and that stain that they covered up pops right through.”

  Home Depot sells three types of rust products: inhibitors, converters, and removers. Not all stores carry every product; Corroseal, for example, is available at stores in “marine clusters” such as Florida and the Great Lakes region, but not in Kansas. Nor does every store put th
e rust products in the same spots. Across the street from the mother ship at Store 121 (Home Depot operates nearly two thousand stores in the United States), I had Castillo show me—or try to show me—where they were.

  Before going into any store, Castillo always dons an orange apron, like any sales associate. With her red fingernail polish, many rings, and bedazzled glasses, the orange apron went well. On the front, in white letters, it said, “Hi, I’m Cynthia. I put customers first.” It looked festive. So did the store. With Christmas approaching, snowflakes, Snoopy, and reindeer hung from girders near the ceiling. Tinsel, wreaths, baskets of pine and berries, nutcrackers, plastic Santas, and snowmen for sale beckoned just past the entrance. Castillo walked past grills, poinsettias, a rack of orange five-gallon buckets, a promotional quarter-pallet of NFL-branded Atlanta Falcons Duck Tape (ten yards, $6.97). A dolly clacked and beeped as it went by. Over the PA system, a phone rang. The store was busy because on top of Christmas, painting season—otherwise known as spring—was around the corner.

  Castillo went straight to aisle 47 (paint) to look for rust products. She stopped in front of a bay full of spray bottles, cans, bags, and jugs of chemicals designed for nuisances: grease, grime, graffiti, goo, gum, glue, crud, dirt, drips, sap, stains, spots, scuffs, “tough stuff,” mildew, and residue. There was Krud Kutter (8 ounces, $1.49), Goo Gone (8 ounces, $3.48), Goof Off (4.5 ounces, $3.57), Dirtex (18 ounces, $3.98), Mötsenböcker’s Lift Off (11 ounces, $4.99). Only four products mentioned rust, and they were all at crotch or knee height, in the land of wallpaper removers, and covered with dust. Castillo led me two aisles over, to a bay of adhesives between painter’s tape and tubes of caulk. Below superglue, wood glue, contact cement, Liquid Nails, and regular old Elmer’s glue, she pointed out Loctite Naval Jelly Rust Dissolver (16 ounces, $6.98) and Loctite Extend Rust Neutralizer (10 ounces, $5.67). They were at the same unpopular height, and easy to miss. When I told Castillo that they seemed to be in a funny spot, she seemed surprised.