Of course, the process wasn’t called galvanizing until 1837, when another Frenchman, Stanislaus Tranquille Modeste Sorel, took out a patent for the procedure. In his application, he gave credit where it was due, referring to “the important discovery by Galvani and Volta that electricity is generated through contact of dissimilar metals,” one of which “was always preserved from oxidation.” He credited Humphry Davy and his copper ship experiments, but wrote, “[T]he method that I propose . . . is quite different . . . This method consists of completely coating the surface of iron with a layer of zinc. First the iron is cleaned and after being immersed in hydrochloric acid or a solution of salammoniac, it is plunged into a bath of molten zinc. Iron prepared in the manner just described is preserved from rust.”
By 1850, British galvanizers were using ten thousand tons of zinc a year. By 1870, America’s first galvanizing business, the Jersey City Galvanizing Co., opened. It was founded by three pipe mill men. In just five years, the trio paid back its initial investment eighteen times over. When the Brooklyn Bridge was finished in 1883, its four main cables had fourteen thousand miles of galvanized wire, replacing oil, grease, and paint as the new standard. The first transatlantic telegraph cable was galvanized. The first barbed wire was galvanized.
By 1920, after a world war described as “20 percent fighting and 80 percent engineering,” the American Zinc Institute was engaged in the publicity campaign that the AGA wages to this day. At a gathering in Chicago, the galvanizing group made its pitch with the help of a newspaperman from Missouri named P. R. Coldren. “Zinc is not nearly as widely known as it should be,” Coldren announced. “It isn’t a metal that gets into print easily, because there isn’t any particular romance wrapped up in it. By nature it is a dull and prosaic metal. Its very color is against it. Gold glitters, silver shines, diamonds sparkle, and rubies glow, but what does zinc do? . . . Nobody ever argues there is a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow . . . No one ever said the streets of heaven are paved with zinc. No thief ever broke into a man’s house, or blew up a safe, or held up an express train to get zinc. No beautiful heroine was ever tempted by a villain with zinc jewelry. Judas probably wouldn’t have betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of zinc.”
This is why Phil Rahrig was headed to Parsons Brinckerhoff.
In a sixth-floor conference room, ten engineers—all men, with just one mustache—came to learn about galvanizing. Irving, a large-bellied man with a potent Chicago accent, began with a slideshow. As promised, it included photos of a rusty railing, a rusty post, a rusty beam beneath an off-ramp. “Total deterioration,” Irving said. Over another image, Irving had placed the phrase “Got Rust?” The engineers did not laugh. Irving showed a photo of pigeon poop on a beam, and another of a beam riddled with rust holes, as if hit with a shotgun. Irving said, “If you keep the barrier on steel, will it rust? No!” Then Irving said that the cost of corrosion was equivalent to building 562 Sears Towers every year.
Since much of that cost is tied to bridges, Irving cited a unique span northeast of Indianapolis, on I-69. The Castleton Bridge was built with a galvanized structure under its northbound lanes and a painted structure under its southbound lanes. Since it was completed in 1970, the southbound side has been repainted in 1984 and 2002. By 2012, Irving said, Indiana had spent more to maintain the bridge than it had to build it. Irving said he inspected the northbound half, and after forty-two years, it’s zinc coating was still, on average, 6.8 mils, or thousandths of an inch, thick. “That’s outrageously good,” he said. The AGA expects travelers headed north to be able to use the bridge for sixty years.
The AGA is pretty sure that the first fully galvanized bridge in the country is Michigan’s Stearns Bayou Bridge, built in 1966. It is four hundred feet long, spans fresh water, sees moderate traffic, and is—in the parlance—subject to salting in the winter. When the AGA last inspected the bridge, in 1997, it concluded that its beams were in “very good shape,” its bolted connections “good,” neither showing any signs of rust. Average coating thickness was 6.3 mils. Only the handrails showed slight staining. The AGA figured the bridge would last sixty-six years.
