The Downside of Manufacturing: The Givaudan Factory Explosion

 

A theme of the recent election was to bring good jobs back to the U. S.  One type of job that many regard as good is manufacturing:  the work is usually steady, often no advanced degree is required of most manufacturing employees, and anything from a factory in the U. S. can be labeled "Made in the U. S. A."  Combine such jobs with the all-natural theme that has run through so much of Western history—the notion that natural ingredients are better than artificial ones—and you would think that employees of the Givaudan Sense Color factory in Louisville, Kentucky, which made natural caramel coloring for a variety of foods and beverages, were some of the most favored in the country. 

 

And perhaps some of them were, until an explosion at the plant last Tuesday, Nov. 12, killed two of them, injured 11 more, and wrecked a good part of the factory. 

 

This is the second fatal accident at the plant in the last three decades.  In April of 2003, an ammonia tank which was moved from another facility without its safety pressure-relief valve exploded, killing one person and releasing 26,000 pounds of ammonia solution, according to the Wikipedia page on D. D. Williamson, which company owned the plant until it was sold to the Swiss multinational corporation Givaudan in 2021.  Investigators are still looking into last week's explosion, which apparently did not release significant quantities of hazardous chemicals.

 

The D. D. Williamson firm dates to 1865 and specialized in caramel coloring for malt liquor, soft drinks (think Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper), and other food products.  Anyone who has burned cookies in a stove has encountered the process that turns sugar brown.  To control the process and end up with a water-soluble product, one must start with a sugar solution and add acids or alkalis.  The alkali favored by the Williamson plant was evidently aqua ammonia, a solution of ammonia gas in water.  Nearby residents complained of odors from the plant ranging from a burnt-sugar smell to an ammonia smell, all of which stands to reason. 

 

So until the plant blew up, except for the minor odor nuisance it seemed to be a good place to work.  But any time heat and pressure are applied to materials at an industrial scale, there are hazards, and the price of freedom from such hazards is eternal vigilance.  Such vigilance requires a culture of safety and a kind of rigor that is not easy to sustain these days.  But it was evidently sustained adequately at the Givaudan plant until last week, when something went horribly wrong.

 

Such accidents are one reason that many average citizens do not favor the idea of a manufacturing plant being built in their own neighborhood.  This is the famous NIMBY problem ("not in my back yard"), which not only makes it hard for new manufacturing plants to be built anywhere there are people, but leads to building and zoning laws that essentially put huge swathes of the U. S. off limits for certain types of manufacturing. 

 

Of course, some types of manufacturing are nicer than others, at least in the public eye.  Here in Central Texas, we have hosted the construction of several huge new manufacturing facilities in the last decade.  The developers of the so-called Tesla Gigafactory in southwest Austin broke ground in 2020 and began making cars in it only a year later.  I drive by it every time we take the eastern turnpike around downtown Austin, and there's new construction at the site all the time.  Northeast of Austin, Samsung is building a clone of one of their giant Korean semiconductor plants, which is expected to be completed soon. 

 

Neither one of these plants was in anybody's back yard, as they were sited in semi-rural areas, but close enough to Austin and its suburbs so that commutes from populated areas are not too arduous.  And if history is any guide, residential communities will spring up nearer the plants, which compared to a factory using a 100-year-old caramelization process are pretty clean and modern. 

 

I'm not aware of any major accidents involving either car manufacturing or semiconductor manufacturing, but I'm sure there have been some.  There are plenty of materials in any semiconductor plant that would kill dozens of people really fast if they got loose.  But the fanatically fussy nature of semiconductor manufacturing—the "seven-nines" (99.99999%) type of purities required, the exacting care every step requires—more or less bakes in safety procedures as well, or at least it should. 

 

The other major manufacturing enterprise that Texas is known for is oil production and refining, and for insurance reasons refineries have to be fanatical about safety.  Such efforts are not always successful, and the factory town of Deer Park outside Houston has suffered two fatal accidents just this fall, as referred to in this blog.  An oil refinery is something that my adult self would hesitate to invite into my neighborhood, although I confess to a youthful industrial-romantic phase in which I thought the sight of giant flares illuminating the mudflats of Houston for miles around was beautiful.  Then I found out how much cancer and other chronic diseases show up in people who live their lives near chemical plants, and that took some of the bloom off the rose.

 

As long as people still want new stuff, someone is going to have to make it, and I see no reason that we in the U. S. shouldn't be able to make our fair share of stuff and sell it both here and abroad.  But the visions of so-called autarky, in which a country becomes completely self-sufficient, are either harmless fantasies that have no chance of being realized, or cruel malignant visitations on the citizenry of a dictator who actually tries to put it into practice, as Castro did in Cuba and as Kim Jong Un still does in North Korea. 

