Mining Disaster Books

As the massive oil bust continued to take its toll, I eventually found myself in a new line of work, so to speak.  I'm doing work that's both in line with what I was doing previously, but with some new context: hardrock mining. 

I strongly believe that all engineers should, ideally about once a year, read an engineering disaster book.  You a lot when everything goes massively sideways and you point to that and say, 'not that. not that ever again.'

The Deep Dark

     This one focuses on the Sunshine Mining Disaster of 40 years ago where 91 people died.  It has a very good introduction to mining terminology in the beginning (what's a drift, what's a rib, what's mucking).  In the middle, it focuses on the lives of the miners and, in my opinion, really drags on and on.  Quite a few miners also just basically sat there and suffocated to death; the initial feeling was the fire would be dealt with quickly and they'd go back to work, so they didn't want to evacuate.  There are about 2 pages at the very end of the book where they (too rapidly, I think) skip over what caused the disaster.  While never definitively solved (arson was an early theory, but that's pretty unlikely), the book presents a pretty compelling case that a combination of wood storage, oxyfuel cutting, and especially early spray foam caused the fire.  The spray foam reminded me strongly of the Brown's Ferry candle incident.  Don't miss those 2 pages because they're a key part of the book.  I'd wish the editor had gotten the author to expand on those 2 pages and tighten up the middle. 

Thunder on the Mountain

     The most recent disaster covered, this book is the most expansive, in terms of scope, of the three.  It covers the modern coal market (with it's bifurcation between the dying thermal coal market and the growing metallurgical coal market), politics (West Virginia politics and the rise of Don Blankeship as kingmaker), the disaster itself.  On both of the other books, some miners were able to save themselves against great odds.  On the Upper Big Branch mine, none were.  There was one particularly gruesome detail that one person was missing for a very long time, even though rescuers kept walking right by him.  It was only when the stench became overpowering that someone looked up...  Ew.  Talk about a gruesome way to go.  A particularly interesting part of the book was where they got coal industry insiders who didn't work for Massey (and a few who did) who slammed the hell out of how Blankeship operated.  It reminded me of BP after Macondo.   

Fire and Brimstone

     Unquestionably the best written of the trio, Fire and Brimstone chronicles the oldest of the disasters, the 1917 Speculator Disaster where 168 died.  This book also covers the political fallout of the disaster and the context with the Anaconda Mining company's chokehold on Montana.  This book is definitely my favorite of the three.  The thing I was really amazed with was how, despite very primitive technology, how well the workers were able to immediately respond to the disaster, despite extremely primitive technology.  Some workers immediately understood the dangers of the fire and began building bulkheads to entomb themselves and survived the disasters.  The bravery of the rescuers using very primitive breathing rigs was also remarkable; the equipment was very limited, but they worked within those limitations extremely well. 

Best book review I've ever read

"The Worst Book Ever Written on Hurricane Katrina" - LGM

Full review at the Boston Review .

From LGM:
Even Cowen’s admissions of error are designed to promote an agenda to destroy traditional education. Noting that New Orleans lacks the well-trained citizenry that will attract many corporations, he gives a half-hearted nod toward a liberal arts education yet calls himself “partly to blame” for training students in “medieval French literature, or higher math, or even critical thinking” because many jobs do not require these skills.
A public apology for supporting the humanities and critical thinking from a university president. You can imagine how this sent me through the roof.
The Inevitable City is one of the worst books I have ever read. Lucky for me I have an outlet when I face that situation. I read it so you don’t have to.

I actually skimmed the book once in a bookstore. There's actually 2 full pages in there where he attacks Ashley Morris as a 'dangerous person from the Internet.'

Reading that review gave me a happy.

Book Review: "Fire on the Horizon"

It's about 2 years since everyone was glued to their TV's watching ROV's try and plug a hole in the bottom of the sea. Since then, numerous books have been published chronicling the explosion and the spill. Here are just a few writups of the multitude of books:

9 Books - LA Times

Publishers have no shortage of books - NY Times

In Book Form - MoJo

Each book focuses on a slightly different aspect of the disaster. After reading a few reviews, I chose Fire On The Horizon: The Untold Story Of The Gulf Oil Disaster by John Konrad and Tom Schroder.

Konrad holds an Unlimited Master's licence and has worked for many years on oil rigs. In his off time, he started a Maritime site called GCaptain. It's actually how I first heard about the Deepwater Horizon fire (one of the reasons I picked the book; they beat everyone else to the punch).

The book gives excellent background to the leadup to the disaster. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the rig's construction in a South Korean shipyard. The maritime background of Konrad helps out a lot. The book nails the maritime aspects of the disaster. Konrad also knew some of the members of the crew, since he worked for Transocean for a time and graduated CUNY Maritime at about the same time as some of the maritime crew.

The cultural aspects of life onboard a rig, while probably not telling 100% true stories, does convey the culture pretty well. They do a good job in humanizing the crew of the rig.

