bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Ask questions like an engineer.

    The follow-up story that I am most interested in seeing, even though I doubt it will get much national media, is the engineering analysis of the New Orleans levee failure:

    • Were the levees known to have structural damage, cracks, or other physical signs of stress concentration at or near the points where they eventually broke? 
    • Did they appear to fail suddenly, without warning, or did they begin to fail gradually? 
    • Did they fail in response to a sudden fluctuation in mean water pressure or did they bear a constant stress for some time, invisibly weakening until they could not bear it any more?
    • Did the first visible point of failure occur deep underwater or near the surface? 
    • Did a floating object strike the levees?  (In three places?!?) 
    • Did the designers allow for the possibility that a massive, floating object might strike the levee in a flood, or did they design it only to hold back water, mud, and air?
    • How well did the maintainers follow the designers’ recommended repair schedule?   
    • Was the designers’ recommended repair schedule reasonable in the first place?  (Did the designers allow for the VERY PREDICTABLE possibility of future funding constraints in this tax-supported project?) 
    • What were they made of, anyway? 
    • Were they made of material designed to absorb water and remain strong, or only to resist water?   
    • How was stress distributed along the length of each levee at full loading?
    • How were the levees designed to fail?  Can a levee be designed to transfer stress away from a weakened place to a strong place, as truss bridges can?  Or is it just a fact of life that when the levees start to break they must keep breaking?

    That’s just a start, from someone whose training is in chemical engineering, not civil or mechanical engineering.  Somewhere, someone who knows how to answer these questions is asking them, I hope, and asking others that I don’t know enough to ask.

    There will be plenty of highly visible people, in the next days, weeks, and months, asking the question Why did the levees fail?  But the vast majority will be seeking political answers.  Their question is really why didn’t somebody spend more money on the levees?   As if wads of cash, dropped from helicopters, could plug up the hole; as if stacks of coins could resist pressure fluctuations that earthen berms could not.

    Here’s an example from August 31, in Editor and Publisher:

    …[W]ith the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps’ project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

    "The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can’t raise them."

    Obviously, fixing stuff costs money.  But to say that the problem you have isn’t the physical problem is to live in an abstract political world where the solution to every problem is to throw money at it and hope it sticks.   Projects can be lavishly funded and yet poorly engineered. 

    Contrast that article with this one,  after a levee break in 1997, which details the kind of thinking I am looking forward to seeing:

    Meehan said the doomed levee [in the 1997 failure—E.] was "generally similar" to two nearby levees that failed in previous disasters – the Christmas Eve 1955 levee break on Shanghai Bend south of Yuba City that killed 38 people, and a break near the Yuba County town of Linda in 1986 that produced $500 million in damage claims.

    Both of those levees failed, Meehan contended, because flood water had saturated a subsurface layer of gravel, then flowed underground far to the landward side of the levees and erupted, geyser-like, undermining the structures and causing their collapse.

    The engineer quoted in that article doesn’t say a word about funding.  Instead he testifies about pressure relief wells, underground migration of flood water, subsurface gravel layers, and premonitory sand boils. 

    Let’s hear some more talk like that.

    In one very real sense, funding is no more than another engineering constraint.  The pylons can be no wider than this, or the largest barge cannot pass under the bridge.  The floating roof of the storage tank can be allowed to fluctuate no more than this, or the emissions will exceed federal standards.  The materials can cost no more than this, or the project will run out of money.

    The only engineering difference between the properties of money and the properties of stuff like, oh, I don’t know, the shear strength of concrete, or the percolation rate of water through gravel, is the persistent, mesmerizing illusion that the supply of money is theoretically infinite.  Running out? You can always get more from somewhere.   Raise taxes!  Divert it from somebody else’s project!  Full speed ahead!

    It may very well be true that lack of funds was a prime cause, if a remote cause, of the New Orleans levee failure.  If so, then it will be legitimate to ask whose decisions failed to provide the necessary funds.

    But neither question can be answered until we understand the proximate cause for the breach in the levees.  Not just one, but three levees, simultaneously.  By "the proximate cause" I mean "the cause of pieces falling off of them in this particular spot at this particular moment."   

    "Lack of funding" doesn’t explain why the levees failed here instead of there, as if someone laid the cash on with a trowel and missed a spot at 17th street.

    "Lack of funding" doesn’t explain why the levees failed on Tuesday instead of Saturday. 