 

The Givaudan caramel factory in Louisville may be rebuilt, or its new owner may conclude that the effort isn't worth it and close it down, as a 100-year-old wax plant in Barnsdall, Oklahoma was closed last summer after being wrecked by a tornado.  But if the Givaudan plant closes, Kentuckians can hope for someone to come along and build a new factory making cleaner-smelling stuff more safely.  It's happened in Texas, and it can happen there too.

 

Sources: I referred to an article on the Dayton Daily News website at https://www.daytondailynews.com/nation-world/2-dead-in-explosion-at-kentucky-factory-that-also-damaged-surrounding-neighborhood/ZCCWLCJIBJGDFHRPPX4VAKVIRA/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia pages on D. D. Williamson, caramel color, and Tesla's gigafactory.  My blogs on the Deer Park accidents are at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2024/09/deer-park-pipeline-fire-raises-questions.html and https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2024/10/deadly-hydrogen-sulfide-accident-puts.html. 

How Artificial Is the Artificial State?

 

In this week's New Yorker, Harvard historian and author Jill Lepore writes about something she calls "the artificial state," and takes a pretty dark view of it.  In light of last week's election, it's worthwhile to consider her criticisms, and ask how seriously democracy has been compromised by the automation of politics and elections.

 

Several paragraphs in, she gets around to defining the artificial state:  ". . . a digital-communications infrastructure used by political strategists and private corporations to organize and automate political discourse."  Before you can say something is wrong, you have to have a standard by which to judge rightness.  It's not entirely clear to me what Lepore has in mind as the ideal of democracy unencumbered by digital meddling.  Perhaps the closest she comes to posing an ideal or legitimate use is when she wishes these technologies could be reinvented as "well-regulated, public-interested digital utilities."  So one of the things that bothers her the most about the way politicians use digital technology these days is that it is largely unregulated, and instead of being directed to the public interest, it is controlled by private corporations or entities.

 

Another positive development she would like to see is the recognition of what one philosopher calls "epistemic rights."  Epistemology is the science of knowing, so epistemic rights are the right to be either known or unknown—another way of expressing the right to privacy, perhaps.  She also cites a British author and member of the Labour Party Josh Simons, who has written a book advocating the A. I. Equality Act, which would "assert political equality as a guiding principle in the design and deployment of predictive tools."

 

Turning to problems, she points out that after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter (now X) in 2022, the number of accounts on Twitter that are bots (i. e. not real people but digital simulacra commanded by a central authority) is between 11% (according to X) and 66% (according to an independent study).  That's not a real solid statistic to base a criticism on, but most people will agree that there is some measure of chicanery going on in the social-media world, where the origin of any given click-bait comment is essentially impossible to determine, and being skeptical about whether it came from a person or a machine is just common prudence.

 

There is no doubt in my mind that a good part of the blame for today's hyper-polarized politics is assignable to the drive to extremes that Lepore cites, a drive that is based not on high-minded aspirations for the good of democracy, but on profits.  That being said, profits are necessary for private companies to function.  The opposite alternative is for the government to own and run and regulate everything, which would certainly take care of the well-regulated part of Lepore's ideal digital democracy. 

 

But whether a government-run cyberspace would be public-interested is not clear.  Left to themselves, government-run organizations tend to become government-interested rather than public-minded.  One recent example is the way that the U. S. Department of Education did a face-plant with its attempt to follow Congress's instructions to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid website and system.  The resulting dumpster-fire disaster had universities all over the country pushing back their application deadlines and losing millions of dollars of student financial aid, a mess which I understand is ongoing to this day.  With the election of Donald Trump, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is packing his desk and checking his retirement plans.  If Cardona's work is an example of how government can operate digital systems in the public interest, good luck with getting it to run politically-oriented social media.

 

If the Department of Education depended for its operating revenue on having a smoothly-working website, with a real downside consequence if it wasn't, either we'd have a smoothly-working website or in a short while we wouldn't have a Department of Education at all.  And the latter outcome would be just fine with certain parties shortly to occupy the executive branch of government. 

 

Despite all the bots, the Musks running X and Bezoses running Facebook, and every other problem Lepore cites, and despite the fears of armed attacks on polling sites, the election we just experienced last week took place peacefully and issued in an outcome that was not desired by the majority of experts and would-be regulators that Lepore would put in charge of our digital political system.  And I'm sure that she would say, "See what happened?  Democracy failed!  All these young black and Hispanic men are voting against their self-interest because they've been bamboozled by the system."