I have two big criticisms of the book. First, the book is overly kind to the boots on the ground. Normally, I'd agree, but I'm not quite sure in this case. I think there is some blame that deserves to say with the field team. The book also really lets Captain Kutcha off light (although I believe Konrad was friends with Ktucha, so there's one explanation). The other criticism is when they get to the complicated petroleum engineering of the actual well construction, it's just a poorly written summary of David Hammer's writing. They lean on the Picayune's writing without giving anything new nor do they even properly summarize it. It takes them more than half of the book to even get to the drilling operations. Pages 128-130 really needs some editing because it's clunky and if I didn't know exactly what they were trying to explain before I read a sentence, I'd be lost. That was pretty disappointing. I'll hunt for another book to compliment that part.* There's also very little coverage of the oil spill (the first half is background, then 1/3 is the actual Macondo well and fire, then the balance is aftermath, spill, widows, etc.).

There's also one thing that I knew about, but didn't realize. What did the Titanic and the Deepwater Horizon have in common? Not enough lifeboat space. A major problem with current lifeboat standards is IMO rules on dictate lifeboat design based off "50th-percentile" standards. In other words, the lifeboat design is only meant to accommodate the average member of the public (~160 lbs.), not the average rig hand. On a Gulf of Mexico rig, almost everyone weighs at least 180 lbs. and there's guaranteed to be at least a few 280-300 lbs workers. The Deepwater Horizon only tested its full lifeboat capacity once in Korea, and that was with 110-lb. Koreans. Once in the Gulf of Mexico, given the larger crew, the Deepwater Horizon couldn't actually conduct a full evacuation without resorting to the use of inflatable rafts. If you also had any seriously injured personnel on a stretcher, you'd lose another 6 seats per stretcher on top of that!

This isn't something new. I heard about this years ago. Here's an International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC) notice from before the Deepwater Horizon incident:

Anthropomorphic compatibility. Most SOLAS-approved lifeboats have been approved on the basis of an assumed occupant mass of 75 kg (≈ 165 lb). The IMO has recently revised its requirements to increase the assumed occupant mass for lifeboats on most new installations to 82.5 kg (≈ 182 lb). IMO did not alter the associated seat width standard, which remains 430 mm (≈ 17 in), when increasing the assumed occupant mass to 82.5 kg. A so-called “Gulf of Mexico standard” is being used by some that assumes an occupant weight of 210 lbs (≈ 95 kg) with a corresponding seat width of 21 in (≈ 530 mm). This matter is also being addressed by coastal State authorities in the North Sea.

Every project I've worked on has used 220-240 lbs. as an average weight. A company I work for actually did a survey of their employees entitled "How Big is Bubba's Butt" that was the source of the higher figure. It's also common to leave room for one stretcher without compromising seating capacity. Also, davit-launched inflatable liferafts are unreasonably complicated to use in an emergency situation.

Every large Gulf of Mexico installation should be audited to ensure that they can actually conduct an evacuation in a realistic manner. Tests should be robust (a sign of a nice and rigorous test is failure, like this one). Not leaving enough margin for actual crew weight or overly complicated launching isn't sufficient.

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* Debating between Bob Cavnar's book and Achenbach's book. Anyone read either?

Book Review: The Gun by CJ Chivers

Two histories have recently come out about the AK-47. Larry Kahaner's book and CJ Chivers' book. I read this LGM Review and decided on the later.

Chivers' book is more a history of automatic weapons in general and then focusing in on why the AK-47 was so successful. There is a large section in there about the M-16's early teething problems that will make your blood boil (the blame for which he places squarely on Colt's greed and the DoD's incompetence). There have been approximately 100 million units of AK-family weapons produced; the M-1 Carbine, the most produced weapon of WWII only had 6 million units built. The AK is "so easy a child can use it... and they do".

Chivers is a good writer. He's won a few Pulitzers while working for the NY Times in Afghanistan, Iraq and Georgia during the South Ossetian War. He served as a Marine in the first Gulf War. He knows weapons inside and out. I love his explanation of how an engineer must juggle compromises to reach his design. He's a fantastic researcher (the notes section is extensive and has a few funny little stories). One of my favorite stories comes from the Civil War. There were several draft riots in New York. During one, a mob marched down the street to burn down the New York Times. Now, you normally think of the NY Times as a Democratic Party paper and incredibly 'anti-gun,' but in the Civil War, the NY Times was ardently Republican and the editor in chief personally manned the hand-crank of one of three Gatling guns. The editor was not about to let HIS paper get ransacked. He had the 1st story covered in wet newspaper and stared down the protesters over the barrel of a gun. The mob took one look at that editor and decided to burn down another abolitionist newspaper (the New York Tribune) instead.

One of the coolest things about the book is the binding. For about $10 on Amazon, you get a nicely bound hardback. The pages are nice and thick and have a good texture to it. The coolest part is the cover. It has a set of grains to it and when you pick the book up just the right way, it feels like the foregrip of an AK.