    "Lack of funding" doesn’t even explain why the drearily predictable scenario, New Orleans underwater, occurred after a levee failure instead of after a levee flood, in some other, stronger hurricane, some other day in the future.

    But if we figure out why the levees failed here instead of there, if we figure out why the levee failed sooner instead of later, if we figure out why the levees failed in this storm instead of holding in this storm, then we can begin to understand the degree to which more money could have made a difference; then we can begin to understand the degree to which competent foresight could have predicted that need; then we can begin to understand the degree to which the political climate enabled decisionmakers to advocate for that need in the timespans of their offices.

    We might even be able to answer the question of whether the levees were competently designed and competently built at all—that is, whether the levees were up to the standards you should expect even given the particular funding constraint.  In other words, did we get our money’s worth? 

    Henry Petroski, where are you?

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  • Brendan “Cassandra” Loy, weatherblogger.

    If you haven’t read Brendan Loy’s archives, you should, moving upward from this starting point, posted at quarter to 2 pm on Tuesday, August 23:

    T.D. 12

    Just a few hours after Tropical Depression Jose was declared dead over Mexico, Tropical Depression 12 formed over the southwestern Bahamas.  It could become Tropical Storm Katrina.

    UPDATE: Hurricane Katrina?  It could happen…

    Brendan Loy is a 2L law student at the University of Notre Dame.  Most of his posts are about school, about his fiancee, about politics.  He is also a weather enthusiast. 

    Starting at the post linked above and scrolling upwards, you watch as his other interests fall away and he begins full-time Katrina-blogging, linking all the while to radar maps, official forecasts, and articles from past years that gloomily predict the New Orleans doomsday scenario that has now come to pass. 

    Eventually he begins to plead with residents to get out of town.

    Just before 7 pm on Saturday, August 27:

    Hurricane watches, as expected, have been extended eastward to the Alabama/Florida border, but that doesn’t indicate a rightward lurch in the track; the NHC simply put the Louisiana warnings up early, to give New Orleans and vicinity more time to prepare.  The track has actually edged ever-so-slightly to the left, but the below-sea-level city of New Orleans is still directly in the crosshairs.

    For some reason that I can’t even begin to comprehend, the evacuation order for New Orleans is only "voluntary" at this time.  The mayor says he might issue mandatory evacuations tomorrow morning, depending on what the forecast says.  What is he waiting for???  The forecast calls for a DIRECT HIT!  This is the story we’ve been fearing for decades!  And if he waits until 24 hours before landfall to order people to leave, it may very well be too late! 

    In the next post, entitled "The mayor of New Orleans is an idiot," Brendan writes,

    I can’t emphasize enough what a bad decision I think it is for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to delay the mandatory evacuation order until tomorrow morning.  According to the Weather Channel, lots of tourists in the French Quarter are happy the evacuation is only "voluntary," and are planning to stay in town until it becomes mandatory…

    Will Ray Nagin go down in history as the mayor who fiddled while New Orleans drowned?  Could be.

    Read it.

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  • What the individual must learn from Katrina.

    Do you have a family disaster plan, one that is appropriate to the kinds of disasters most likely to befall your area?

    We don’t—yet.  But we will, before winter falls on Minnesota this year.

    And one thing is certain:  No part of it will depend on actions, or even on suggestions, by local, state, and federal government.

    There will be no algorithm that says, "Do such and such if the mayor orders an evacuation," or "Do this and that if the governor orders a state of emergency."

    There will be no part of it that assumes that anyone, anyone at all, will come to our rescue. 

    We rely on the government (any level of government) to save us only at our own peril.

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  • From the City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, Part 2. Evacuation. Section II. Concept of operations.

    "Transportation will be provided to those persons requiring public transportation from the area."

    h/t Instapundit.

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  • The Astrodome: One giant high school cafeteria?

    Bizarre.  This morning on NPR’s Weekend Edition:  a sociologist tries to explain to Linda Wertheimer, without using the word "segregation," that the relief workers will be intentionally racially segregating the emergency shelters.  I think the link is here.

    She’s going on about how people want to be with their own "cultural group" and how tensions will be lower that way.  This may or may not be true, but what’s interesting to me is the linguistic somersaults she’s putting herself through to avoid saying "we will segregate the shelters."