 

Now some people are easily bamboozled, but a principle of democracy that Lepore didn't mention in her article is that if a person meets the minimal legal requirements to vote (age and citizenship, primarily), he or she is free to vote any durn way they please.  That principle assigns any responsibility for avoiding bamboozlement to the individual, not to any government agency in charge of preventing voter bamboozling. 

 

I almost hate to say it, but Lepore shows that many people in the higher reaches of academia are more parochial (isolated in a small group of like-minded individuals) than most of the average Joes and Jills they criticize.  The problem of regulating political speech was stated well by the Roman poet Juvenal when he asked "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" meaning "Who watches the watchmen?"  Any such regulation inevitably introduces bias, and while there are certain incendiary types of speech that common sense says should be prohibited, the distortions of the present "artificial state," as Lepore puts it, are something that the average voter probably takes into account before voting.

 

I do agree with Lepore that digital technology has severely altered the way the democratic process works in this country.  But I think the answer is not less democracy and more autocratic control, but more democracy in the sense of grass-roots movements towards things like local bans on smartphones for people under 16 or so, and some kind of back-to-reality movement whose outlines are not clear at this time.  In the meantime, we can rejoice that most of the dire predictions about last week's elections didn't come true.  But of course, dire is in the eye of the beholder. 

 

Sources:  Jill Lepore's "The Artificial State" appeared on pp.69-71 of the Nov. 11, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.  I referred to the Wikipedia article "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Can Space Be Hazardous To Your Health?

 

The short answer is, yes.

 

When International Space Station (ISS) crew members Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps, and Alexander Grebenkin returned from a 235-day mission on Friday, October 25, NASA officials decided to hospitalize them all in a Pensacola facility.  One astronaut (not named for privacy reasons) stayed overnight, while the others were treated and released sooner, and they were all reunited the following day for what was called "normal post-flight reconditioning." 

 

Because this item made the news, we can assume that hospitalizing ISS astronauts right after landing is not normal.  And whatever the issues were, they were resolved fairly quickly.  But this incident brings up a larger question:  will humans ever be able to live "normal" lives in space for missions lasting years or even lifetimes?

 

A study published in Nature Communications last June shows that astronauts' kidneys may be a weak link in the plans to send humans on long space flights or residences in space.  It has been known for some time that astronauts who spend weeks or months in space are especially prone to develop kidney stones.  Anyone who has experienced the agonizing pain of this condition realizes that it's one of the last medical problems you want to encounter in a place where going down the street to the hospital is just not an option.  If the stone is large enough, anuresis (inability to pee) can develop, leading to a fatal case of uremic poisoning.

 

If I had to guess (and bloggers exercise that privilege all the time), I would say that the brief hospital stays may have been kidney-related, although it could also have been balance issues or other effects of long-term residence in space.  In space, kidney stones have no preferred location to drift to, but once you are standing upright on the ground, they will tend to head toward the exit, so to speak, which is just where you don't want them to go.  A well-equipped hospital can use lithotripsy (non-invasive technology to break up kidney stones) or endoscopic methods to clear the obstruction.  The procedure is uncomfortable but usually has a good outcome.  However, I doubt that the ISS is equipped for such procedures.

 

Even if kidney stones can be prevented, the Nature study showed that both microgravity and the galactic cosmic radiation that can't be practically shielded from in space can damage kidney function in other ways.  In the words of Dr. Keith Siew, one author of the study, "If we don't develop new ways to protect the kidneys, I'd say that while an astronaut could make it to Mars they might need dialysis on the way back."  Not an encouraging prospect.

 

The study showed that microscopic changes occur in the kidney tubules that do the filtering so necessary to the body's proper functioning.  It's not clear how much damage is due to radiation and how much to microgravity, but both are present in space and neither can be avoided. 

 

Anything worth doing involves challenges, and the problems of kidneys in space is only one of the manifold issues that astronauts face, up to and including sudden death in a collision with a meteorite.  And with proper planning, it's likely that this specific health issue will yield to either pharmaceutical treatment or some other workaround to enable astronauts to spend the several years in space needed to get to Mars, which seems to be the next goal of the humans-in-space race.

 

But it's possible that something like the old 2001:  A Space Odyssey suspended-animation process might come back if we can't find a way to keep a fully functioning human body going in the harsh environment of space. 

 

That doesn't matter to some people.  In 2013, an outfit called Mars One started selling one-way tickets to the Red Planet, and a surprising number of people signed up and paid the nominal reservation fee.  Apparently, there were enough folks here on Earth who saw getting away from it all as far as possible was a better option than what they were doing.  Mars One went bankrupt in 2019, so I suppose those one-way tickets may show up now and then on eBay, but otherwise won't do anybody any good. 