In the middle of the rust belt, Ohio seems to have gotten the AGA’s message. It has over 1,600 galvanized bridges, more than any other state. Chicago just built 8. Renovating the Tappan Zee Bridge, New York turned to galvanizing, and saved $3 million. Pittsburgh, on the other hand, learned the hard way that concrete was no rival. Just east of downtown, a flat bridge was built beneath a concrete bridge, solely to catch the crumbling concrete from the bridge above. “Concrete comes with a couple of guarantees,” Irving said, smirking, as he showed a photo of the structure. “It will crack, and it won’t burn.” Again, nobody laughed.
Next slide. “Here’s a bridge—it’s a piece of junk!” But wait, he said. There was no need to scrap that steel. “You can clean it, coat it, and put it back up.” Even the old railings could be regalvanized. An engineer in the room grew curious. “How long does recoating take?” Irving said it takes less than two weeks to blast and galvanize an old bridge like that. He said plants are hot all the time, ready to go. All you gotta do, he said, is schedule it.
Among the 170 galvanizing plants in the United States, most of which are in the East, the Midwest, or Texas, none has a kettle larger than sixty feet long. What this means is that the longest beam anyone can hot-dip galvanize is a ninety-footer, and this is not prohibitive. This is accomplished by dipping in one end, lifting it out, flipping around the beam, and then dipping in the other end. Galvanizers call this progressive dipping. The dip is into molten, 840-degree zinc, four times as thick as maple syrup. Before dipping a pipe or tube or anything hollow, a galvanizer will blow holes in the object, to let air and water vent out, and molten zinc in and then out. Using a magnetic thickness gauge, an inspector can assure himself, once the beam or pipe has cooled, that the entire thing has been coated.
Coated is a funny word, because, really, the two metals are metallurgically bonded. If, using an electron microscope, you examine the thin layer of zinc on the surface of the steel beam, you’ll see four distinct layers. From the steel up, they are known as gamma, delta, zeta, and eta. The first three layers—respectively, 75 percent zinc, 90 percent zinc, and 95 percent zinc—are harder than steel itself. The outermost layer, eta, is 100 percent zinc, and hence the softest layer; scratchable, but with difficulty. Irving picked up two brick-sized samples of galvanized steel and clacked them together. Then, describing the zinc-to-steel bond, he punched his right fist into his left palm. Boom!
While a galvanized steel beam cools over days, reactions slowly convert the zinc to zinc carbonate. To guys like Irving, this is primo stuff, worth waiting for. It’s worth waiting for because it bonds very well with paint, and a beam that has been galvanized and painted—what’s known as duplex—benefits from something of a synergistic effect. An engineer using duplex-treated steel can plan on about twice the life expectancy he’d otherwise expect, because rust doesn’t form immediately below scratches in the paint. In fact, rust doesn’t form when the zinc coating is scratched, because galvanized steel heals itself cathodically. It can tolerate wounds up to a quarter inch. “Zinc is the best primer in the world,” Irving said. The main cables on the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge are duplexed.
Ending his pitch, Irving answered a handful of questions. He said that the cost of galvanized rebar was the same as that of epoxy-coated rebar and said that six states, including Florida, Virginia, and Oregon, no longer allow epoxy-coated rebar in highways because of cracked coatings leading to rust. He described how to weld and repair galvanized steel, and didn’t seem to frighten any of the engineers. He said that the auto industry has started to use galvanized sheet metal. “Remember when you used to get your car Rusty Jonesed? I had two cars that I got Rusty Jonesed! Now, with galvanizing, Ziebart is gone!” Actually, Ziebart still applies aftermarket rustproof undercoatings to cars, while its former competitor, Rusty Jones, went bankrupt in 1988.
Then Irving compared California to Italy. “They’re the same size. California has seven galvanizing plants. Italy has a hundred and thirteen. You go into grade schools, and the kids know about galvanizing. Europe galvanizes fifty percent of their steel. We do, what, six? We’re a disposable society.” He sounded like Dan Dunmire. He said, “If Roy Rogers was alive today, he’d want his horse Trigger in a galvanized pen.” This was strange, as nine out of the ten engineers in the room were too young to get the reference. I thought he should have repeated something he said earlier: “Our kettles are always on.”