My biggest gripe about the book was the photographs. Only about half of them follow the book, while the rest seem like a random allotment from a stockphoto site. I know that Chivers could have done better. He has an awesome blog with all sorts of great photos he's taken in war zones. Check out this post on Rebel Graffiti of Muamar Qadafi.

Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones, the TV show is done for the season. To fill the time (an get into some fiction, for a change), I've picked up the books. I've finished Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings and started A Storm of Swords.

The books are pretty good. I've never read about a character I've wanted to hate more than the little impudent whelp Joffrey. (MINOR SPOILER, Highlight to read: Joffrey takes a crossbow to a crowd of people begging for bread.)

To get more of your fix of Game of Thrones, check out First Draft's awesome commentary. Wired: Call the Banners goes through a bit of the strategy of the characters (by the Danger Room blog guys). Be warned: the Wired article has a few spoilers.

And now, here's Joffrey getting bitch slapped to close:

Bunch o' Book Reviews

It's been a while since I did a book review, but since I finished the P.E. exam and don't have any grad school (yet), I've been filling my time with book and depleted my "to read" pile.

Here are a whole bunch of quick reviews (with covers from Good Reads):


The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.
Loved it. Exhaustive technical coverage of the making of the bomb. It teaches lots of physics and project management. I wish I had read this book when I was in college. Rhodes has a writing style I really like. I've picked up Dark Sun and The Twilight of the Bombs. I've read Twilight of the Bomb and that one covers more of the political side (although the part where the IAEA tracks down the pieces and parts of Iraq's nuclear program is fantastic). Nuclear Renewal is dated crap and is to be avoided.


Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans by James Gill.
Fantastic. A must-read to understand New Orleans history and why New Orleans society is structured the way it is. There was a speech in one of the last Treme episodes where the old plutocrat describes how each successive generation tried to keep the next one down ('until the Standard Oil men left for Houston').


One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander by Sandy Woodward.
The Falklands War was a surprisingly nasty little war that everyone has sort of forgotten about (partly because the US was incredibly embarrassed by it; the Reagan administration loved the staunchly anti-communist Junta and the Brits, of course were Robin to our Batman). Woodward gives a lot of credit to the 'Argies' ("We should have realized a country that made great Formula One drivers also made for great fighter pilots"). Had the Argentinians either waited for the British to scrap their carriers or waited for the assembled fleet to fall apart from rust and overdue boiler maintenance, they would have won.


Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945 by Leo Marks.
Candice read it and then got me to read it. It's all about SOE's operations and field ciphers. Note that you always hear about Bletchley Park's cryptography, but never allied codes (except for maybe the Navajo codetalkers); that's because the allied codes were crap. One of the German cryptographers wrote a book about "Operation North Pole." The book itself is a bit frustrating at first. There's a lot of discussion about the confusing nature of SOE's command hierarchy. Leo Marks doesn't really understand it (which is the point), but it slows the beginning down. A lot of reviewers also thought it was way too technical, but I thought that was the best part of the book (explaining WOK's and one-time-pads). A very sad ending as well.


The Control of Nature by John McPhee.
I firmly believe that all engineers should read 1 'engineering disaster'-type book per year. I thought that To Engineer Is Human would do it, but I hated the explanation of fatigue failure, so I gave up on the book and moved on. I found the Control of Nature thanks to XKCD and loved it. Like a combination of Rising Tide, Bayou Farewell, and Inviting Disaster. It covers 3 topics: the Atchafalaya/Old River Control Structure, volcanic eruptions in Iceland, and debris flow in Los Angeles. The only drawback was the analogies (5 million gallons per minute is like ______) droned on too many times and I didn't like some of them.


The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer*.
A French/German kid from Alsace-Loraine enlists into the Grossdeuchland Division of the Wermacht. You rarely read histories of the losing army. This is another one Candice got me to read. This is, despite 50 years and the stumbling block of translation, one of the greatest war accounts ever written. Starkly anti-war. Almost the entire book is the long, slow retreat from Stalingrad. You'll be reading the book and you'll get to a part that really just reaches out and grabs you and shakes you. In one part of the book, he remarks how reading war accounts shouldn't be 'in the comfort of your own home, in a nice cozy chair, but instead in a field, cold, starving, tired, standing for hour after hour.'

UPDATE- More random thoughts.

On The Control of Nature: geologists must get pretty cocky around engineers. Geologists study mountain chains being worn down by erosion and here are the engineers proposing 'taming' a river.

On Silk and Cyanide: There's a great quote where Marks is visited by another cryptographer and they talk about political matters and then, as Marks writes, "He paid me the greatest compliment: he got technical." LOVE THAT QUOTE!

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* There's a little controversy about Sajer. Some think the book is a forgery, but I don't find that view very credible, although Sajer admits that it's more of an emotional book than a strictly factual reference. Guy is apparently still alive in Paris.

P. E. Exam Day

BR River Center
Originally uploaded by Noladishu

Well, yesterday I took the exam. I stayed in a hotel the night before nearby and man, Baton Rouge sure does suck.

