Disaster Engineering and Construction

Link to a good paper by Bob Prieto and Charles Whitaker of Fluor - - Post Disaster Engineering & Construction Program and Project Management.

Outsourcing Wars

We like our wars.  We have and we will - - but budget constraints are casting some doubt on the economic feasibility of open ended commitments and global obligations.  Remember an important point - - between military poverty and military desire is (has been and will always be) opportunity.  Opportunity at the point where national interests intersect with capitalistic opportunity.

Matt Potter, in his entertaining new book Outlaws Inc. (2011), highlights this opportunity in the context of black market smugglers and private military logistical firms.  Potter has the following story in his book:

John MacDonald is a Surrey-based chartering agent, one of the middle-men who take the initial job specs for armies, aid organizations, importer/exporters, and private individuals and find the planes and the aircrews to do them.  Despite coming form a long line of aviation specialists and having "seen it all," he laughs as he recounts one wildcat II-76 team job that left the American military command in southern Afghanistan breathless with admiration, knowing they'd been hoodwinked by a five-man crew of Russians and their shadowy network.


"The U.S. military had this huge generator they needed to get to an airfield site they were planning in the south.  This was a remote area, and aside from a few pockets of U.S. troops, it was completely under bandit control.  There was no fuel available for mile around the landing spot, and none of the outfits we approached would touch it with a barge pole.  They all kept saying, "We'll never get out again, how can we take of from an unprepared airfield with no fuel?'


"The job was priced at between $60,000 and $70,000, but one day there's a phone call from these Russian guys.  They said, "We'll do it, but it'll cost you $2 million, in advance."  The Americans didn't really have a choice by this state, so they paid.  And sure enough, right on time, this ex-Soviet air force crew flew in, with the generator, in this battered old II-76, unloaded the generator, then sat down for a leisurely smoke.

"Just as all the Americans were wondering how on earth they were going to fly out again, there's a cloud of dust and up clatters this old minibus driven by some Afghan bloke - - and these airmen just get in and drive off.  The Yanks were all going, "Hey, how will you get the plane back?"  And the crew just said, "We won't.  It's an old one - - we only bought it for this job, and we're ditching it here."  Half a million dollars it cost them, and they held it together with string just long enough to land, then cleared off $1.5 million in profit and left it to rust.  It's still there.

"Everyone just applauded them - - the U.S. guys in command, us, and charterers the world over.  Not just for the flying, but for the incredibility sharp business mind that could hatch this.  It was truly beautiful."

Remember - - between poverty and desire is always opportunity.  The era of globally tight military budgets will only reinforce this.

Climate Risk, Not Climate Change

The September 5, 2011 issue of Bloomberg Business has an interesting cover story on the insurance industry - - The God Clause by Brendan Greeley.  The following is important for engineers:

The business of insurers and reinsurers rests on balancing a risk between two extremes.  If the risk isn't probable enough, or the potential loss isn't expensive enough, there's no reason for anyone to buy insurance for it.  If it's too probable and the loss too expensive, the premium will be unaffordable.  This is bad for both the insured and the insurer.  So the insurance industry has an interest in what it calls "loss mitigation."  It encourages potential customers to keep their property from being destroyed  in the first place.  If Swiss Re is trying to affect the behavior of the property owners it underwrites, it's sending a signal: Some behavior is so risky that it's hard to price.  Keep it up, and you'll have no insurance and we'll have no business.  That's bad for everyone.

To that end, Swiss Re has started speaking about climate risk, not climate change.  That the climate is changing has been established in the eyes of the industry.  "For a long time," says Bresch, [in charge of sustainability and risk management for Swiss Re] "people thought we only needed to do detailed modeling to truly understand in a specific region how the climate will change.  You can do that forever."  In many places, he says, climate change is only part of the story.  The other part is economic development.  In other words, we're building in the wrong places in the wrong way, so wrong that what we build often isn't even insurable.  In an interview published by Swiss Re, Wolf Dombrowsky, of the Disaster Research Center at Kiel University in Germany, points out that it's wrong to say that a natural disaster destroyed something: the destruction was not nature's fault but our own.

Realistic Disaster Scenarios

Lloyd's, the London-based company that invented the modern profession of insurance, publishes a yearly list of what it calls "Realistic Disaster Scenarios."  The list imagines such events as two consecutive Atlantic seaboard windstorms or an earthquake as the New Madrid fault in the Mississippi Valley, either of which could strain or break an insurer's balance sheet.

