Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  As a result of the publicity surrounding the stunt, authorities in California moved Geronimo Pratt from San Quentin to San Luis Obispo, and prison guards there gave him hell. Drummond visited him a few times and saw him deteriorate. Pratt put on weight, became cynical. To focus on the future, Drummond promised to take Pratt up El Capitan if and when he was released.

  Back in the Bay Area, Drummond and Rutherford fulfilled their community service by taking a handful of kids from Oakland into the Sierras, to a granite cliff called Lover’s Leap. There, they spent a weekend teaching the kids how to rock climb. On December 8, 1982, two years after John Lennon was murdered, Drummond climbed one of the Embarcadero Center towers and hung a banner that said Imagine No Arms. After San Francisco authorities promised to leave his banner up, he descended. Then they tore it down. A year later, he climbed the tower again to hang a huge button that said Yes on 12. It was in support of Proposition 12, which would freeze nuclear weapons development. While Drummond was climbing, the building manager threatened to cut his rope. While he was getting arrested, a journalist yelled out, “What’s your next stunt, Ed?” Drummond realized he was done climbing buildings for political purposes.

  For work, though, Drummond continued to climb buildings. He spent years working as a steeplejack in San Francisco. He got married on the roof of Grace Cathedral. When he learned of the extensive plans for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty, he thought about bidding for the job. “We’d have done it for a million,” he said.

  In 1997, twenty-seven years after he was first jailed, Pratt was exonerated for the murder of Caroline Olsen and awarded $4.5 million for false imprisonment. Drummond was right: he had been framed. Having spent nearly half his life in prison, Pratt wasn’t about to waste a few days on a granite monolith. In Los Angeles, when he was released, the crowd was so big and boisterous that Drummond only had a moment to say to Pratt, “Remember, we have a climb to do.” Pratt, carried by the crowd, replied only, “Oh yes, climbing.” Then he was gone. Drummond wrote Pratt a couple of letters and never heard back from him again.

  Pratt died in the summer of 2011. When he did, I was heartbroken to inform Drummond of the news.

  Since that cold night, Drummond hasn’t been back to the spiffed-up Statue of Liberty. He lives in San Francisco. Rutherford still lives in Berkeley. After thirty-four years of teaching science (including corrosion), he recently retired. He still has the suction cups they used. The two have met a few times since their Statue of Liberty days.

  Less than a month after Superintendent David Moffitt caught Drummond and Rutherford climbing, Croatian nationalists detonated two sticks of dynamite inside the base of the statue. Moffitt dealt with that surprise too and stayed at Liberty Island through the long restoration. He then spent two quiet years as superintendent of Colonial National Historical Park, near Jamestown, Virginia (out of the bombing and VIP zones), and four years in Washington as assistant director of visitor services for the National Park Service. He retired, moved to Williamsburg, Virginia, and started a landscaping business called Jusdavid Landscaping. He was the only employee. No climbers ever interrupted him. He retired a second time in 2003. Not long ago, he wrote me, “After all these years and with the exoneration of Geronimo Pratt, that protest, albeit illegal, seems almost admirable.” At seventy-four, his knees have given out, but he still likes to get down and pull weeds. He just needs help getting back up.

  Robert Baboian, the corrosion consultant, has been back to the statue many times to check up on her. He was there in October 1986, when NACE dedicated its National Corrosion Restoration Site plaque, and he was there a year later, only to discover that the plaque was corroding. It was turning green. The American Society for Metals and the American Society of Civil Engineers had installed their own historic landmark plaques in 1986, and they were doing fine. When ASM and ASCE executives heard about NACE’s rusty plaque, they laughed their butts off. Baboian took care of the problem. He had a New York sculpture artist strip off the old interior-grade coating and apply a durable, exterior-grade coating to it. The plaque has survived okay since. It’s not shiny and polished like ASM’s, but a dull, muted brown. It’s not corroding, though.