I made sure to load up on coffee. I arrived early (they threaten you with not letting you in if you show up late) and the other test takers, being engineers, also showed up early. It was a pretty interesting sight there, all the engineers with their suitcases full of books. Wish I had taken a photo.

One nice thing: the proctors were extremely efficient and courteous. They kept the exam on time (unlike when I took the F.E.) and you didn't notice them during the exam, as it should be.

The exam was flat out hard. There's no other way of putting it. The test makers are extremely paranoid about content being posted, so I'll skip through that. I'll say that there were a few of my strengths that were completely absent from my question bank.

The morning section I was almost finished after 2 1/2 hours. There were a few questions I struggled with the rest of the time.

The afternoon section was far harder than the morning (although it matched up with my areas of expertise more). Each question took much longer. I used all the time allotted to me.

Especially in the afternoon, you've got to move quickly. There's no time to look through solved problems (I tried in the morning and it didn't help). The references that are the best are those that provide shortcuts or are tabulated data. A book full of tabulated data (like Keenan and Keyes or Crane 410) beats out the equations. I now know how all the old farts were able to launch a rocket to the moon with slide rules and all. It was those books of tabulated data. They are awesome and go a long way towards cutting down on calculation errors.

Out of the entire suitcase of books, here's what I actually touched during the exam:
The MERM (all hail the MERM). I also xeroxed the index (3-hole punched and bound, so it met the rules). That saved a lot of time.

Keenan and Keyes Steam Tables

Mark's Standard Handbook. I was able to pull a problem from one of the weirder tables inside.

Keenan's Gas Tables. A book I really, really wished I had studied with more.

Engineering Unit Conversions. A must. Big time saver.

Cameron Hydraulic Data. All the info in Cameron is in the MERM, but Cameron is so much handier. I think I also may have used Crane 410.

Shigley's Machine Design. I think I used it once.

Pocket Ref. Flipped through it for a value on something, I think.

All other texts in my giant suitcase were useless. For all of the code questions (CFR/ASME/etc.), they gave you the section of the code and you had to interpret it.

The best thing I did, honestly, was my own 3-ring binder full of material. I had several psychrometric charts, tons of Wikipedia data on the molecular weight of common gases, etc. I was flipping through that almost as much as the MERM.

Book Review: Normal Accidents

Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies

Recently, while talking about the Deepwater Horizon, someone recommended "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow. It's all about Normal Accident Theory [PDF]. The book is filled with all sorts of illustrative examples from a variety of industries (nuclear power, marine transport, aviation, etc.).

There's a huge database of incidents and near-misses. Here's an example from Fix the Pumps on why near misses are important. The most ground breaking part of the book is when he talks about "non-collision course collisions" where two vessels with radar in good weather will come close to each other, but are well away from colliding. Both bridge crews react poorly and the vessels collide, sometimes with deadly consequences (one example was from the Mississippi River near New Orleans - NTSB Report [PDF]).

He also constantly harps on the fact that "operator error", while a constant scapegoat, is actually usually a factor of design flaws or production pressure or something else. Operators get blamed for entirely too much, in Dr. Perrow's opinion. Also, lots of "safety systems" can serve to actually make a complex system more dangerous. Remember, Chernobyl was testing a new safety system the day it blew up. More does not necessarily mean better. If it just adds to the complexity or it requires too much maintenance or it leads to nuisance alarms that cause the operators to miss the real flaw, it's bad. Getting the RIGHT safety system is an important balancing act.

The book has its drawbacks, though. Dr. Perrow is a sociologist, so he gets on some things that, if you have a science or engineering background, you just shake your head at. For example, this edition was last updated in 1999 and he recommends buying a generator to prepare for Y2K. Oops. He also occasionally lets his personal political views push for conclusions beyond strictly what the data (at least as he's presented) supports (ex.- he advocates completely abandoning nuclear power).

There's a lot more to the book, but suffice to say, the book made me think. In the future, I think it will be good for my development as an engineer to ensure that I read at least one engineering disaster book per year.

Books on Edwin Edwards

One of the things that always frustrates me is learning history that's too recent for the history textbooks, but before I started to regularly read the newspaper. I've been interested in reading up on some recent Louisiana history and the Leo Honeycutt biography caught my eye:

Leo Honeycutt's "Edwin Edwards"

The book features extensive interviews of Edwin Edwards made while he was in prison. Frankly, the book stinks. The beginning is actually quite good and the book covers quite a lot of non-EWE-related Louisiana recent history, which I appreciated. The chronicling of the media's influence on campaigns is one of the best parts of the book. I also like how much the anti-Edwards camp is exposed as hypocrites (Foster for being pro-Duke, pro-gambling and Buddy Roemer for being the "father of legalized gambling in modern Louisiana"). Towards the end, though, the book became unreadably bad. James Gill was quoted extensively, but only at the end when it served the author's bias. There were a couple of quotes that, when a fuller quotation was given, would have conveyed the exact opposite of what Honeycutt was trying to portray. The book also had some minor typographical errors throughout, but for a first edition that was sort of rushed out, I'll forgive. The blatant pro-Edwards bias ruins the book towards the end. I couldn't finish the book, it was that bad.