The combination of climate change and economic development will force engineering to expand knowledge and capabilities in areas such as risk analysis, risk management, risk mitigation, and a understanding of the global insurance industry (general structure and capabilities).  For example, Swiss Re has been working with McKinsey & Co., the European Commission, and several environmental groups to develop a methodology it calls the "economics of climate adaption," a way to encourage city planners to build in a way that will be insurable in the future. 

To many organizations, both public and private, how you build in the future matters more than the levels of carbon dioxide.

C40

C40 is a planning group for 59 cities engaged in efforts to combat climate change.  A major focus of C40 is equipping old buildings with energy-efficient features.  In the U.S., the average building - - whether skyscraper, house or church was built in the 1970s.  For example, heating hot water accounts for 17% of the energy used by buildings in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy.  C40 has partnered with the World Bank to ensure funding for such retrofitting projects, among other climate action plans for cities.

The Age of Hyperspecialization

From the Letter to the Editor column in the September 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review:

What kind of life are you proposing to people?  Should business leaders micro-segment employees into task performers?  This is the death blow to innovation.  Where do critical-thinking skills fit into the authors' picture of the future of knowledge work?  What about systems thinking, design thinking, and the human ability to recognize patterns and create new things?  And what about the leverage you get when people are grouped together?  Don't they develop more-effective decisions?

Ray Luebke, structured innovation and strategy consultant

The letter was in reference to The Age of Hyperspecialization by Thomas W. Malone, Robert J. Laubacher, and Tammy Johns in the HBR July-August 2011 issue.

Coleridge's Ancient Mariner

Singapore is the third most densely populated country in the world.  Water is a huge issue and constraint for them.  With 7,000 people per square kilometer, its land mass is not large enough to supply its five million inhabits with water.

Seawater has always been seen as our collective solution to local water problems (when the oceans hold 97% of our surface water, getting salt out of saltwater is everyones Plan B).  The issue has always been cost - - cost in the context of energy requirements for salt removal.  German engineering may have a solution - - Siemens electrochemical desalination is currently being tested in Singapore (a full-scale pilot plant should be completed by 2013).

The following was in the September 3, 2011 issue of The Economist (Drops to drink):

"To make seawater fit for human consumption its salt content of approximately 3.5% must be cut to 0.5% or less.  Existing desalination plants do this in one of two ways.  Some employ distillation, which needs to have 10 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per cubic meter of seawater processed.  Brine is heated, and the resulting water vapor is condensed.  Other plants employ reverse osmosis.  This uses molecular sieves that pass water molecules while holding back ions, such as sodium and chloride, that make water salty.  Generating the pressure needed to this sieving consumes about 4 KWh per cubic meter.  The Siemens system, by contrast, consumes 1.8 kWh per cubic meter, and the firm hopes to get that down to 1.5 kWh.

It works using a process called electrodialysis, in which the seawater is pumped into a series of channels walled by membranes that have slightly different properties from those used in reverse osmosis.  Instead of passing water molecules, these membranes pass ions.  Moreover, the membranes employed in electrodialysis are of two types.  One passes positively charged ions and the other passes negatively charged ones.  The two types alternate, so that each channel has one wall of each type.  Two electrodes flanking the system of channels then create a voltage that pulls positively charged ions such as sodium in one direction and negatively charged ions such as chloride in the other.

The result is that the ions concentrate in half the channels, creating a strong brine, while fresher water accumulates in the other half.  As the brine emerges, it is thrown away.  The fresher water is put through the same process twice more and eventually has its salt concentration reduced to 1%.  That is not bad, but it is still double what is potable.  There is therefore one further step.  This is to employ an ion-exchange resin in addition to the membranes.  Such resins increase the electrical conductivity of the system and allow one more passage, bringing the salt concentration below 0.5%."

Two key points.  The first is the notion that all water constraints and issues are local or regional problems - - yet water technology is a perfect example of potential global solutions.  The solution to your particular water supply problem may have a solution on the other side of the planet.  The second point is that metanational firms, such as a Siemens or GE, are very good at taking technology and research from Point A and applying it at Point B.  Those engineers that can think and capture knowledge globally, yet apply it locally, are going to be in high demand.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner probably said it best - - water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.