    If it’s true, as she says, that people will naturally assume a spatial distribution of cultural attributes that minimizes tensions (okay, she didn’t say it that way, but trust me, my way makes a lot more sense than what came out of her mouth), then why not just allow people to find their own spots instead of assigning seats, so to speak?

    Sure, it’s less orderly to install people that way—even if you give general instructions like "try to fill up from the back to the front" and even if you employ "ushers" to guide late arrivals to empty pockets and spots—but if one of your overriding goals is to reduce tension and if one of your theories is that people will reduce tension themselves by picking their own neighbors, then perhaps it’s a reasonable tradeoff.

    It just seems weird to assume that two families will get along okay if they are forced to sleep next to each other, only as long as they are the same race.

    UPDATE.  Welcome Althouse readers.  More on Katrina in my Something Different category.  More on media in, well, Media.

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  • The new stack of library books.

    One of the small changes I made to mark the start of Oscar’s kindergarten year at home:  ending the schoolwork session each day by cuddling together and reading a couple of nonfiction books from the library.  I plan to repeat each one two or three times before they go back.

    Today I picked up nine books to last us through the next two or three weeks.  I got a broad selection, hoping to find out what sort of things interest him.  We have a book on hurricanes; a biography of George Washington; a book about bridges; one about postal workers and how the mail gets around; "Energy Makes Things Happen"; a story about the legend of Johnny Appleseed (what, incidentally, captivates children’s librarians so much about Johnny Appleseed?  There had to be six books about JA in the tiny branch library, and I remember there being a lot in my elementary school library twenty years ago); a book about frogs, and a book about wetlands. 

    Besides all these, we got one called Who Eats What?  Food Chains and Food Webs by Patricia Lauber, part of the "Let’s-Read-And-Find-Out Science Series" (which I find to be reliably interesting and only a little bit oversimplified). I read it to him today.  It must have piqued his interest; a little later he came to me, munching an apple, and wanting crayons and paper to draw a food chain.

    I expected him to draw "boy eats apple," but instead he drew two indistinct blobs, one with an arrow pointing to the other. 

    Tell me about your food chain, I said.

    It shows an antibody eating a germ, he said cheerfully.

    I blame "Let’s-Read-And-Find-Out Science"  Germs Make Me Sick!

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  • Kicking Katrina’s refugees out.

    In Tallahassee:

    Hundreds of refugees from Hurricane Katrina are being evicted from Tallahassee hotels to accommodate fans coming to town for the Miami-Florida State game Monday night.

    "There is absolutely no compassion here whatsoever," Lynne Bernard wrote on a bulletin board on the Web site of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. "The Hampton Inn in Tallahassee is pretty much throwing us out because of a football game."

    A message left for the manager at the Hampton Inn was not returned, but other hoteliers said there was little they could do to help those who fled homes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama because they had to honor long-standing reservations for the football weekend.

    At the Courtyard Marriott near the Capitol, evacuees were taking up 15 of the hotel’s 154 rooms on Wednesday. A Quality Inn had several dozen of its 90 rooms occupied by storm refugees.

    "This weekend has been booked for a couple of months," said Antwan Hinkle, the Quality Inn’s front desk manager.

    Hinkle said people who have planned trips for months would not take it well if they were told just days before the game that the hotel could not provide rooms. "We’re going to have a whole bunch of angry people," he said.

    I’m speechless.

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  • Who is feeding the babies?

    Some of the babies who fled Katrina, or who are trapped in New Orleans, are being breastfed by their mothers.  The rest need formula—premixed formula, because the water is questionable.

    Are the formula companies helping?

    Abbott Labs (makers of Similac, Pediasure, and Pedialyte) has stepped up to the plate, according to a Wednesday press release:

    Abbott has pledged $2 million in cash donations and an initial $2 million in nutritional and medical products to help victims of this disaster. The nutritional products, which are already being distributed to those in need, were rapidly shipped to affected areas in response to initial requests from aid organizations yesterday soon after the disaster struck.

    Wal-Mart is a major distributor of infant formula (manufactured by Wyeth, among other companies).  They are helping too:

    Wal-Mart will establish mini-Wal-Mart stores in areas impacted by the hurricane.  Items such as clothing, diapers, baby wipes, food, formula, toothbrushes, bedding and water will be given out free of charge to those with a demonstrated need.

    No statement yet from Nestle USA, makers of Good Start (1-800-225-2270). 

