NACE got a new president and began reforming the disbanded committee on National Corrosion Restoration Sites. The organization is considering commemorating a battleship as well as the restored dome of the US Capitol. Last I checked, it had not yet considered the material for its plaques.
Maren Leed, who got corrosion in front of Senator Daniel Akaka and into federal code, works as a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. “It’s not like I’m a corrosion hero,” she said. “I was just doing my job.” She credits Congress. “Congress is a pretty screwed-up place, but every now and then they can do some okay things.” Cliff Johnson, the public affairs guy from NACE who brought corrosion to Leed’s plate, now works as the president of Pipeline Research Council International—where he looks at pigging. Leed called him the luckiest nonlobbiest she’s ever met. Had the new ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee been from, say, Wyoming, the Pentagon’s corrosion office never would have been created. But it was a good idea, and the conditions were right. As far as congressional sausage goes, this was pretty clean.
Dan Dunmire, who as a result of their efforts has been running with corrosion for the last decade, has since impressed Leed. “I was worried that because of him being an odd duck, it would hamper his ability to get things done in the department,” she said. “But he’s got an infectious passion, and he’s eternally optimistic.” Larry Lee, Dunmire’s chief of staff, said, “It surprises a lot of people that we were able to pull off a project as mundane as this.” Then he added, “We created a monster!”
When the rust exhibit opened at the Orlando Science Center in March 2013, Dunmire couldn’t go because of federal sequestration. He’d intended to speak at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Instead, he flew to Orlando on his own funds and kept a low profile. “Nothing can stop me,” he said. “Nothing.” He learned that Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s immensely valuable national petroleum company, wanted to support one such exhibit in Saudi Arabia, and that NACE yearned to get behind one in Houston. Three weeks before Christmas, his office won an award for the exhibit from the National Training and Simulation Association. Unable to resist a Star Trek pun, he announced that the exhibit was inspiring “the next generation of infrastructure preservationists.” Pleasing Dunmire even more, the Carnegie Science Center, in Pittsburgh, expressed interest.
The 2013 government shutdown didn’t impair his efforts, either. Given a week off, he filled his time with hobbies that were “very related” to his work. “My life is my job,” he explained. “I don’t wanna retire. I don’t wanna play golf. I don’t wanna be on the beach or the mountains. I wanna do my job.” He’d been getting the script for LeVar 6 approved, filming parts in Panama, planning to film other parts in Nevada. He’d been looking into another video game about corrosion, and interactive training modules for the Defense Acquisition University. He’d been following progress at Akron’s corrosion engineering program—whose first twelve students, a year before they were to graduate, had job offers from California and Texas. He planned to attend their graduation in the spring of 2015. When I asked if he was making any attempt to stay healthy, he laughed it off. When I asked if he was thinking about LeVar 7—even though LeVar had said he was out after six—he said, “Never say never.”
In late April 2013, Dunmire and a few of his team went to Oberammergau, Germany, for a three-day corrosion workshop at the NATO School. A few dozen people from allied nations attended. On the first day, after introductions and brief presentations by corrosion officials from the United States, England, France, and Germany, Juergen Czarnecki, the head of the German Ministry of Defense’s corrosion program, got up to speak. At the microphone, Czarnecki—the esteemed bearer of a PhD in nuclear physics—went through a long, involved presentation called “The Art of Corrosion.” He mentioned reforms to Germany’s constitution, reorganization of the Bundeswehr, research at the Wehrwissenschaftliches Institut für Werk- und Betriebsstoffe. Then, at the end of his presentation, he ran through five items on a to-do list. The last was bright red. He said the gathered nations had to use the United States as a model, and called for the adoption of “the Dunmire Process.”
There were chuckles in the audience—good chuckles. Dunmire was stunned. He stared at the screen in disbelief—that crazy head-down stare—and began shaking his head. To Czarnecki, he said, “What are you doing?” He was honored, but he thought the phrase wouldn’t sell well in Washington. Dunmire couldn’t imagine anybody naming anything positive after him, and thought it violated protocol. “You don’t name things after career bureaucrats,” he said. He also said, “I don’t want anything named after me. I want the program to survive.”
Since then, though he insists he’s no narcissist, the term has grown on him. It’s not like he coined it. “It’s like the Marshall Plan,” he said. “Marshall thought it should be the Truman Plan, and Truman said no, it’s the Marshall Plan.” Now, at work, he refers to the Dunmire Process regularly. “Oh my God,” he’ll say while wrestling with a program, “we have to use the Dunmire Process!” America’s allies, apparently, feel the same way.
