Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  More of our world is made of metal than ever before. The tab now stands at a record four hundred pounds of steel for every person on earth. As many sages have pointed out, the higher civilization rises, the farther it has to fall. Does our development suggest a type of insanity? Does our national approach, or lack thereof, to maintenance suggest laziness or even hubris?

  When Robert Baboian wrote his graduate thesis on corrosion in the 1950s, corrosion was just a “tiny little” part of Rochester Polytechnic Institute’s course work in electrochemistry. It was the same at all the technical institutes. For the last few generations, if you asked a mechanical engineer where you might learn about corrosion, he’d point you to a civil engineer. The civil engineer in turn would point you to a chemical engineer. The chemical engineer would direct you to a materials engineer, he’d direct you to an electrical engineer, and then he’d point you back to the mechanical engineer you started with. To most engineers, the future is not in corrosion. The future is in nanoengineering, genetic engineering, materials engineering, microbial engineering.

  To Bernard Amadei, a longtime professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado, this situation is pathetic. Amadei is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the winner of both the Hoover Medal and the Heinz Award, and in 2012 was appointed as a science envoy by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The eminently practical son of bricklayers, he contends that engineering education in the United States is a failure because the aims of modern engineering are askew. He thinks that we’re fixing problems we don’t have and ignoring problems we do. He thinks that we now throw money at projects piecemeal, rather than design them right. A staunch believer in American ingenuity, Amadei nonetheless thinks we—humans—have a design defect. And he argues that the way we teach engineering contributes to the problem. “Here at Boulder,” he said, “kids take Concrete 1, Concrete 2, Concrete 3, and then they go out, and they don’t know how to mix concrete! They go, hmm, pffff !” On top of his thick French accent, he regularly pauses and says pffff. “It’s deplorable! . . . We are virtual engineers. We’re out of touch with reality.

  “My colleagues still teach like it’s the 1950s,” he went on. “Traditional engineering is brute force. Dam that river. Dig that canal. If it doesn’t work, try harder. . . . Civil engineers have to build something big: my tower is bigger than your tower.” Considering the condition of American infrastructure, which earned a D from the American Society of Civil Engineers, he calls this approach a “technical wasteland.” As evidence, Amadei cited recent train travel. He took the Acela on an hour-and-a-half trip, and was an hour and a half late. He wrote a letter to Amtrak and got his money refunded.

  To get engineering students back in touch with reality and to give them a conscience, Amadei founded Engineers Without Borders. The organization now has twelve thousand members engaged in more than four hundred projects—mostly water or sanitation related—in forty-five countries. On the Crow reservation in Montana, he started a company that makes cinder blocks out of local clay. In Afghanistan, he started a company that makes fuel out of waste paper. In Israel, he showed Bedouins how to use renewable energy to make cheese.

  Amadei has been rethinking engineering schools, too. He told me that the best engineering program he’s ever seen isn’t where he teaches at the University of Colorado, or Stanford, or MIT, but at KIT: the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, in Rwanda. It was started in 2004. All engineers there begin by spending three months in a village. When they come to school, they’re asked what they can do to solve problems. They do the same thing over the next three summers. Then, to get their degrees, they have to demonstrate what they’ve done to improve that community.

  This kind of approach makes Amadei’s eyes open wide. “I see great opportunity,” he said. “We need a new mind-set for a new ballgame with new players.” He’s eager to get busy “reengineering engineering.” To do so, he’d begin by insisting that engineers take a wider range of courses, because he thinks that engineering education in America is hampered by its narrow base, churning out only specialists. He’s in favor of fewer universities and more vocational schools. He’d also support any efforts to educate more engineers, who constitute only 0.5 percent of the American population, especially female engineers.