Tyler Bridges' "Bad Bet on the Bayou"

Instead of finishing Honeycutt's book, I picked up Bad Bet on the Bayou. It is a history of gambling in Louisiana from the Louisiana State Lottery Company to the conviction of Edwin Edwards. The earlier history is fantastic. I loved how it described pre-suburbanization Jefferson Parish as nothing but thugs, scoundrels, and prostitutes. Sometimes, you'll hear suburbanites complain about all the corruption in New Orleans, but the shit that went down in the 'burbs is amazing.

Tyler Bridges really stuck it too Edwards. He got a little too preachy at times. His most effective passage was when he chronicled the damage done by gambling addiction to a half dozen Louisiana families.

After reading both books, first off, I would have never read nearly as much of the Honeycutt book had I read Bridges' book first. I'm also ardently anti-gambling and Bridges' book only reinforced my views. The best way to stop gambling is math education, but if we did that, half the state education budgets would be in the red!

As far as EWE goes, I think that Edwards' first two terms were OK, at least he didn't push gambling. His third was crap, but then again, it was the oil bust, so anyone would have had a hard time. Edwards' fourth term, well, I'll let the man describe it for himself:

"The best thing that could happen to me would be to win the election and die the next day"

-Edwin Edwards to John Maginnis, just before the runoff election against David Duke

Offshore History - "Offshore Pioneers"

I've been on the hunt for a good history of the offshore industry. So far, I haven't found a really good one.


The Prize is probably, overall, the best history of the oil industry. There are some omissions and minor errors, but from a story-telling standpoint, it can't be beat. It also doesn't really concentrate on offshore.


Oil 101 by Morgan Downey is probably the best from a pure factual and bias standpoint. Morgan Downey was an oil trader on Wall Street who had a very good grasp of the technical aspects of the oil industry. It's very dispassionate in its presentation and it's very, very thorough with a good chapter on Exploration and Production that takes up half the book. The problem with the book is its halfway a reference manual, so it's not much on narrative.


While hunting around I came upon a history of Brown & Root (B&R;):

Offshore Pioneers: Brown & Root and the History of Offshore Oil and Gas

It took a little while to find a copy, because it's be out of print for about 10 years. The book was put together by 3 history professors who got funding from Brown and Root, but it's openly disclosed in the forward, so you have a heads up about the bias. It's very pro-B&R;, obviously, but the advantage of that is they got access to so many key people. It's not a 100% whitewashing of history, but what I like is even if they would whitewash some of the B&R; history, they had no qualms about dumping on the competition.

For example, Shell's Cognac platform was built in '77-'78 by New Orleans-based J. Ray McDermott. It was a HUGE milestone in offshore engineering at the time. It was a fixed structure in over 1,000 feet of water that cost $250 million to build and weighed 59,000 tons.

Well, one of the things that's talked about in the book was that B&R; built a two platforms for Union Oil in almost as deep water (~955 feet vs. 1,025 feet for Cognac) that each cost less than $90 million. B&R; was better able to calculate the forces and their interactions and could thus shave down the weight of the tower down to 26,000 tons.

In a little jab at Shell, the platforms were named Cervaza and Cervaza Light (Garden Banks Blocks 160 & 158). You see, Cognac is expensive and beer is, well, not... Engineer humor... Hardy har har...

The two best chapters in the book weren't really about B&R; at all, though. They were about Project Mohole and Taylor Diving.

Project Mohole was an attempt to use an offshore drilling vessel in 15,000 feet of water to drill through another 25,000 feet of the earth's crust to the Mohorovičić discontinuity, collecting core samples the whole way down, and recover a piece of the Earth's mantle. Keep in mind, when Project Mohole was initiated, the deepest offshore well at that time was in only 200 feet of water. The project required taking existing technology and pushing it forward not just evolutionarily, but by leaps and bounds.

Today's most advanced Polycrystaline Drill Bits are direct descendants of the drill bit developed in the Phase I test. In that test, the drillship stayed in place with dynamic positioning, drilled an initial hole, and (through much trial and error) re-entered the original hole, and captured samples from a subsurface column of basalt. A drill bit studded with thousands of tiny diamonds was necessary to cut through the basalt, which was like drilling through hundreds of feet of steel.

Project Mohole suffered a series of major cost overruns and was always a target of political sniping. Eventually, the project was axed, mostly to pay for the Vietnam War. Imagine what sort of contributions to petroleum engineering, geology, and geophysics might have been made if it wasn't axed to pay for a pointless war...

As it was, prospects like BP's Tiber & Exxon's Blackbeard wouldn't be happening at this time without the jolt that Project Mohole gave to deepwater drilling. While things were a little better back then, private companies HATE spending money on R&D;, especially on things where the usefulness-horizon isn't in X-many quarters.

