Engineering Sayings: 1

"Belts and Suspenders"

Multiple, redundant safety systems.  Also sometimes overkill.

Ex.- How can you pick a conservative engineer out of a crowd?  He wears both a belt and suspenders to keep his pants from falling off.

Piper Alpha: The worst disaster in the history of offshore

Many years before Macondo, there was a much more deadly disaster offshore in the North Sea.

Piper Alpha was the largest platform (by production) in the world in its era (317,000 barrels/day, peak). It was built in the North Sea by a consortium run by Occidental and Dr. Armand Hammer.

I recently picked up Fire in the Night: The Piper Alpha Disaster by Stephen McGinty. The book was only published in 2008 (the incident happened in 1988), so enough time has passed to be able to sort things out.

In addition to time, the Piper Alpha incident had the benefit of the Cullen Report (summarized here), which is a Royal Inquiry. In the US, we have this pesky thing called the 5th Amendment, which protects people from self-incrimination. Under a Royal Commission, they just do away with that. Someone doesn't want to talk, they just lock them up until they feel like spilling the beans. Lord Cullen never had to actually do that to anyone, but I'm sure having a bazooka in your pocket, as Secretary Paulson once said, doesn't hurt.

There were many, many lessons learned from Piper Alpha that are now standard on offshore operations today (SSIV's, Temporary Safe Refuges, etc.). One of my favorites is intumescent paint:

It expands, forming an insulating layer that keeps major structural items intact long enough for an evacuation. In Macondo, 10 people on the drill floor died basically instantaneously. Only 1 person died after the initial explosion (a crane operator who fell and was incapacitated and later burned). All others were able to make it to a safe refuge and the Deepwater Horizon stayed structurally intact for quite some time (~36 hours!). There's actually some disagreement out there as to whether it was the fire that finally killed the rig (high temperature weakening of steel), or the haphazard firefighting dousing the wrong areas in water and flooding the hull (ballasting down the ship, causing it to capsize).

One sad parallel between Macondo and Piper Alpha was the confusion that all too often accompanies disaster. In Piper Alpha, loved ones waited at a hospital in Scotland. One by one, helicopters would land and there would be those who would find out their loved ones made it. Eventually, there were no more helicopters and the families were notified that's all the survivors. Sadly, for another two days, some clung to a rumor that a 'Russian freighter' had picked up most of the rest of the crew and was steaming to a port with the radio broken. Some of the families even drove up to the port to wait on a freighter that would never arrive.

In Macondo, noted fuckface Jiff Hingle, Sheriff of Plaquimines Parish* spread a rumor that a survival capsule was found and contained all of the 11 missing. MSNBC** and Fox News reported that as fact. One of the widows was actually on the phone with her husband's employer getting the news her husband would never return when she saw on the news the report and went on and on about how "he's alive" while the TO employee was patiently trying to explain that the report was false and he died on the rig. Also, both the UK, under a Socialist Prime Minister, and the circa-2010 MMS had almost exactly the same Inspector:Platform ratio.

In the Piper Alpha disaster, Fast Rescue Crafts were worth their weight in Myrrh. My favorite part of the whole book was the story of the Silver Pit's FRB. It pulled more people out of the water than anyone else. It made several 'easy' rescues early, but then took an absolute beating later on when it edged in near the inferno to pick up survivors. They have a load of 3 survivors on board, 4 crewman on the boat, including the coxswain. The boat is leaking and the motor is starting to sound like it's on its last legs. The coxswain spots someone directly under the inferno waving for help. The platform was collapsing into the sea and just the heat flux from the fire that close would give you bad burns, but the Coxswain asked his boatmates, "...Are we going to go? We're his only hope."

The response was a chorus of "GO!" The coxswain puts the throttle down, they go in full speed and with no margin for a second run or even slowing down (with the inferno over their head and the platform literally coming down in pieces all around them) and the crew grabs the swimmer out the water and pulls him in to safety. He survived, despite bad burns.

The FRB goes back to its mothership, offloads survivors, then despite massive damage, wonky engines, and the boat sinking underneath them, it goes back out to try to rescue more. The FRB was all used up from their antics and sank beneath their feet. The coxswain bobbed in the North Atlantic satisfied he had done absolutely everything possible to save people. The final death toll was 167 with only 61 survivors. 33 were rescued by the Silver Pit's FRB.