  John Scully, Luz Marina Calle (the head of NASA’s corrosion branch), Paul Virmani (the author of the Department of Transportation’s 2001 cost-of-corrosion study), and Dan Dunmire all see the situation similarly. In that 2011 National Academies report, to which they all contributed, they identified corrosion education as a major national concern. In a typical engineering program, “students’ exposure to corrosion issues is limited to a single lecture in corrosion in an introductory materials science class,” they wrote. “In many cases, lectures on corrosion are not offered because of time constraints and the demands of other topics. At many universities, even students majoring in materials science and engineering (MSE), who should be trained in materials selection, receive limited exposure to the topic of corrosion because only a fraction of MSE departments have even a single course on corrosion in their curriculum.” They blamed overcrowded curricula, scarcity of qualified faculty, and a lack of awareness. They praised NACE for offering corrosion modules at educational summer camps for high schoolers, and pointed to the Corrosion And Reliability Engineering (CARE) program at the University of Akron, the country’s only undergraduate corrosion engineering program.

  Because of corrosion, engineers are rethinking the materials that have gone unchanged in structures for a long time. One such new material is extruded structural composite, or thermoplastic lumber, as it’s usually called. It’s been around for twenty-five years, mostly in nonstructural arenas: picnic tables, park benches, decks, boardwalks. New York City built a four-hundred-foot pier out of the stuff in 1995, but a year later, it was hit by lightning and burned down. Nevertheless, the new material has been touted as superior to wood because it doesn’t splinter, crumble, crack, warp, or rot, and doesn’t require the chemical treatment—chromated copper arsenate and pentachlorophenol—that pressure-treated wood does. In fact, it’s impervious to infestation by insects, it doesn’t mushroom like wood when pounded, and in stress tests, it outperforms oak after exposure. Plus it’s recycled.

  In 1998 Axion International, a small company in the heart of New Jersey steel country, showed off what the material could do on a twenty-four-foot bridge in Missouri. The bridge had steel I beams supporting a wooden deck, which was replaced with Axion’s thermoplastic boards. They cost twice as much as new wooden planks. By 2006, though, the plastic seemed a bargain, because it required no maintenance and was still in perfect shape. The market, though, was not impressed. Where the three years leading up to the bridge saw Axion stock soar from $150 a share to over $2,000 a share, the next three years saw shares fall to below $13.

  Not taking the hint, Axion went on competing with wood by manufacturing railroad ties. The company tested them at the Federal Railroad Administration’s Transportation Technology Center, in Pueblo, Colorado. Since 1999, the center has run 1.5 billion tons over them, in 39-ton cycles. The ties have yet to break or warp. They resist plate wear, hold spikes, and maintain their gauge. Armed with such evidence, Axion has sold 200,000 such ties (a mere 65 miles of track) in Dallas, Kansas City, Jacksonville, and Chicago—where salt rains down every winter courtesy of that God-like agency called the DOT. Because the plastic ties last at least four times as long as wooden ties, at only twice the initial cost, it seems a sure bet that Axion stands to gain from an industry that replaces 20 million of them each year.

  In the last decade, though, Axion’s engineers, working at Rutgers University’s materials science lab, developed a new polymer three times tougher than the old mixture. By blending HDPE plastic (#2) with old car bumpers and 11 percent fiberglass, they created a material stronger and more flexible than steel, but only one-eighth as dense. It floats. Its light weight makes it cheaper to transport than steel.
Most importantly, it doesn’t rust.

