Graceful Degradation

I have long been a fan of wooden boats. There is something alive about them that a fiberglass or steel boat lacks. Modern materials are an improvement in terms of strength to weight and ease of maintenance, but there is a grace to wood.

Part of that grace is that wood speaks to us about its condition. It shows its wear, its cracks, or its incipient rot. A spruce mast will creak and bend before giving up and breaking, allowing a sailor time to loosen a line or change course prior to a disaster. Although it is many times stronger, pound for pound, a carbon fiber mast offers no warnings. If there is a hidden flaw in it, or if you exceed its strength, the first you will hear of it is a sound like a gunshot. Your mast will go over the side and you will be in a very sudden predicament.

What the wooden mast has that the carbon fiber mast lacks is the property of graceful degradation. This is one of my favorite engineering terms. It calls up the image of genteel debauchery, but it refers to a system that has a gradual mode of failure with perceptible warnings inherent to the process.

This concept came to mind as I visited eastern Massachusetts this last Sunday. A ten-foot diameter water main, no, THE ten foot diameter water main from the primary reservoir had broken, putting two million people instantly on a boil water order.

The water main was just a trigger, though. The concept has been percolating in the back of my mind for some time, possibly since the recent tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The present financial crisis swirls into the mix along with the ash cloud from that volcano in Iceland, as do the 5,000 barrels of oil that spew into the Gulf of Mexico every day.

I’ll jump to the conclusion and then backtrack: Efficiency isn’t resilient. Concentrated, streamlined, just-in-time, lean systems aren’t resilient.

We rely on many complex systems that have virtually no room for error, yet threaten us with disaster in the event of an error. We have the single big water main and the few large power plants transmitting over the few large transmission lines. The power plant in question runs on an inherently dangerous fuel in an inherently dangerous reaction that has to be carefully balanced and isolated from the environment by layers of so-called failsafe protection. A dozen huge banks handle 60% of our economy. Our air transportation system is structurally overbooked, with planes taking off and landing every 30 seconds at major airports. A delay at one airport cascades to dozens of others, clogging the entire system .There is no room for error, breakdown, bad weather, or, let’s say, a volcanic eruption. There are hundreds of offshore platforms managing holes drilled into the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico, each required to contain a high pressure stream of toxic material. It’s surprising that more spills haven’t happened. As the various pipes, actual and metaphorical, crack and spew, we witness the inevitable force of chance multiplied by decades of cost savings through deregulation and deferred maintenance.

We could take a lesson from nature. The natural world has evolved to be spectacularly inefficient. It is inefficient because only the inefficient survive. Most organisms over-reproduce so that some small number of offspring will survive. Living systems exhibit massive redundancy.

I am reminded of the State of Vermont installing a “living system” wastewater treatment facility for one of its welcome centers along Interstate 91. A living system wastewater treatment plant uses tanks with hydroponically grown plants to absorb waste products and purify the water. The problem with wastewater treatment at a tourist welcome center is that business spikes on the weekends and then goes to nearly zero during weekdays. A conventional septic system has a hard time handling the surge or starve pattern, but a plant ecosystem is well adapted to it. The huge surface area of the root systems captures the surge and the plants store the nutrients till the next time of plenty.

I am also reminded of a presentation I attended at the Northern Grain Growers conference back in March. The presenter was talking about side by side tests of organic and chemically grown grains. In good years the chemical crops outperformed the organic crops. However, in mediocre or bad years, when the weather didn’t cooperate, the organic crops outperformed the chemical ones. The reason is that organic farming concentrates on nourishing the soil, not the plant. (See my essay on obliquity) It takes more effort and care to build up the soil, but then the soil holds moisture and nutrients better than the dead sponge of a chemically treated field. The organic farmer is trading short term gain for long term reliability.

The British Petroleum (BP) offshore well that is now leaking 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico is a classic example of the failure of short term bean counting. It would have cost BP roughly $500,000 per well to install a remotely operated emergency shutoff valve, a backup requirement that BP had lobbied against. BP has about 200 subsea wells worldwide, so that would have cost BP $100 million. The company is now facing civil liabilities approaching $10 billion, and its stock has lost $25 billion in market value. That’s just the financial cost of lean operation. The cost to society in general will be many times that.

I’ll lay our present crises at the figurative feet of corporate power and corporate mythology. Our culture has been sold a story about the efficiency of business and the wisdom of market forces. Corporate interference in our government has made that mythology law. What we find is that efficiency works (at least for the shareholders) only as long as everything is going well, and that markets are no wiser than the yeast in a beer vat.

We need to have a conversation as a society about the ongoing price of building in resilience. In some cases it won’t be a cost, but a savings. My local credit union gives me better service and interest rates than the commercial bank I used to use. Widely distributed renewable energy systems will pay for themselves during their service life and dampen price volatility. We have to start adding into our calculations the periodic, yet inevitable price of lacking a Plan B. If we are smart, we will enforce some rational amount of redundancy. When things go wrong, as they so often do, we will have the ability to degrade gracefully.