There is one direct link between Macondo and Piper Alpha: The Tharos / Deepwater Marianas. The Tharos was a dive support vessel that someone billed as an 'offshore fire engine' on the side. It had some design defects and didn't save as many lives on Piper Alpha as it probably should have. It later got converted to a MODU. That MODU spudded (started the drilling) of Macondo. It on the scene for both Piper Alpha and Macondo.


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* Source: "A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" by Joel Achenbach, page 44
** Source: "Fire on the Horizon"

High School Reunion

Ms. White's Homeroom Class, a photo by Noladishu on Flickr.

So, I just found out at the very last second my high school reunion was tonight and did manage to catch up with a few people.

For those of you checking in, here's Ms. White's homeroom class from freshman year. Found a print of this going through some old boxes a while back. Sorry about the scan quality.

Polonium: The best and worst poison

So, while up in New York, I picked up The Poisoner's Handbook from The Strand. The subtitle is 'Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York'. I loved it. It's a murder mystery with heavy doses of history, politics, and science. I'll give it one of the best compliments I can give a book: it reminded me of Rising Tide (one of my favorite books of all time).

Poisoning has always sort of been a "coward's weapon" (killing in secret without the chance of glory, like open battle). The 'Hassassins' terrorized the Middle East, until their downfall in the 14th Century. Poisoning has slowly been dying off due to advances in medicine and science. Doctors can cure a myriad of poisons and forensic scientists can extract tell-tale clues of poisoning, leaving the assassin (and those that order the hit) vulnerable to retaliation.

Except for 1 obscure poison: Polonium. It looks to be more in use than we realize. There's the famous Litvinenko poisoning case in 2006, but it looks like there is at least one more from 2004:



Excellent report about the possible (probable?) use of polonium to assassinate a head of state. I definitely recommend the second half of the video where they go through how they investigated. Great work.

Why is polonium such a great poison? Well, for background, I'll highlight the brain teaser about the 4 radioactive cookies. Polonium is an alpha-emitter. You can hold it in your hand and be perfectly safe. You can have a vial of water with enough polonium to kill dozens and have it just sit there and it won't be easily detected and won't harm a potential assassin, but you sprinkle it in, say, the target's tea or on the target's sushi and they ingest it, they'll die a slow, painful death over 3 weeks and doctor's won't be able to figure it out or cure it...

...Except if you have a radiochemist specifically looking for polonium. Then, even sub-milligram quantities of polonium can be revealed and analyzed. You see, during the early stages of the Manhattan Project, scientists knew plutonium could also be useful to make a bomb and would be much easier to manufacture than Uranium-235.

Years before, chemists had developed a branch of analysis called microchemistry which could handle tiny amounts of chemicals weighing as little as 0.001 gram. But not even such a tiny bit of plutonium was available. So the chemists at the University of Chicago under Glenn Seaborg began in April, 1942, to develop a new method which could handle chemicals which weighed no more than 500 micrograms (1 microgram equals one-millionth of a gram) or about 1/5000 the weight of a single dime. ... This method is known as ultra-microchemistry.

From the data Seabourg's team extracted, engineers were able to then refine designs of nuclear reactors and bomb components months before usable quantities (kilograms) of plutonium were available.

Moving from plutonium to back to polonium, very small amounts of polonium can be extracted very far after the subject is poisoned. It's like a heavy metal; it persists and doesn't break down. It will radioactively decay, but you can still track the 'daughter-products' and that breakdown allows you to even track when the polonium was created. With a large enough sample, from tracking the isotopes of the polonium, a good radiochemist can even tell you which reactor made the polonium. All of these factors make it a very BAD poison to choose.

"Longest Time" Biology Music Video

Via Boing Boing
The part with the skittles is a particularly good, yet simple demonstration of evolution.

Very Good German Crane Salesman

The 125-Year Old Brooklyn Bridge

Built by Washington Roebling, with help from his father and his wife Emily, the Brooklyn Bridge is a milestone in the history of civil engineering. It's also a damn pretty bridge. My wife and I took a bunch of photos as we crossed over the bridge on foot.



This photo above is actually the buttress where the cable holding the bridge up is tied into basically a giant weight.







After this, we also got some awesome pizza under the bridge.

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?

how a jet engine works

how a jet engine works, a photo by Noladishu on Flickr.

You know what, flying should be fun. You're riding in air at hundreds of miles an hour, traveling across the country. That's something worth celebrating and treating like it's something special instead of something miserable that you have to endure like a colonoscopy. Jet Blue really tends to put the fun back into flying. They had this setup on "how an engine works" and it made my inner engineer glow with joy to see little kids walk up to the button (which is located within easy reach of a 7-year-old). The presentation was pretty good too (although they left out 'suck, squeeze, bang, blow').