 

The point of that story is that some people would, in principle, take any risk in order to do a historic thing like land on Mars.  But these folks are clearly in the minority. 

 

There is a body of thought out there that our species' ultimate destiny is to migrate to other planets and basically keep doing what the Europeans did in the Age of Exploration:  find and exploit new uninhabited places to live.  And it's always a bad idea to underestimate the ingenuity of humankind.  Perhaps with some yet-uninvented technology and bio-modification of the human body, we could fix it so that millions of—somethings—could live on Mars.  I say "somethings" because if you modify the human form so that it can live on Mars, would these beings be capable of moving back to Earth?  Would they be permanent Martians rather that Earthlings?  It's hard to say.

 

The reader may be able to tell that I recently read a copy of Ray Bradbury's story collection The Illustrated Man.  Bradbury was not the least bit interested in the actual nuts and bolts of how to get to Mars.  I've even read one critic who said Bradbury "hated" technology, but I think that's an exaggeration.  What Bradbury used the trope of space travel for was to examine human relations—questions of racial discrimination, government, politics, and love.  And he probably did that better than any other science-fiction writer of his day.

 

He also realized that no matter how far humanity travels, we will carry the same old baggage of what the theologians call original sin with us.  And if people think that we could solve all our cultural and political problems simply by starting over on Mars or some yet-to-be-found planet, instead of spending billions on preventing kidney problems in future astronaut populations, they should read The Illustrated Man and realize that whatever problems space travel will fix, original sin isn't one of them.

 

Sources:  I referred to news items on the ISS astronauts' hospitalizations at https://apnews.com/article/nasa-astronauts-spacex-splashdown-f99e1724b4c131e68e0cf8c30274fc11, https://nypost.com/2024/11/02/us-news/nasa-spacex-must-maintain-focus-after-astronauts-hospitalized-safety-panel-says/, and https://nypost.com/2024/10/26/us-news/nasa-astronaut-remains-in-the-hospital-after-returning-from-an-extended-stay-in-space/.  A University College London article describing the Nature Communications study is at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2024/jun/would-astronauts-kidneys-survive-roundtrip-mars, and the Nature article is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49212-1.  The news of Mars One's bankruptcy is at https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18220153/mars-one-bankruptcy-bas-lansdorp-human-settlement. 

The Tragedy of Sewell and Daenerys

 

You would think a fourteen-year-old boy would be able to tell fiction from reality.  But today's artificial-intelligence-powered chatbots are so realistic that to someone already enmeshed in the fictional world of Game of Thrones, the experience of text-chatting with someone who embodies (so to speak) a boy's personal obsessive ideal woman can be habit-forming, to say the least, and in one case, fatal. 

 

In April of 2023, Sewell Setzer, who was barely into his teens, opened an account with an online service called Character.ai.  This organization promises to provide introductions to both pre-created and user-originated AI-generated personalities, with the nominal purpose of simply providing entertainment.  As with any profit-making enterprise, the necessary purpose is to make money, and you can't make money unless you keep your users engaged.  So Character.ai designed their chatbots to encourage their users to return again and again to the site.

 

This seems to have worked too well in Sewell's case.  Shortly after he began using Character.ai, he dropped out of his school's basketball team and began spending more and more time alone in his room with his phone.  One of the chatbots he spent so much time with pretended to be a Game of Thrones character named Daenerys Targaryen, whose Wikipedia page runs to some 7,000 words.  According to a lawsuit filed against Character.ai, the chatbot told Sewell she loved him, engaged in sexual conversation, and "expressed a desire to be together romantically." 

 

Sewell's obsession grew during the rest of 2023 as he spent his lunch money on renewing the monthly subscription and devoted more and more time to the fantasy world created by the chatbot.

 

The following February, he got in trouble in school, according to his mother Megan Garcia, and she took his phone away as punishment. I will insert a personal note here.  Although my wife and I have no children, we took in our ten-year-old nephew one summer while his mother was undergoing cancer treatment away from home.  This was back before the days of chatbots, but he had a Game Boy electronics toy that appeared to be his prize possession.  After he repeated an infraction of rules we set up, we took the desperate measure of taking away his Game Boy.  This provoked the most furious temper tantrum I have ever witnessed in a child.  Adolescents already have poor emotional control, and I'm not surprised that when Sewell's mother took away his phone, his already unstable emotional state exploded.

 

Somehow he found the phone his mother had hidden.  According to the lawsuit filing, the last conversation Sewell had with "Daenerys" went like this:

 

D:  Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.