  Neither is Lady Liberty. For the first ten years after the restoration, Baboian inspected her annually. Every time, like some dignitary, he went straight to her torch. He poked around her crown. Then he descended stairways to her toes. From the ground, he looked up with a telephoto lens. After the mid-1990s, he resorted to biannual inspections. They take two days. Today, with the torch closed to the public, he revels in going up there. He’s seventy-nine years old and still vibrant. The statue is 128 years old and comparable. “She’s doing good, really good after twenty-five years,” Baboian said. “The stainless steel is holding up well. It doesn’t leak on the inside anymore.” Over the years, he said, most of the baking-soda-induced stains have faded, but a couple of prominent ones remain visible on the Lady’s neck and right temple. Guano accumulates in the numbers on the statue’s tablet but washes away with rain.

  Baboian said something that surprised me. “Pretty soon, the gold leaf will have to be redone.” The gilded torch has worn thin and, according to Baboian, will need fixing by 2016. Baboian had wanted the torch to be electroplated with nickel and then gold, like the statue atop the dome of the Rhode Island State House, but the restoration committee had resisted. When the torch gets re-re-re-re-done, Baboian hopes that someone heeds his advice.

  Officially, Baboian retired years ago, but from his home in Rhode Island he still consults under the name RB Corrosion Service. He takes on projects he likes, preserving an iron basilica in the Philippines, a bronze Buddha in Japan, the USS Monitor, the Enola Gay, the Capitol dome. He tells a lot of kids that they ought to be corrosion engineers. “You won’t ever have a problem getting a job,” he says. “Never ever. And you’ll get paid well.” He said his career in corrosion has treated him well. He owns two boats. He regularly gets out fishing off Cape Cod and often makes it down to Marco Island, Florida. In the most defiant act of all, he roots for the Red Sox.

  Three years after Bertha Krupp’s 150-foot stainless steel schooner was seized by Britain at the start of World War I, she was sold at auction. The Norwegian buyer gave Germania to his brother, who renamed her Exen and sailed her to New York. As any boat owner could have predicted, he went bankrupt. In 1921 his estate sold Exen to Gordon Woodbury, the former assistant secretary of the navy. He renamed her Half Moon, after Hudson’s ship, and refitted her lavishly. Off of Cape Charles, Virginia, the next year, en route to the South Seas, Woodbury sailed through such a storm that he nearly drowned. His quartermaster was washed overboard and lost. Woodbury limped home under tow from a Standard Oil tanker and sold the boat promptly. The next owner cut off the lead keel and sold the hull for scrap. The buyers renamed her Germania, towed her to Florida, and employed her as a floating restaurant and dance hall on the Miami River. Damaged in the hurricane of 1926, she sank. Raised, she was bought by a Captain Ernest Smiley and renamed Half Moon again. Smiley anchored Half Moon on a reef miles off of Florida, lived on board with his wife and son, and employed the vessel as a Prohibition-era cabaret. In a severe 1930 storm, the Smileys abandoned ship, and Half Moon broke free and ran aground less than a mile off of Key Biscayne. The Smileys were rescued, but Half Moon was not. For generations, she buried into the sand and was forgotten. Modern divers speculated about her identity, thinking her, perhaps, Haroldine.

  Mike Beach, an energetic scuba instructor and guide earning a master’s degree from the University of Florida’s Rosentiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, began writing his thesis about Half Moon not long after she was identified. Fifteen years and at least a hundred visits later, he took me out to see her. From a sandy park covered with palm trees, we hopped in sea kayaks and paddled out. The morning had been clear and calm, and the tide was slack, but the wind picked up halfway out and slowed our progress. Swells picked up, and the water, until then clear, got murkier
. Miami was visible behind the barrier island. Over the monotonous paddling, Beach told me he’d heard that hammerheads and bull sharks were out in the area. “We’ll be lucky if we see sharks,” he said. “If I see a shark, I’m jumping in.” Then he showed me scars on his left leg, and said he used to be a handsome guy. After a shark attack in 1996, he got four hundred stitches in his face and leg. “Lightning never strikes twice,” he said.

  When we tied our kayaks to the buoys marking the wreck twenty minutes later, I was not as excited to go in. I put on fins and goggles and a snorkel. Then I followed—or tried to follow—Beach. We started at the stern, which was maybe ten feet below the surface. He dived down into the dark blue water, pointed to the tip of the ship, and vanished beneath her skeletal frame. I kicked to keep from rising. She didn’t look stainless. She looked greenish and barnacle ridden. Then again, stainless steel doesn’t do well in saltwater. I popped back up on the surface, waiting for Beach. The man has lungs. The current pushed us toward the bow. Down he went again, and I followed. Back on the surface, when he mentioned a stingray and poisonous coral, I lost interest in seeing the bottommost hull of Half Moon. Five feet down, I could see the structure of her frame, the length of her stringers, the width of her beam. For fifteen minutes, I admired her form, contemplated the long journey that ended here and was still ending.