The other chapter I really liked was about Taylor Diving. If it's related to human beings breathing or working under water, it was developed either by the US Navy or Taylor.

The funniest thing is how Taylor Diving got its start. It was started by three guys. Two of them were Navy veterans and the third, Jean Valz, was a veteran of the French Resistance. In 1959, L. E. Minor, the head of engineering for B&R;, was out drinking on Bourbon Street and stopped in Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, one of his favorite watering holes. Moonlighting as a piano player was Jean Valz. The two struck up a conversation and by the end of the year, most of B&R;'s diving work was subbed out to Taylor. Both companies would later be bought by Halliburton.

Taylor Diving, as time went on, conducted research into underwater welding and saturation diving at their test facility in Belle Chasse, LA. They could simulate dives past 1,000 feet and could play around with air mixtures and welding filler rods and everything, all under close supervision by doctors.

Offshore Pioneers is good at filling in the details and dates for a lot of things I've heard of randomly working in the oil business, but not in a thorough, systematic way. I'm still on the hunt for one all-encompassing offshore history, though.

Book Review: Skunk Works

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed by Ben R. Rich


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you were to list the most important Aerospace Engineers of the 20th Century, your list would have to include Clarence "Kelly" Johnson. He designed the P-38 Lightning, the P-80, the U-2, the A-12/SR-71 Blackbird, the C-130, among many others.

His right hand man/successor wrote a history of the the Skunk Works, Lockheed's independent wing that develops secret aircraft.

The first third of the book goes through the development of Have Blue & the F-117. The rest of the book backs up and gives

There are a few stories that were told for the first time in this book. For example, they talk about a certain secret desert test facility. They aren't allowed to say its commonly known name, but they mention its in a dry lake bed somewhere North of Las Vegas near a weapon testing range. Hmm, wonder what he's talking about...

One of the surprising aspects was how much respect he has for "the ebil librils" Carter & Clinton and how much he bashes Reagan's administration. One thing that was revealed in the book was when Carter canceled the B-1 (a plane obsolete when it was first authorized, thanks to look-down-shoot-down radar), he was actually taking the money to fund stealth research and constructing the F-117. Reagan bashed Carter over and over and eventually refunded the B-1. It was a flying porkbarrel project from start to finish. He laments the "defense-industry socialism" the military practices. Also, he highlights the ridiculous claims Reagan's science advisors made about Star Wars and the National Space Plane. Ben Rich was constantly mystified at why his favorite president, Reagan, made such bad decisions, while he singles out
William Perry, one of Clinton's SecDef's, as the best SecDef in modern US history.

The SR-71 chapters make for great reading. It was an aircraft that was literally (almost) out of this world. Mach 3.2. 80,000 feet. Not a single aircraft lost to enemy fire, despite the most hazardous assignments in the S military. The plane comes to a really tragic end, though. First, the US government orders all tooling destroyed, to prevent the Soviets from learning its secrets (also preventing another Mach 3 plane from being built for the rest of the 20th Century). The decision to kill the Blackbird was made by Dick Cheney. A few weeks after Cheney killed it, Schwarzkopf asked for it to be reactivated to hunt for Skuds. NASA still had 3 in flying condition and the Skunk Works offered to reinsert surveillance packages and have them shipped to the front lines. The Air Force Brass, who long hated the plane for sucking up chunks of the budget they're rather have for bombers and fighters, nixed the idea. One of them confessed, 'If we crack open the door an inch and it does well, like we know it will, we'll never be rid of the plane!' Forget about protecting the troops...

It's cool to get a real evaluation of US aircraft. Here are some of the planes he talks about:
* F-16: great, but low fuel capacity.
* F-111: Overly complicated. Huge EM emissions made it a magnet for missiles. Only was built because its factory was in LBJ's hometown.
* B-70. Obsolete even in its early years of development. Should have been canceled way earlier than it was.
* B-1. See above.

As interesting as the book was, I was only going to give it three stars, but then I read the last chapter. It's filled with tips on successful project management and his vision of the future (from 1995-ish). It includes lots of drones like the Preadator, bashes the B-2 and F-22 for deliberately spreading out contracts, to the detriment of the budget, to make the planes "cancellation proof" in Congress, and emphasizes the importance of a strong US industrial base. He doesn't talk about machines and facilities when he means industry; he's talking about welders, machinists and engineers.

Book Review: Prisoner of the State, the Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang

Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang

When I first heard about this book, I was immediately intrigued. It's not every day the head of an insular global power publishes a tell-all memoir. It's taken me a while to get to it, but I wanted to read it to get some sort of understanding of modern China. I've never really read a book on modern (post-Mao) China and I figured this would be a good start. I'll confess to being pretty ignorant about modern China. I started the book knowing a little about Deng Xiaoping, but my knowledge was pretty limited beyond that.