I asked Dunmire to define the Dunmire Process. He said it was imagination mixed with Henri Fayol’s management process, and insisted his team—which he called his posse—created it, and deserves the credit. Juergen Czarnecki had meant the Dunmire Process to mean treating corrosion like calculus—incorporating the subject into standard curricula, which Larry Lee had been pushing for years. Larry Lee saw the Dunmire Process as the man in charge riding away on a horse, throwing out off-the-wall ideas, while foot soldiers chased and offered support. Rich Hays, Dunmire’s deputy, saw it as more of an art than a science, hinging on nonlinear thinking.
I asked Dunmire, “Is Star Trek part of the Dunmire Process?” “Of course Star Trek is in there. Of course,” he said. “In the original series, what did McCoy say? ‘The only constant in the universe is bureaucracy.’ It’s true, isn’t it? He said, ‘I don’t care if you’re a benevolent dictatorship, you have to have bureaucracy to do things.’ ” Dunmire refined his definition. He said he looks at challenges through a lens formed by his military background, his business background, his work at Heinz, and Star Trek. “When James Tiberius Kirk said, ‘Risk is our business,’ or ‘You gotta do the right thing,’ or ‘Stay in that chair as long as . . .’ ” He trailed off. Then he restarted. “What would Kirk do?
“Here I am, sixty years old, and something’s getting named after me, and I’m still breathing. That to me makes it neat.” He giggled. He’d told me before that he never yearned for recognition or awards, only to contribute to this earthly existence such that someday, whether fired or retired, he could look in the mirror and say, “I gave my full measure,” rather than “I fucked up.” That it wasn’t a DOD award didn’t matter; that he wasn’t the most liked man in the Pentagon was a faraway concern. That his budget remained uncertain rolled right off him. “That’s what I find most amusing. I mean, big deal, some guy gets a statue named after him after he’s dead. Or a building, or an award. But he’s dead. He’s dead! But I’m alive. I am alive!”
After a century of unmitigated corrosion, Lady Liberty had developed cracks, scabs, stains, holes, and rust boogers—here investigated by architectural historian Isabel Hill on March 28, 1985. (Photo by Jet Lowe, courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Historic American Engineering Record—HAER NY, 31-NEYO, 89–180)
A famous Yosemite climber once said that he wasn’t sure if Ed Drummond, here in Scotland in 1970, was a poet who climbed or a climber who wrote poetry. His 1980 stunt climb on the Statue of Liberty sparked the most dramatic corrosion battle in American history. (Photo courtesy Ed Drummond)
In renovating the Statue of Liberty, the National Park Service sought the advice of Robert Baboian, who ran the corrosion lab at Texas Instruments’ office in Attleboro, Massachusetts. At the end of 1983, he began measuring the thickness of the patina on Lady Liberty’s copper. Based on
his results, he figured her skin would survive a thousand years. (Photo courtesy Robert Baboian)
During the reign of King Charles II, Robert Boyle, the wealthy English “father of chemistry,” took up the first proper investigation of rust. His experiments with saltwater, lemon juice, vinegar, urine, and various acids showed that all metals, even gold, were vulnerable. (Image courtesy Cambridge University Library and Early English Books Online/ProQuest)
Rust photographer extraordinaire Alyssha Eve Csük headed into Bethlehem Steel for the 377th time in November of 2012. Over the last decade, she’s taken nearly 30,000 stunning shots of rust. (Photo courtesy of the author)
Dan Dunmire, the Pentagon’s corrosion ambassador and nation’s highest-ranked rust official, has chosen LeVar Burton to wage a public campaign against rust, which costs the Department of Defense $15 billion annually. Here, in a Florida production studio in October of 2012, Dunmire suggests changes to the script of the fifth of seven corrosion videos Burton has hosted. (Photo by Diana Zalucky, courtesy U.S. Department of Defense)
In 2004, the National Association of Corrosion Engineers published an “action-packed comic book adventure” to introduce eight- to fifteen-year-olds to the exciting world of rust. At the group’s 2013 conference, an actor dressed as the book’s superhero, Inspector Protector, posed for photos with NACE members and officials when not doing flips. (Image by Marion Integrated Marketing, courtesy of NACE-International)
In March of 2013, Bhaskar Neogi began a monthlong smart pig inspection of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, one of the heaviest metal things in the Western hemisphere—and the least accessible. On the day he launched the pig, it was a balmy ten below in Deadhorse, Alaska. (Photo courtesy of the author)
Howard EnDean, the father of modern rust-detecting pipeline pigs, had oil in his blood. On one day in 1956, EnDean filed patents for four varieties of smart pigs; one was at least fifteen years away from technical feasibility. (Photo by James Streiner, Gulf Oil Public Relations Department, courtesy Howard EnDean, Jr.)