  Late that night, I found out that Beach—professor, triathlete, licensed coast guard captain, PhD in maritime history—is also a good drinker. Halfway through a bottle of Laphroaig, he told me that those were “pretty sharky conditions.” All for rust, I joked.

  Seven months later, the British Stainless Steel Association celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of Harry Brearley’s discovery. In Sheffield, on the side of a building, an artist painted a four-story-tall mural of the rebel whose persistence changed our expectation of metal. Industry magnates and a Member of Parliament spoke. An exhibit on Brearley opened at a museum. At a lavish dinner, his grand-niece, Anne Brearley, spoke briefly to great applause. The next day, at the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, his great-grandson, Warren Brearley, unveiled a plaque dedicating the new Brearley Suite.

  Forty-one days after the pig arrived in Valdez, Alyeska pumped 600,000 barrels of oil through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in one day. It hasn’t pushed as much crude through since. In the summer of 2013, when daily flow rates regularly dropped below 500,000 barrels, and often under 400,000 barrels, Bhaskar Neogi got the first hint of his data. Baker Hughes’s preliminary report said that TAPS had no imminent threats. Investigations along the pipeline confirmed the pig’s accuracy.

  In early September, a 10-inch steel disc showed up in Valdez, perplexing many. Alyeska figured out that it was part of a valve at mile 385 that had been used, in the 1970s, to demonstrate the integrity of the pipeline (using water pressure). In 2012 Alyeska had encapsulated the old valve—apparently just in the nick of time. When the threaded O-ring failed, and the steel disc began swimming south in a stream of crude, no oil was spilled. Examining pig data, Neogi reassured higher-ups that 150 other such valves along the pipeline were in fine shape.

  Later that month, Neogi was promoted to Alyeska’s senior director of risk and compliance. The move put him among the nine senior company leaders who report directly to the president. Roughly a hundred people work for him, and he travels as much as ever. As of early 2014, though plans were afoot for a 2015 pig run, Alyeska still hadn’t hired a replacement as the pipeline’s integrity manager.

  Neogi’s fish are doing fine.

  Ben Wasson also landed in Alyeska’s Regulatory Affairs department. Todd Church, the manager of the Operations Control Center, who said that there was enough oil at Prudhoe Bay to get him through his career at Alyeska, moved on to another company before finding out.

  At Baker Hughes, Devin Gibbs has been so busy inspecting pipelines that when I called his office and said I was trying to reach Devin Gibbs, the receptionist laughed and said, “And how’s that going?” Alejo Porras has been just as busy, inspecting pipelines from Ontario to Colombia.

  Bill Flanders and Dennis Hinnah, PHMSA’s senior regulators in Alaska, who saw their roles as “trust but verify,” retired within a month of each other.

  Since Neogi began planning the 2013 pig run, California, as serious about its water as Alaska is about its oil, has pioneered the use of a modified MFL pig in its mortar-lined water mains. San Francisco did it first, pigging thirteen miles of three parallel fifty-inch pipelines running across the San Joaquin Valley in 2010. Through these pipes, built as early as the 1930s, travels water from Hetch Hetchy to millions of people. San Francisco’s public utilities commission hired a company called Emtek (since acquired by Pure Technologies) to develop the pig, and Emtek came up with a custom, retractable MFL pig that looks something like a giant Tinker Toy made from tent poles. Thanks to fiercely strong magnets and modified algorithms, the pig can detect anomalies in steel covered in up to an inch of mortar, as these water mains are. Since there’s no pig launcher or receiver in the San Joaquin pipelines, the logistics get ugly. To run the pig through a line, the line must be drained, dewatered, and opened. Through a manhole, two thousand pounds of parts are lowered into the pipe, and there assembled into a pig. A custom electric all-terrain vehicle, with big rubber tires, is also lowered into the pipe—and this pulls the pig. It’s not fast. When the driver of the ATV gets to a butterfly valve, through which neither tool nor ATV can proceed, both are disassembled, passed through it, and reassembled on the other side. This takes two days. As such, in a monthlong shutdown, San Francisco may get only a week’s worth of pigging and collect data from only five miles of pipe. But San Francisco has found it valuable. Thanks to the pig, the city found more than one thousand anomalies in the encased steel. Most were under 30 percent wall thickness, but ten were around 40 percent, and one measured 90 percent. San Francisco found the pig so valuable that it bought the tool, put it in a warehouse, and has plans to keep using it until all three lines have been inspected.