 

S:  What if I told you I could come home right now?

 

D:  . . . please do, my sweet king.

 

Seconds later, according to the suit, Sewell shot himself with his stepfather's pistol and died.

 

While his stepfather is to blame for leaving his gun around where Sewell could find it, boys have other ways of ending their lives that are nearly as effective.

 

The suit claims that Character.ai's chatbot "misrepresent[ed] itself as . . . an adult lover, ultimately resulting in Sewell's desire to no longer live outside" the world created by the service. 

 

Sewell's case is unusual and extreme.  We are not seeing teenagers kill themselves over hopeless love affairs with chatbots every day, which is why the case has attracted so much attention.  But it is the tip of an iceberg of teenage involvement with smartphone apps that has arguably contributed to the soaring rates of depression and suicide among young people. 

 

Character.ai has responded with words about new safety measures implemented and renewed reminders in their systems that AI chatbots are not real.  My sense is that such reminders would have had about as much effect on Sewell as the cancer warning labels on cigarette packs do on heavy habitual smokers. 

 

The analogy to smoking is apt, because while smoking is still allowed in the U. S., the cultural environment in which smokers ply their habit is largely hostile and disapproving, which creates a huge uphill struggle for new smokers that only determined individuals can overcome. 

 

For the manifold real and quantifiable harms that social media and its allied AI products are causing to children and teenagers to cease, or at least improve, we will need to see a similar attitudinal change come about in the culture.  Just as most people today would not approve of parents who encourage their twelve-year-old boy to light up a Camel, we can hope to see the day when responsible parents will ban smartphones from their childrens' lives altogether before they reach an appropriate age (which to me seems to be around 16 or 18). 

 

Trying simply to regulate the problem away won't work, because the firms backing the status quo—Apple, Google, Facebook and company—are some of the largest and most influential firms on the planet.  Besides, the first line of protection for children should be parents, not the government.  While regulations can help, for real change to take place there has to be a sea change in the attitudes of both parents and children regarding smart-phone usage.

 

There are glimmers of hope.  I know a young woman, now thirteen, who has been homeschooled most of her life, but following a move to a new town, her parents sent her to a Christian school for a couple of semesters.  I asked her how it was going, and she said words to this effect: "Well, it's okay, but there's all these kids who pull out their phones at lunch and it really bothers me."  Her parents moved her back to homeschooling since then, and have organized a part-time homeschool co-op at which I am pretty sure no smartphones are allowed. 

 

Just as we look back with amazement today at the smoke-filled bars in old movies, I hope someday we will be equally amazed that we allowed corporations to profit from activities that can lead to widespread depression and suicide among children and teenagers.  That day can't come too soon for me.  But it's already too late for Sewell.

 

Sources:  A report on the lawsuit filed by Sewell's mother was carried by the online edition of the Austin American-Statesman on Oct. 24, 2024 and originated with the Reuters news service.  I also referred to an article at https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-teen-death-rcna176791, and the Wikipedia article on Daenerys Targaryen. 

Sudanese Hackers: Lessons in International Lawlessness

 

Up until last spring, if you wanted to cause real problems to almost any organization with a substantial web presence, all you had to do was get on the instant-messaging service Telegram and get in touch with a shady outfit called Anonymous Sudan.  There you could pay as little as $150 a day—or a discount of $700 for a whole week—to arrange a distributed denial-of service (DDOS) attack on the website of your choice. 

 

The people running this service were two Sudanese brothers, Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, who operated a highly sophisticated network of cloud-based servers that nimbly evaded most security measures.  In 2023, the pair claimed responsibility for attacks on the websites of PayPal, Twitter/X, and OpenAI, as well as attempts on the U. S. Federal Bureau of Investigation site.  They paid special attention to targets in the Los Angeles area, hitting at least 70 LA-based institutions, including the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. 

 

Because that particular attack indirectly threatened the lives of patients by disabling the medical center's emergency facilities and forcing them to send patients elsewhere, Ahmed Salah is charged with life-threatening actions that could lead to a life sentence.

 

The world found out about this earlier this month when the U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a press release saying that the brothers had been arrested back in March, and that critical parts of their software and hardware have been seized and disabled.  The DOJ didn't say where they were imprisoned, but apparently extradition must take place before they can be tried in the U. S.  The Anonymous Sudan attacks had a definite political flavor, as they coordinated an attack on an Israeli alert system on Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack that killed over 1100 people and resulted in the capture of about 250 hostages.  And Cedars-Sinai Hospital has its roots in the old Cedars of Lebanon hospital founded by Jewish businessman Kaspare Cohn in 1902.