John Carmona, proprietor of The Rust Store in Madison, Wisconsin, collects rusty stuff for product research. (Photo by Colleen Carmona, courtesy The Rust Store)
Some of the world’s first stainless steel—before it was called as much—was used to make the hull of Germania, which was renamed Half Moon. Here, off New York City in 1921, she was nearly pristine. A century later, the remains of the storied German schooner now rest—very much stained—in shallow water off Miami, Florida. (Photographer unknown, courtesy Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Because no good adventure ever works out as planned, thanks, first, to Matt Holmes and Jonathon Haradon for going in on that dumb sailboat eight years ago. You two are finer cabrones than I.
Enormous thanks to Doron Weber of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for supporting works like this that promote the public understanding of science. Humongous thanks, also, to Cindy Scripps and the Scripps Howard Foundation for supporting the Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, where the proposal for this book was born. In the modern media maelstrom, both institutions calmed the seas.
To Lydia Dixon, Kevin Tompsett, Andrew Green, Kevin Davis, Nick Masson, Erin Newton, Danny Inman, Ben Berk, Michael Cody, Rob Gorski, Dan Becker, Matt Nelson, and Jeff Purton: thanks for each having two good ears, two strong legs, one good liver, and a flexible schedule.
To Colin O’Farrell, Ben Miller, Thaddeus Law, Emilie Fetscher, and Mike Beach: thanks for comfortable beds/couches.
To Liz Roberts, Erin Fletcher, Adam Hermans, Walker and Bratton Holmes, Brian Feldman, Cameron Walker, Tasha Eichenseher, Jonathan Thompson, Tom Yulsman, and Brian Staveley: thank you so much for harsh and generous edits and tiny but crucial fixes.
To Michael Kodas, Jerry Redfern, Leah Goodman, Florence Williams, Dan Baum, Mary Roach, Hillary Rosner, Phil Higgs, Erin Espelie, Evan P. Schneider, Brooke Borel, and, most of all, Mom and Dad: thank you heartily for support and writerly encouragement.
I’m indebted to many fine librarians and archivists, among them Alexia MacClain and Jim Roan of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries; Sue Beates of the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Pennsylvania; Linda Cheresnowski of the Barbara Morgan Harvey Center for the Study of Oil Heritage at the Charles Suhr Library at Clarion University in Oil City, Pennsylvania; Carol Worster of the Gas Technology Institute; Theo Long of the Biscayne Nature Center; Roger Smith of Florida’s Bureau of Archaeological Research; Sarah Martin and Steve Jebson of the UK Met Office; Hilda Kaune of the Institute of Materials, Minerals, and Mining in London, UK; William Davis of the Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives; and the interlibrary loan staff at University of Colorado.
Thanks to Lynda Sather, Katie Pesznecker, Kate Dugan, and Michelle Egan of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company; to Cheryl Irwin of the DOD; to Alysa Reich of NACE.
Immense gratitude to Ed Drummond, Stephen Rutherford, David Moffitt, Howard EnDean, Jr., Ralph Nader, Stuart Eynon, and others for scraping through old memories.
Bigger thanks to Alyssha Eve Csük, Bhaskar Neogi, Dan Dunmire, and Ed Laperle for letting me follow you around and ask a lot of dumb questions.
For believing in a new guy and sharpening my proposal, utmost thanks to Richard Morris, at Janklow & Nesbit. And for ironing out my wrinkles and making me look good, huge thanks to Nick Greene, Jofie Ferrari-Adler, and the crew at Simon & Schuster.
© ELIZABETH RILEY
JONATHAN WALDMAN has written for Outside, The Washington Post, and McSweeney’s, and also worked as a forklift driver, arborist, summer camp director, sticker salesman, and cook. He grew up in Washington, DC, studied writing at Dartmouth and Boston University’s Knight Center for Science Journalism, and was recently a Ted Scripps Fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado. Rust is his first book. Visit him online at jonnywaldman.com.
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Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui
Map by Paul J. Pugliese
Jacket design by Jonathan Bush
Endpaper images and jacket photograph © Alyssha Eve Csük
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Waldman, Jonathan.
Rust : the longest war / Jonathan Waldman.
pages cm
1. Corrosion and anti-corrosives—History. 2. Corrosion and anti-corrosives—Anecdotes. I. Title.
TA418.74.W35 2015
620.1'1223—dc23
2014043291
ISBN 978-1-4516-9159-7
ISBN 978-1-
4516-9161-0 (ebook)
Rust: The Longest War Page 35