  Rather than compete with humble wood, Axion sought, ambitiously, to compete with steel. It began, in 2002, with an elegant fifty-six-foot arch bridge in New Jersey that could support thirty-six tons. Even then, though, the structure’s strength came from laminated boards bowed into a van Gogh arc. Not until 2009 did Axion demonstrate that its thermoplastic could be fashioned into, and employed as, regular old-fashioned I beams. But this time, it did so dramatically. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Axion’s plastic I beams were used in a forty-foot bridge spanning a muddy creek. The US Army Corps of Engineers drove a dump truck full of rocks over it. Then the army drove a seventy-ton Abrams M1 tank onto the bridge. Halfway across, the tank stopped and parked. After testing—the bridge was wired up with a couple hundred sensors—engineers determined that it could safely handle one hundred tons. Dan Dunmire, the Pentagon’s rust ambassador, was behind that trial. The next year, designers in Virginia put Axion’s plastic I beams to use in two plastic railroad bridges, the world’s first. They’re forty feet and eighty feet long, and look as good as truss bridges out west. Axion’s greatest coups, though, took place in 2011. In York, Maine, a tiny fifteen-foot bridge became the first plastic bridge on a public US highway. And in Scotland, a ninety-foot bridge, Axion’s best looking yet, erected in only four days, became Europe’s first recycled plastic bridge.

  The North Carolina bridge cost just under $500,000, which, in bridge jargon, was $675 per square foot, or a pretty good deal. Axion says that the thermoplastic bridge cost half as much as a comparable steel bridge, and will last more than twice as long, with no hassle. It says that its thermoplastic is resistant to acids, salts, abrasion, and even ultraviolet light, which destroys only 0.003 inches of the plastic per year, far less than corrosion would destroy on a steel bridge. According to Dunmire, this is the bridge of the future. It’s got a lifespan of at least fifty years, and requires no maintenance, because it doesn’t corrode.

  Ironically enough, Axion manufactures the plastic in Portland, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River, thirty miles northeast of Bethlehem, where steel for the Golden Gate Bridge was made eighty years ago. Axion recognizes the modern opportunity before it by pointing out that the global demand for infrastructure upgrades is in the trillions of dollars. As a result, it now calls its patented thermoplastic technology “disruptive,” which is part of the reason that Dunmire likes it so much. The material will disrupt the American steel industry, and maybe the tasks of bridge inspectors. (It remains to be seen if it will disrupt the endocrine systems of the biological systems nearby.) But mostly, it disrupts the constant battle against corrosion.

  Plastic won’t work for engines of automobiles, but it will for their exteriors and maybe their frames, making them lighter and more efficient. Boats, as mortal as humans, remain destined to be made of metal. Same for pipelines and cans. Alternatives remain a long way away but are not unimaginable. Most statues, the most durable of our creations but also the most old-fashioned, seem fated to be fashioned of metal forever. Calder or not, they’ll go on corroding. Like babies or old men, they’ll always need some form of care: cleaning, waxing, blasting, or artificial patination.

  To deal with corrosion today, the authors of the 2011 National Academies report made some suggestions. As they saw it, of the various government agencies dealing with corrosion, only the DOD and NASA had comprehensive, well-funded plans. The DOD program, they wrote, “might serve as a model for what should be sought in other large government organizations.” Each federal agency or department, they continued, should draw up a corrosion road map, addressing the four “Corrosion Grand Challenges.” These were: (1) developing corrosion-resistant materials and coatings; (2) predicting corrosion; (3) modeling corrosion through lab tests; and (4) outlining a corrosion prognosis (in other words, when objects will need repairs, overhaul, or replacement). This they called a “national corrosion strategy.” They said an “overall federal effort,” including support from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, should address the various road maps. They called for documenting current federal expenditures on corrosion research and mitigation, and then funding a “multi-agency effort for high-risk, high-reward research.” They called for collaboration among departments and agencies with state governments, professional societies, industry groups, and standards-making bodies. They called for the creation of a corrosion consortium much like the Human Genome Project, to store the vast amount of thermochemical data on metals and the ways they rust in various environments. They hinted at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s success in a similar endeavor, and pointed out that since corrosion research tended to find its way into applications at a “glacial pace,” this would revolutionize the field. They agreed with the Defense Science Board Task Force’s conclusion that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” They wrote, “The committee believes that government-wide as well as society- and industry-wide recognition of the scope of the corrosion problem and a well-defined, coordinated, and reliably resourced program would have a high payoff for the nation.”