One of my first worries about the book was how accessible it would be. The editors included 2 forwards, 2 epilogues, 2 timelines, and an index of names with brief bio's. They did a fantastic job. Their one mistake was they put the afterword written by Bao Pu (the son of Zhao's secretary) at the end. If you read the book, read his part first. It will make the rest of the book much more clear.

There are a lot of assumptions that I'll have to make for the review. I'll have to more or less take Zhao's word on much of the internal events. It's not like China's state-run news agency is going to start publishing meeting minutes. I'm also going to assume Bao Pu, et. al. left Zhao's writing as it was with minimal editing. The text looks a little rough around the edges, so I think that's a solid assumption. It's also really odd to read about the hardcore Maoists as the "Conservatives" and the Free-Marketeers as the "Liberals," but it makes sense for a lot of reasons (i.e.- classical liberalism).

One of the editorial decisions that was made was to rearrange the book. It starts with the events leading up to the massacre, then his time under house arrest, then the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the "reformers", including Zhao, and the scourge of corruption. The book ends with a careful analysis that the only way for the Communist Party to hold power is to build respect for the Rule of Law, (as opposed to the current Rule by Men), combat corruption, and introduce parliamentary democracy.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it: this isn't an easy read. The editors wanted it to be Zhao's own words. Fortunately, if you get bogged down, each chapter begins with a summary and you can just read the summaries until you get back into familiar territory. One thing that took me ages to figure out was whether Zhao was a canny politician or naive, or what. I eventually decided he was pretty canny and had he gotten a couple of breaks, we'd all (in the West) know his name by now.

I learned a lot in the book. One of the more interesting references, I was able to find on the glorious internet. River Elegy is a documentary that caused a huge stir by criticizing Chinese culture for turning inward and calling on China to turn to the world. Here is River Elegy:

(~60 minutes, with the first few minutes of introduction)

I learned a little about Sun Yat-Sen (the "George Washington of China"), Journey to the West (one of the Chinese classics), and more. Had Zhao just written a book ripping the heads of the Party, the book would be a lot less interesting. He wrote a very thoughtful, informative account of modern China. I was looking for a good primer on modern China and I think I found it. That book is also a lot more dangerous to the Chinese government than an emotional screed.

One thing I'm really interested in is how the Chinese have reacted to the book. Journey of Reforms, the Chinese version of the book, sold its first 14,000 copies out and it's now the most sought-after book in Hong Kong. In mainland China, where the book is banned, a Microsoft Word version of the book is being spread like a virus (immune from the Great Firewall of China).

Anyway, that's the review. I hope you liked it. If you've read it, I'd be interested to hear what you thought of the book.

Book Review: Limits of Safety

The Limits of Safety : Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons


It's the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bombers sit fully armed at the end of the runway, awaiting the order to penetrate Russian airspace. At night, a sentry sights a man climbing over the fence. He shoots at the saboteur and sounds the alarm. Linked alarms go off at several nearby airbases, except one alarm isn't the sabotage alert klaxon, it's the alarm to launch the bombers. Crews pile into their aircraft and the bombers trundle down the taxiways. All of a sudden, lights appear on the runway. It's the base commander in a jeep flashing its headlights. He's called over to the other base and found out the situation and stops the bombers.

The saboteur was a grizzly bear.

This true story (I'm paraphrasing actually, you can read a sample on Google Books) starts a very interesting book analyzing US handling of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. How the Air Force (and Navy) handled The Bomb is used to teach all sorts of aspects of Safety/Reliability Engineering, from High Reliability Theory, to Complex Systems.

For a book primarily aimed at academic audiences, it's pretty readable. True stories of how we almost set the world on fire keep it interesting. There's also plenty of examples of robustness in the system, too. Taleb in the Black Swan mentioned the one group he's come in contact with that had the most robust view of risk was military officers (far better than bank officers).

I'm now working for a new client and the book should prove useful. This client is so anal-retentive about safety they have pee coloration charts above the urinals to tell whether or not you're dehydrated. This isn't for offshore workers, either. This is for downtown officeworkers.

Note: Image and title link lead to Good Reads.

Book Reviews

Since Candice has been dragging me to Rue while she does homework, I've had plenty of reading time. Just finished a couple of books and here are some thoughts.

The Radioactive Boy Scout. By Ken Silverstein. The author backtracks the adventure of David Hahn, a teenager who constructs a scarily-close-to-viable breeder reactor in his mother's garage. The book is a pretty quick read (only a few hundred pages) and flows well. The author cuts between narrations of Hahn's experiments and disasters in the atomic power industry. For an English major, he does an incredible job at keeping his facts straight. He still gets the penetration of Beta particles wrong and misattributes a few quotes. It could have used a more thorough fact checking.

What sort of bugged me was he was blatantly anti-nuke throughout the whole book. The author's Wikipedia page notes "Silverstein is a self-described "gadfly" in the newspaper business, and an opponent of what he considers "false 'balance'" in the news media." That's fine and all for, say political reporting, but for scientific reporting, that starts down a slippery path. He also takes a few jabs at the Boy Scouts. He spends almost a chapter talking about how Baden Powell had a fixation on stopping masturbation and was a closeted fascist.