  In an unusual show of Californian city sisterhood, San Francisco loaned the tool to San Diego in late 2011, so that the county water authority could inspect a six-foot water main in San Marcos built in 1958. In fifty years, it had been inspected only a handful of times, and then only visually. The status of exterior corrosion on the pipe was a mystery. Up steep sections of this pipe, the ATV and pig were winched. As expected, the logistics were nightmarish. In a week, the tool covered a mere five miles—which made the sucker in Alaska seem to be moving at warp speed. But it found severe anomalies, and left employees of the San Diego County Water Authority satisfied and impressed. They had plans to use the tool again, on a different section of their system, in 2014.

  Myron Shenkiryk, Pure Technologies’s western regional manager, told me that since the California utilities began pigging some water mains, a dozen other water utilities, from all over the country, have gotten in touch. Apparently the company has a monopoly; the big players in the pigging industry don’t like the logistical nightmare involved with pigging water lines. Water money also pales compared to oil and gas money. Securing that monopoly, Pure Technologies could inspect sewage lines, which, on the plus side, usually have pig launchers and receivers. “Most agencies don’t even know that the technology exists,” Shenkiryk said.

  Since the spring of 2011, Ball has spat out more than a hundred billion cans. The company did not invite me back to Can School, which remains popular, and for which Ed Laperle still leads tours of the corrosion lab. Laperle has been as busy as ever—testing eight hundred beverages in 2013. “Everybody’s looking for the next Rockstar,” he said. With at least a couple of the experimental beverages, he encountered what he called “unique corrosion scenarios,” but insisted that the details were confidential.

  Alyssha Eve Csük spent the year away from the Bethlehem Steel works, teaching photography at Appalachian State University. She moved out of her studio and bought a house just outside town. She wa
s selected as a featured artist by Hahnemühle. (And contracted for this book’s cover image.) As always, she yearns to get out and shoot more.

  Cynthia Castillo, Home Depot’s buyer of rust products, transferred from the paint department to the decor department a month after I saw her. The new rust product merchant came from the electrical department.

  For the first time in years, John Carmona of the Rust Store hasn’t upgraded to a bigger facility. He has, though, hired two more employees and now stocks nearly three thousand SKUs. Business is so good that he has little time to test the many samples piling up on his desk. He’s had no cheesehead emergencies.

  Phil Rahrig, pushing the agenda of the American Galvanizers Association, has been playing as much defense as offense. Since April 2013, the defense has regarded nearly one hundred galvanized rods in the east span of the new San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge that failed prematurely, and which led many observers to jump to conclusions about not just the few thousand other rods but also the fundamental worth of galvanizing. Annoyed by the innuendo, he called the failures a manufacturing error. Apparently the company that manufactured the rods lost some of its records and accidentally heat treated the rods twice, weakening them. The galvanizer, he insisted, was innocent; the process, he said, still as valuable as ever. Rahrig’s offense has entailed taking on the stainless steel industry in addition to the paint industry. In New York, that’s meant convincing authorities that galvanized parts were suited for the Tappan Zee Bridge. “Stainless is not Kryptonite,” he said, as if I were considering purchasing a few hundred tons of the stuff. Then he added, “That they were looking at stainless tells me they were considering maintenance costs of the project. That’s very good news.” Indeed, Rahrig suspects that government agencies have begun to more seriously consider life-cycle costs. The evidence: in the last decade, demand for galvanized parts has increased 60 percent, to four million tons annually. Further evidence: Rahrig’s loathing for the DOT has ebbed a bit. A great many of those tons have gone toward the solar industry, building frames for so many panels. A lesser amount has gone toward Denver’s new light-rail system, whose stations are painted beige. They’re not just painted. They’re duplexed. Said Rahrig: “I know the galvanizing is underneath.”