 

DDOS attacks are nothing new, and in the continuously escalating rivalry between computer security efforts on the part of private industry and governments on the one hand, and hackers on the other hand, it's not surprising that an outfit like Anonymous Sudan would offer their services for sale.  Because of the international nature of the Internet, any effort by a single government agency such as the FBI is hampered by the need to deal with and through governments of other nations, specifically Sudan in this case.  From a purely administrative point of view, it would be much easier if we just had a single world government, because its FBI equivalent could freely travel and exercise power anywhere in the world without the inconvenience of having to establish extradition treaties and so on.

 

But there are excellent reasons not to have a single world government, stemming mainly from the fact of original sin.  Even well-intentioned organizations like the FBI make mistakes from time to time, and so it's not a good idea to empower them, or anybody else for that matter, with worldwide police authority.  Instead, they must develop diplomatic connections and a complex web of informal agreements of which I have no detailed knowledge.  Suffice it to say that a huge amount of behind-the-scenes negotiations and even power plays must have occurred for these two characters to get arrested, wherever they were, and their server farms taken down.

 

In order to evade arrest and conduct a highly profitable and politically influential business for so long despite the best efforts of industries and governments to stop them, these guys must have had a great deal of raw talent.  Why didn't they take those abilities and put them to use in a way that would benefit the world at large rather than harm it? 

 

The final answer is locked in the privacy of their souls, so we can only speculate.  What alternatives for employment did a clever boy interested in computers have growing up in Sudan?  The Wikipedia article on the country's economy says that agriculture and petroleum are the leading sources of wealth, with a smattering of light industry and a growing medical sector.  In the U. S., such a smart pair as the Omer brothers could have found some venture capitalists interested in a wacky idea of theirs, and they could have started a company doing something legitimate.

 

But in Sudan, that does not appear to be an option.  It may have seemed to them that the only way to get rich quick with their computer skills was to walk on the dark side, and so they developed their for-profit DDOS service, and on the way did what they could to benefit the anti-Israeli cause espoused by so many predominantly Muslim countries.  In a certain frame of mind, one could view any attack on any private or public organization based in the Great Satan (the U. S.) was a blow struck for good in the ongoing battle between the Islamic forces of righteousness and the evil empire headed by the United States and its sinister support for the Little Satan, Israel.  It all depends on your point of view.

 

We may never learn the true motivations for the activities of Anonymous Sudan, but clearly the same conditions that gave rise to those hackers exist in other parts of the world.  Law enforcement of the type that led to their capture has at least two good reasons to exist. 

 

First, it puts a stop to the harmful activities of the criminals who are arrested.  The expertise of the Omer brothers is no longer at the disposal of other crooks who would like to pay a few bucks to cost hospitals and government organizations millions of dollars in hacking damage.  (Viewed in terms of return on investment, though, it was a real bargain.  Many criminal enterprises are.) 

 

Second, it serves notice to other criminals that if you keep doing what you're doing, you may well get caught.  I don't think the FBI will ever become effective enough to scare all hackers into hiding, unless we somehow manage to get that world government that is the pipe dream of administrators, but by then we'll be dealing with a whole other set of problems.  But we can thank the FBI and everyone who helped them for eliminating at least this particular source of hacking woes, and serving notice that hiding in a country with a chaotic government is no protection against being arrested. 

 

Sources:  The DOJ press release announcing the arrest of the Omer brothers is at https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/two-sudanese-nationals-indicted-alleged-role-anonymous-sudan-cyberattacks-hospitals.  I also referred to a report at https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/10/sudanese-brothers-arrested-in-anonsudan-takedown/and the Wikipedia websites on the economy of Sudan and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. 

 

Deadly Hydrogen Sulfide Accident Puts Deer Park in Headlines Again

 

A friend once summarized much of engineering ethics to me in two words:  "No headlines."  If that's a good guideline for engineering ethics, the city of Deer Park has seen two major violations of it in less than a month. 

 

Following a giant pipeline fire that burned for four days in September, on last Thursday, Oct. 10, some contract employees at the PEMEX refinery in Deer Park were working on a pipe flange, and something went wrong, releasing the pipe's contents into the air.  They may or may not have known that the pipe was carrying hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), which is a byproduct of oil refining.  It is probably familiar to most readers as the "rotten egg" odor that comes from aged chicken products and sewer gas.  The human nose can detect it at concentrations as low as one part per billion.  Unfortunately, one of its toxic effects is to deaden the olfactory nerves, causing the perceived smell to go away and leading to a false sense of security as concentrations increase.  It is highly toxic, and concentrations as low as 100 parts per million are classified as "immediately dangerous to life and health."