8
TEN THOUSAND MUSTACHIOED MEN
In 1997 a corrosion engineer named Rusty Strong had a rust problem. He was on his way back to Houston from a corrosion conference near Chicago, and after deplaning, he took a shuttle to the airport parking lot where his black Nissan truck was parked. Before deshuttling, he could tell that something was wrong. His truck was crushed—the cab banged in, the windshield shattered. Incredulous, he asked the shuttle bus driver what had happened. The driver refused to make eye contact. “I think a pole fell on it,” she mumbled nervously. “It was an act of God.” Rusty was steaming, particularly since nobody had bothered to cover the hole in the cab, and after a few days of rain, the floors were soaked. He took the shuttle back to the parking lot toll gate and called a tow truck.
Late the next morning, in his wife’s car, he swung by his office, grabbed a camera and micrometer, and returned to the lot. He began investigating. The twenty-foot light pole that had fallen on his truck had been removed, but the base of the pole, four inches in diameter, was easily visible on a concrete pedestal one foot off the ground. The base of the pole was heavily rusted on the inside, because the weep hole that was supposed to let water out had been grouted over. Rusty took photos and measurements. Then he began inspecting other poles in the parking lot, taking more photos and more measurements. That’s when the shuttle bus pulled up. Out came the parking lot manager, telling Rusty he wasn’t authorized to take photos. They argued, while Rusty finished his study. Then Rusty asked to talk to the owner of the lot. The owner, in Florida, told him by phone that the pole had been knocked over by a tornado in a rainstorm. Rusty—informing the owner that he was a corrosion engineer who studied rust professionally—told the man otherwise. “This was not an act of God,” he said. “It was a failure of man.” He went on, informing the lot owner that, were the matter to end up in court, it was precisely someone like Rusty that the owner would want on his side. Rusty figured that the owner didn’t buy it—a rust professional? Who’d ever heard of such a thing? After that phone call, Rusty drove home and made another phone call, to his insurance company. He told his agent that the damage to his truck was the result of a maintenance failure. To that agent he faxed an article from the journal Corrosion on the same rusting-light-pole phenomenon in Galveston, Texas, along with his photos. Fifteen minutes later, an insurance adjustor called Rusty. He was laughing. “This’ll be so easy,” he said. Now Rusty’s insurance record says DO NOT CANCEL. He doesn’t park at that lot anymore.
Rusty tells this story to colleagues and fellow corrosion engineers at conferences of the National Association of Corrosion Engineers, and it always elicits a similar response. That’s hilarious, they say. And: I can’t believe they tried to pull a fast one on a corrosion engineer.
Of the fifteen thousand corrosion engineers in the United States, most don’t deal with statues, cans, air force jets, or navy ships. According to NACE (which has since rebranded its name to NACE International, the Corrosion Society), a quarter of its members work in pipeline integrity. Another 10 percent work for natural gas utilities, an additional 9 percent work in oil and gas extraction, and still more work for refineries—which means that about half of all corrosion engineers work in oil and gas. Corrosion engineers who don’t work in oil and gas most likely work in some transportation-related field, on planes (and spacecraft), or ships, or cars, or roads, or bridges, or docks. Some work in mining, or paper processing, or manufacturing. Many work for water, electric, or sewage utilities. NACE International counts among its corporate members the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company, Colorado Springs Utilities, Knoxville Utilities Board, Santa Clara Valley Water District, West Virginia Department of Transportation, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, and the US Bureau of Reclamation.
Many make chemicals, or metals that resist high temperatures, or biomedical implants. Metallic implants are made mostly of biocompatible materials such as stainless steel, platinum, or titanium, though the brother of corrosion consultant extraordinaire Bob Baboian had a plate of tantalum put in his head after suffering a wound in World War II. Nonbiostable implants corrode and present as arthritis. The latest stents, used to keep narrow arteries open, are made of nickel alloys, platinum chromium alloys, and cobalt chromium alloys, and some made of niobium are in development.
Many corrosion engineers, conducting their research at educational institutions, also teach. The majority work for almost 1,500 different companies, including 3M, BASF, Dow Chemical, General Electric, Halliburton, Honeywell, Hyundai, Northrop Grumman, and Siemens, as well as Corotech, Cortec, Cortest, Corr Instruments, CorroMetrics, Corrpro, Cor-Pro, Corrodys, and Corrosus, which sounds like it ought to team up with T-Rex Services. More than a handful work at government labs, including Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs, or the Naval Research Laboratory, or at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or at NASA. Some work at private corrosion labs, solving problems for organizations lacking their own corrosion engineers. These private labs, by the way, from Nevada to Delaware, were generally not amenable to showing around a guy writing about the industry.