    [UPDATE: A call Friday morning was answered with standard boilerplate ("Nestle works with all state and local agencies," etc.) and no specific ways they are helping now were mentioned.]

    No statement yet from Mead Johnson, makers of Enfamil (1-800-429-5000).

    [UPDATE:  As of Saturday, still nothing from Nestle or Mead Johnson.]

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  • One thought about economic impact, over coffee.

    Mark has been to New Orleans exactly once.  His first employer (let us call it Giant Conglomerate Number One) sent him there to visit their coffee plant, just outside the city.  That coffee plant—GC1’s only U. S. coffee plant, and we’re talking a company that makes a lot of coffee—was abandoned during Katrina, not even a skeleton crew stayed on.  It will be a while before it is going again.

    Will coffee prices rise?  I asked, not really serious about it.

    That’s a real possibility, he said. New Orleans imports and warehouses all the nation’s coffee, he told me.  And went on to explain that it was a sort of coffee customs center, something about all the papery husks having to come off the coffee beans before they entered the United States, and "almost all of it" coming in through N. O. 

    It turns out that it’s not actually all the coffee.  The best clue I could find was this article from 2002, which seems to say that coffee comes in through four U. S. ports (New Orleans, New York, Miami and Houston) and that in 2002, New Orleans received 27 percent of U. S. coffee imports.  New York imports more and warehouses more.  So it’s not the cataclysm that my usually knowledgeable husband claimed it was.

    Still, that’s a lot of coffee processing, a lot of warehoused coffee, a lot of coffee importation infrastructure under the water.

    Why am I bringing this up?  Because this is just one industry.  It is maybe a little early to think about the economic impact of Katrina, since people are still in grave peril.  But multiply this by all the commodities and other materials that pass through the New Orleans port, by all the companies that have a facility in the affected area of the Gulf Coast—the country is going to be reeling from this.

    UPDATE.  A sobering analysis here.  H/T Jay Tea at Wizbang, where blogger Paul is safely evacuated but has a long road to recovery.

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  • Katrina-blogging.

    Thursday, Sept 1 is the concerted day of blogging for Hurricane Katrina relief.  Details here at TTLB.

    Donate today.  I recommend Catholic Charities USA.  Very easy online donation, immediate tax receipt, and CCUSA has a strong presence in the New Orleans area.

    (If Catholic Charities isn’t your bag, Instapundit has a roundup of links for donations, and the good professor promises to keep bumping it to the top of his main site.)

    Blogger WizBang issued a call to action for bloggers.  If you know something about disaster relief—anything—and that knowledge can help other people, get blogging and comboxing about it.  He’s got a good list to start you thinking about how you might help.

    Technorati flood aid tag. 

    Click  here and scroll down for a list of bloggers posting from/near/about the affected region.

    Craig’s List – New Orleans is filling up with offers — from people from around the nation— of free housing for Katrina refugees.  Got a place?  List it there.  The quickest way to ease this suffering is for people to open up their homes to the suddenly-homeless.

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  • Cool new technology saves girl from drowning.

    Check out the lifesaving technology featured in this story from the UK:

    The system was fitted to the Bangor pool in March 2003 at a cost of £65,000 and involves eight overhead and four underwater cameras.

    The Poseidon technology can detect movement, trajectory and texture of underwater objects. It then compares images to a database of thousands of examples of swimmers in trouble.

    If it finds a match, it alerts lifeguards using a pager message which also displays a diagram showing the location of the stricken swimmer.

    The story details the rescue of a ten-year-old girl in North Wales.

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  • Katrina relief.

    It only took me 90 seconds to make a donation, earmarked for Hurricane Katrina relief, to Catholic Charities USA.  And I got my tax receipt by e-mail.

    Donate today. 

    (If Catholic Charities isn’t your bag, Instapundit has a roundup of links for donations, and the good professor promises to keep bumping it to the top of his main site.)

    UPDATE.  Blogger WizBang issues a call to action for bloggers.  If you know something about disaster relief—anything—and that knowledge can help other people, get blogging and comboxing about it.  He’s got a good list to start you thinking about how you might help.

    UPDATE.  Tomorrow is the concerted day of blogging for Katrina relief.  Details here at TTLB.  I’ll do my tiny little part!  This post will repeat tomorrow.

    UPDATE.  Technorati flood aid tag. 

    UPDATE.  Click here and scroll down for a list of bloggers posting from/near/about the affected region.

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