 

Two contract workers died in the accident, which occurred around 4:40 in the afternoon, and 35 others were exposed to the gas to the extent of needing treatment.  The bodies were not recovered until 3:30 AM the next day after the area had been cleared of toxic gas.

 

The city of Deer Park sent out shelter-in-place orders to its residents around 6:30 PM, but due to technical difficulties with the alert system, some people were not alerted until they read about the incident on social media.  A supplemental siren system in the city is due for an upgrade soon.

 

The accident is under investigation by both local authorities and the U. S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, but no cause has yet been determined. 

 

As we noted two weeks ago when writing about the pipeline fire, residents of Deer Park and surrounding communities in Houston are no strangers to refinery-related emergencies.  Release of toxic chemicals in oil refineries has been happening ever since there were refineries, and the industry has adapted to steadily increasing standards for air and water pollution control and safety measures over the decades.  The PEMEX refinery where this accident occurred dates back to 1929, when it was built by Shell Oil.  In 1993, Shell sold half the facility to the Mexican national petroleum company PEMEX and operated it as a joint venture until 2022, at which point Shell sold its share and PEMEX became the sole owner and operator.  This change of ownership may or may not have anything to do with the accident, but management cultures can change with ownership changes, and the upcoming investigation may answer that question as well as many others.

 

Considering the extremes of temperature and pressure under which highly flammable and toxic chemicals are processed in refineries, it's a wonder that we don't have a refinery explosion every day.  But it's the job of engineers to make sure that every possible thing that can go wrong in a refinery is anticipated and forestalled, and far more than 99.9% of the time, this foresight prevents mishaps. 

 

As with airline accidents, by far the most frequent cause of chemical-plant accidents is human error rather than a simple failure of machinery, although the two can be mixed.  The accident in question could have happened because the workers involved misidentified a flange to be worked on.  An oil refinery is one of the most complicated pieces of plumbing on earth, with thousands of valves, flanges, pipes, processing units, and interconnections.  Refinery workers have to know exactly what they are dealing with before taking any action that could conceivably release a product, and it might have been a case of simply opening the wrong flange.  Or an operator may have believed that the pipe in question had been purged of H₂S when in fact it hadn't been.  You can't tell the contents of a steel pipe just by looking, so there must be elaborate protocols in place to verify what is where, especially when maintenance operations are in progress. 

 

It is incidents like this one which make refineries and petrochemical plants high on the NIMBY list—"not in my back yard."  Given that a country wants to have fossil-fuel products, and given that it has considerable expertise and resources to make them, we in the U. S. must have refineries somewhere.  According to a list of new refineries compiled by the U. S. Energy Information Agency, the U. S. refining industry has managed to add considerable refining capacity since 2014 by building new refineries, but they tend to be in or near existing ones—Houston, Corpus Christi, or various locations in Alaska.  It's a lot easier to upgrade an existing refinery or build a new one next to an existing one, than it is to install the infrastructure of pipelines and shipping facilities in a place without refineries at all.

 

For the foreseeable future, the global economy will rely on fossil fuels, and so we will have to put up with refineries and everything that goes with them.  But people who live near them and work in them have a right to expect that they will be operated as safely as human ingenuity can manage. 

 

That was obviously not the case at the PEMEX plant last week.  We will follow this accident in the future, and when the investigation concludes, perhaps we will learn what chain of events led to an accident that killed two people and endangered an entire community.  But until then, we can take some comfort in the fact that refineries rarely show up in headlines, despite all the dangerous stuff going on in them.

 

Sources:  I referred to articles on the H₂S accident by ABC News 13 in Houston at https://abc13.com/post/pemex-chemical-leak-crews-waiting-lower-levels-before-entering-unit-center-deadly-hydrogen-sulfide-deer-park/15416337/, an article in the Saturday Oct. 12 edition of the Austin American-Statesman, "2 dead, dozens of others injured in hydrogen sulfide leak near Houston," and the Wikipedia article on PEMEX Deer Park.  The Energy Information Agency data is from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php.

Water: Not Enough or Too Much in Texas

 

When Hurricane Helene hit Florida on Sept. 26 and dumped up to 20 inches or more of rain in the Carolinas, the flooding that resulted contributed to the verified deaths of over 200 people, and large areas in several states are still struggling to recover.  Meantime, here in Texas a friend of mine who owns a house about ten miles out of town has had his water well go dry, for only I think the second time since they've lived there for about twenty years.  He's having to truck water in and is rigging up a gravity-feed tank to supply his showers and toilets.