A handful of corrosion engineers work as father-and-son teams. At Corrosion 2012, NACE International’s sixty-seventh annual conference and expo, which was attended by six thousand members of the corrosion business, I met a young corrosion engineer named Ryan Tinnea. Ryan Tinnea is the son of Jack Tinnea, who is also a corrosion engineer. Jack has a mustache. Ryan does not.
On the expansive floor of Salt Lake City’s convention center, I followed the younger Tinnea to the booth of a vendor selling plastic rebar. We walked past rows and rows of booths, from ten-by-ten-foot stalls to twenty-by-thirty-foot islands, selling $25,000 handheld X-ray fluorescence detectors,1 paints that change color with heat, and corrosion inhibitors so potent that one drop keeps steel wool in a jar of water unblemished. As we walked, Tinnea told me that he thought the fraction of corrosion engineers working in oil and gas was more like two-thirds. Surrounded as we were by booths tailored to the wants of big spenders, this impression was understandable. At the booth of the rebar vendor, Tinnea asked the salesmen about the mechanical characteristics of their stuff. Pseudoductile, they called it. It was not good enough for Tinnea. If not ductile, it was not okay in earthquakes. A fault runs directly through the middle of the city where he and his father work, about a mile south of the office of Tinnea & Associates. He and Tinnea the elder work in Seattle, on everything from the aquarium, to the opera house, to Piers 58, 59, and 60.
About 8 percent of corrosion engineers fly solo as corrosion consultants, providing independent corrosion expertise, often in service of litigation after some calamity: delaminating space shuttles, leaking pipelines, out-of-commission offshore oil rigs, or houses built with tainted Chinese drywall. They are not short of work. I found Tinnea the elder in his office on a Saturday morning. On a survey sent by NACE International to American corrosion engineers, one commented: “too much work to do with not enough time.” John Scully, the editor of the journal Corrosion (which is published by NACE International), put it thus: “Some people worry about job security. Corrosion engineers will always have job security.” Tom Watson, who served as NACE’s president from 1964 to 1965, put it even better. In June 1974, he wrote this poem, titled “Rust’s a Must”:
Mighty ships upon the ocean
Suffer from severe corrosion;
> Even those that stay at dockside
Are rapidly becoming oxide.
Alas, that piling in the sea
is mostly Fe2O3.
And when the ocean meets the shore
You’ll find there’s Fe3O4.
’Cause when the wind is salt and gusty
Things are getting awful rusty.
We can measure, we can test it,
We can halt it or arrest it.
We can gather it and weigh it,
We can coat it, we can spray it.
We examine and dissect it,
We cathodically protect it.
We can pick it up and drop it,
But heaven knows we’ll never stop it!
So here’s to rust, no doubt about it,
Most of us would starve without it.
Watson, as far as I can tell, was the funniest corrosion engineer in history. At a conference in Toronto during his tenure, he accidentally lit a block of magnesium on fire, and it burned a hole through the floor of a Holiday Inn. Toronto, apparently, did not hold it against the group. Because corrosion engineers aren’t unlike other engineers—as the joke goes, even the most extroverted one looks at your shoes while you talk to him—Watson is a great exception.
The other great exception is O. Doug Dawson, of AutoChem. In 1972 he presented a paper at the Australian Corrosion Association’s thirteenth conference called “Sex and Corrosion.” Half seriously, he alleged that the mechanisms of aqueous corrosion were analogous to those of sexual reproduction. Courtship, love, conception or contraception, pregnancy or abortion, and gestation all fit into his schema. The way he saw it, the patterns observed between the range of metals on the galvanic series (between magnesium and gold) seemed comparable to the patterns observed by scantily clad beachgoers (between surfer dudes and bikini babes). In the world and on the beach, factors at play in coupling included propinquity, exposure, and “local protrusions.” Bulges and curves, he wrote above the line drawing of a female profile, should be avoided.
Rust: The Longest War Page 23