  Nobody, the authors wrote, seriously understood the need to conserve national resources. “Corrosion affects all aspects of society, in particular, the areas where the federal government is investing: education, infrastructure, health, public safety, energy, the environment, and national security.”

  My own opinion, after a couple of years pondering rust, is that the Department of Transportation ought to turn to galvanizing bridges in the great many places where possible and where paint isn’t cutting it.

  The Food and Drug Administration ought to insist on part-per-trillion analyses of the endocrine-disrupting agents at the heart of corrosion-preventing epoxies lining food and beverage cans. In the meantime, it ought to put labels on all cans stating that pregnant women should not consume foods or beverages from cans.

  Congress ought to tighten minimum pipeline inspection standards and grant more enforcement powers to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. Opposing the construction of new pipelines is silly. Oil is only getting more valuable and likelier than ever to be shipped out of the ground to hungry consumers—myself included—by one means or another. Pipelines are the safest way to deliver the oil. Demanding that we know the condition that pipelines are in, on the other hand, is not silly. It’s what Senator Warren Magnuson wanted to do when he said, “Keep the Big Boys honest.” To keep ’em honest, we ought to demand more frequent inline inspections (for leaks and metal loss), lower metal-loss intervention criteria, make the information public, and impose higher penalties for failing to abide. Fines need to be proportional to the dollars flowing out of the pipe; otherwise they’re just chump change. Offshore drilling ought to be contingent on stricter regulation. It is, after all, our oil, leased from our land, flowing through tubes on long stretches of yet more of our land. Following our rules is the least the industry should do. If Alyeska can send a smart pig from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez every three years and in so doing keep the Trans-Alaska Pipeline from suffering a corrosion-induced leak, every other pipeline operator ought to be able to do as much.

  The president ought to direct more funds to Dan Dunmire’s Pentagon office, considering the returns we’ll get. He ought to support the plan by the National Academies, calling for a civilian version of Dunmire’s office. He ought to say the word rust.

  Like any environmental story, dealing with rust should give us a little more respect for what’s public, a little more regard for the future. It should also educate us, showing that the right stuff is not thinking with your gut but the result of engineering-like analysis. Admiring only the shiny and new is what spoiled babies do. Admiring the practical and effective takes maturity. While children admire Buzz Lightyear for his bravery and strength and improvisation, the rest of us can admire Robert Baboian, Bhaskar Neogi, and Ed Laperle. Don’t we need some engineering heroes? Finally, unlike so many bleak environmental stories of the moral and practical var
iety, we may see results long before we degrade and die.

  EPILOGUE

  Before they got caught and set off the most expensive, most public, and most symbolic rust battle in American history, Ed Drummond and Stephen Rutherford spent that night in May 1980 sharing one sleeping bag and one down jacket high over the historic entrance to America. Shivering, they distracted themselves by reading Emerson, Dickinson, Frost, and Angelou out loud. Before dawn the next morning, a police officer leaned a twelve-foot ladder against the Lady, climbed to the top, and put a finger to his lips. “Psst,” he said. “Psst! Are you cold?” Drummond and Rutherford were suspicious; the other cops had spent most of the night taunting them. But they saw sincerity in this man. The cop’s name was Willie. He offered the climbers wool blankets and hot coffee. Drummond rappelled down to him, retrieved the offerings, and never saw the man again. He called him an angel in disguise.

  In court the next day, having charged Drummond and Rutherford with “malicious damage to government property,” the judge asked, “Who will pay this bond?” Just then, the door swung open, and in came Bill Kunstler, the most hated lawyer in America. “I will,” he said in that deep scratchy voice. His entrance was perfect. Dramatically, he posted the deed to his house on Gay Street. The judge put his head in his hands and said, “Oh God, it’s you.” He had the case moved far from his jurisdiction. To Drummond, Kunstler said later, “This is how things change, this is how things get done.”