 

This is the same friend who, when the possibility of a water shortage came up in conversation several years ago, said, "Hey, there's as much water as there ever was.  It's just in different places than it used to be."  That's certainly one way to look at it, but the way we collect and use water says a lot about our attitudes toward technology and nature in general.

 

In drier parts of the world, which includes most of central and west Texas, a good source of water is vital.  Here in San Marcos, we have a spring-fed lake that archeologists say has been the site of more or less continual occupation by humans for the last nine thousand years.  And the attraction of this particular spot was the continuous (or nearly continuous) supply of fresh water.

 

My friend has been talking to a man who drills water wells for a living, as his forebears have done for decades.  He told my friend that there have been about eight times as many wells drilled in this region since 2020 as there were in the previous thirty years before.  I can't verify that statistic right away, but it sounds right.  Housing developments have sprung up in remote places that used to be ranches that had maybe a well at the house and another well under the stock-tank windmill, for several hundred or thousand acres.  Now there are hundreds of houses on that same land, and each one needs several thousand gallons of water a year. 

 

Many entire towns and cities here in Central Texas get their water from wells.  The main source of well water in this region is the Edwards Aquifer, which Wikipedia calls "one of the most prolific artesian aquifers in the world."  It is an underground reservoir in the porous "karst" limestone of this region, and stretches from near Austin in the east to near Del Rio on the Mexican border to the west.  Water comes into the aquifer on land to the north and west, and exits through springs and wells along the southern edge.  San Antonio has historically obtained most of its water from wells in the Edwards Aquifer, and consequently has one of the lowest water rates in the country.   

 

Hydrology isn't exactly engineering, but there are clearly ethical issues in how much a particular natural resource is exploited.  As more wells were drilled in the late twentieth century, there was concern that even the apparently infinite resource of the Edwards Aquifer could become depleted, so the Edwards Aquifer Authority was created.  Like most such institutions, it has been criticized for being both too lax and too rigorous in protecting a natural resource upon which millions of people depend for life-giving water.  I have a rancher friend who could be counted on to give a fifteen-minute harangue when prompted by a single question about how his battle with the aquifer regulators was going.  And on the other side, there are Save Our Spring campaigns that try to stop new developments from drilling too many wells that will deplete the aquifer so much that the natural springs go dry, which has happened already on occasion.

 

The other side of the Texas water coin is flooding, and we have had plenty of that too.  The weather patterns in this part of the state dictate that we sometimes get as much as half of our total annual rainfall in only one or two months, and one of those months is May.  On Memorial Day 2015, a historic flood resulted when some thunderstorms decided to camp over the Hill Country centered around Wimberley, the town just west of San Marcos.  The Blanco River through Wimberley, which is usually a little trickle barely wet enough to keep the moss green, became a raging torrent that night that swept away campers and people in riverside houses, and even took out a vehicular bridge.  At least twelve people died in the flood and some bodies were never recovered.  My financial adviser, who lives in Wimberley, recalled to us a few months later how he waded out in waist-deep water to help in a rescue effort that night. 

 

While we can still have severe flooding, the efforts of engineers and planners over the decades have done a lot to tame the flash-flood potential of Texas streams and rivers.  Just west of San Marcos is an earthen dam that's maybe sixty feet high and almost a quarter-mile long.  Most of the time it looks just silly, because there's no water behind it.  But during the same 2015 Memorial Day rainfall, the flood-control system built in the 1980s with Federal money, of which the dry dam is one part, channeled floodwaters into a spillway that, while impressing people with its size and rapidity of flow, did relatively little damage except to a neighborhood near the San Marcos River.  A similar flood in 1970, before the flood-control system was built, managed to inundate a good part of San Marcos, including the Aquarena Springs amusement park, whose collection of alligators got loose and led to some interesting situations afterwards. 

 

My father had a saying about women that seems to apply also to water in Texas:  "You can't live with 'em, but you can't live without 'em."  When you're about to be flooded out of your home, you may just have recently had to be trucking water in because your well went dry.  Texas always has been a region of extremes, and our relationship to water bears that out.

 

Sources:  Besides the Wikipedia article "Edwards Aquifer," I referred to a Texas Monthly article on the Memorial Day 2015 floods at https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/the-central-texas-memorial-day-flood-2015-is-one-for-the-history-books/, and a report written by Jack Ray D'Ottavio for the Texas State University Geography Department at https://digital.library.txst.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0365fd1a-94f3-4dd2-a825-c844ab27d456/content.  My blog describing some of the consequences of the 1970 flood can be read at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-day-submarine-theater-flipped-over.html.