Still and all, it's a quick read, it's an interesting subject, and it's well written. If you read it, just keep that bias in mind as he narrates certain subjects.

********************************

I've been trying to work through the "must reads" list. I've been reading Huey Long, by T Harry Williams since the fall semester. It's a thick book, so it's taken me a while (those of you following me on twitter will note my occasional posts the past few months).

Huey Long is one of the most fascinating characters in American History. Every biography of him has taken the stance right from the start that he is either a saint or a scoundrel. Only one has stayed fairly objective and that's the best one. To this day, no scholar can top T Harry Williams' book.

Despite being a little dated in writing style (and vocabulary), I found it a lively read, due in no small part to the subject. The book is exhaustively researched and well annotated.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book:
* Huey Long had a photographic memory. He remembered every word from every book he ever read. An amazing gift for a politician to have.
* Some of Huey's speeches seem like they were written yesterday. A sample:

Mr. Hopkins [WPA] announced twenty-two millions on the dole [Food Stamps], a new high-water mark in that particular sum, a few weeks ago. We find not only the people going further into debt, but that the United States is going further into debt. The states are going further into debt, and the cities and towns are even going into bankruptcy. The condition has become deplorable. Instead of his promises, the only remedy that Mr. Roosevelt has prescribed is to borrow more money if he can and to go further into debt. The last move was to borrow $5 billion [imagine trillion today] more on which we must pay interest for the balance of our lifetimes, and probably during the lifetime of our children. And with it all, there stalks a slimy specter of want, hunger, destitution, and pestilence, all because of the fact that in the land of too much and of too much to wear, our president has failed in his promise to have these necessities of life distributed into the hands of the people who have need of them.

* Huey constantly railed against FDR for appointing Merril bankers to his cabinet. The criticisms have been made of Obama and Goldman Sachs.
* I think one of the things that sets the book above the rest is it's as much a chronicle of the subject's enemies as it is about the subject of the biography. You can't understand Huey's actions without understanding what he was up against.
* While Huey might have started out doing things for the right reasons, once he became a Senator, he started to lose control of his machine. It started to take on a momentum all its own. Huey had to constantly supervise every little detail of its operation. After his death, the machine had total control of the state without someone like Huey to restrain it. I suspect these postmortem excesses might have hurt Huey's reputation more than the record shows he did.
* The person that I thought reminded me the most of Huey Long was The Gracchi of Ancient Rome.
* Huey Long played an important part in FDR's administration. He pulled the administration hard to the left. The things FDR is really remembered for, like Social Security, were things Huey stumped for and FDR implemented to take away Huey's fire. Even then, Huey lambasted FDR for not going far enough in his reforms.

I know the term must-read is over used, but if you're interested in Louisiana politics, T Harry Williams' biography is a must read.

Some supplemental video:

Engineering Books

While most engineering research is done on computers with software or Google, I think having a decent library is still important. Here's a small sample of reference books I keep on my desk.


Cameron Hydraulic Data, Crane TP #410, McMaster Carr Catalog, Pocket Ref, Surface Production Operations. Lindeburg is also good.

Crane Technical Paper #410 [Bottom Left] and Cameron Hydraulic Data [Top Left]. Both are essential for pump design. Crane is more common, because it's cheaper and has the most useful data organized well, but Cameron has far more data and I prefer. It wouldn't be a bad idea for universities to give their mechanical engineering students Crane 410 while they're in school to familiarize them with it. All the older engineers got their Cameron book from Vendors, but they don't like giving them away anymore. They'll give you CD's full of data, but they're no where near as useful as a book. You can still find them on E-Bay, Amazon used books, and elsewhere if you hunt around. I like the older editions because there tends to be more data, none of the primary information is obsolete, and they'll have information that's useful to working on legacy systems (like tables in SSU).

Surface Production Operations [Bottom Right]. Petroleum engineering in a book. Originally written by a Tulane Petroleum Engineering professor (back when Tulane still had petroleum engineering {or any for that matter}). Once again, hunt around for older, cheaper editions.

The big yellow book in the upper right is a McMaster-Carr catalog. It's an ENORMOUS industrial catalog with almost everything you could ever ask for. Very useful for estimating project costs or to know when a vendor is taking you for a ride with their bid. Cheap on E-Bay, but you'll pay for shipping because of its considerable heft. Once again, vendors used to give these to engineers, but not anymore.

The little black book sitting on top of the yellow book is Pocket Ref, a book I've seen on just about every engineers desk. More information per cubic centimeter than any other book ever written. Everything from pipe thicknesses, to wiring, to weather, to everything.

It's a good idea to get a prep manual for the P.E. Exam. I favor Lindeburg's. I used his for the F.E. Exam and liked it. His one for the P.E. useful well after you take the test for your engineering career.

That's a few of the more useful ones on my desk. I'm still hunting around for a cheap copy of Belt Conveyors for Bulk Materials by CEMA and Mineral Processing.