Seems like a small thing, but it made me happy to see. Turbomachinery is really amazing and the US is the undisputed leader in jet engines. Only Rolls Royce can even pretend to be in the same league. One funny little detail: Honda's engineers INSISTED to the Board that they start an aircraft division; the engineers insisted to the board it would help them recruit engineers. The board complied and Honda probably loses money on their aircraft, but it keeps the engineers happy and you have to admit Honda makes some very well designed cars across a broad range of price points.

Assembly of a 747-8, the largest plane built by Boeing

Amazing time-lapse. From Wired.

Creationist Louisiana State Senators

Fools on Parade. Indeed.

Once upon a time, people actually had some shame. First off, there's THIS, which I'm not even sure how to process, then there's this video of Julie Quinn making a complete ass of herself.

"I am an attorney and I would like an answer!" - Julie Quinn, lawyer and moron. Speaking of lawyers, I wonder how Quinn, as a lawyer and a one of those entrusted to oversee taxpayer dollars, would comment on how Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District was a good use of taxpayer funds, because it's only a matter of time before Louisiana gets its ass sued off. More here.

"People with little letters behind their name" include doctors, engineers, and scientists. But, Julie Quinn is a lawyer, so it's all good. She can fix our levees, design deepwater oil platforms, heal the sick, discover cures to diseases, invent new things, ... Oh wait, no she can't actually do anything; she's a lawyer. If one useless man is called a disgrace, what are two useless men called? A law firm.

Kudos to Karen Carter Peterson (the new head of the burnt-out cinder of what used to be the Louisiana Democratic Party).

Unfortunately, KCP is outnumbered by the asshats. See the sad evidence below.

Here's Zack's take:

Note that the push to repeal LSEA failed.

Book Review: "In Mortal Hands"

In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age

I firmly believe that all practicing engineers should read at least one 'engineering disaster' book a year. It's been a little while for me.

The first ~100 pages are not worth reading. It's a poor synopsis of Richard Rhodes and I liked the original better. You need to skip to about the 1970's before the book gets worthwhile (although the Israeli bomb chapter is excellent).

The author was a journalist covering the nuke industry and once she gets closer to what she directly covered in her interviews with first-hand witnesses, the book improves dramatically. The best parts is her coverage of the regulation of the civilian nuclear industry. For example, Victor Stello over-protected the industry (to its detriment), while others at the NRC did their jobs.

Some of my other favorite stories:

* The (sad) story of a Chernobyl firefighter and his pregnant wife.

* The cataloging of the costs of failed experiments in reprocessing and breeder reactors.

* The story of Remy Carle at his graduation from Ecole Polytechnique.

* Western nations really only care about nuclear proliferation when it's convenient (and because of that, have, in the past, helped out 'rogue' states like North Korea and Iran much more than they'd like to admit). For instance, the United States KNEW Saddam was using a $500 million agricultural loan to fund his bomb program, but, despite please from those overseeing the program, continued funding it (not necessarily out of nefarious intentions, probably just bureaucratic laziness).

Overall, I got what I was looking for out of it. Even the book's biggest flaw (the beginning) is not much of a flaw, because I'm comparing it to a Pulitzer Prize winning book.

UPDATE- One of the stories from the book is MOSSAD's theft of uranium from Pennsylvania. Apparently, that story can now pretty definitively be but in the "True" column.

Darwin the Dinosaur impresses

Writeup from Gambit.

Note that the group is from New Orleans and based out of the CAC. Their website is here.

It takes some balls to be pro-Darwin in a state wheredangerous fools like this have power.

More dancing here:

Engineering Links of the Afternoon

* PHD: Graduate School Enrollment vs. Unemployment Rate (graduate enrollment in engineering).

* Some Important Things Most Students Never Ask About Graduate School [PDF]

* Going to grad school while working. Great quote: "No Matter How Much You Love Your Job, You Will Love Grad School More". Actually, this one is turning out pretty true. Also: #1 Drawback: Time

* A history of offshore drilling. Excellent white paper on the history of the offshore business.

* The cost of new oil supply. The chart for the cost/well is amazing.

* Liberating America's Secret Laws. Overly dramatic title, but interesting subject, because things like ASME's Boiler Code are a part of the law, but not actually accessible to common citizens.

* Ignition! The history of the development of rocket fuel.