Maybe I’ll share some more principles of aging gracefully. I’m getting practice, but I’ve discovered that practice does not make perfect. Or did I remember that correctly?

No longer can we claim to hold these truths to be self evident. The new mantra is that we hold these opinions to be self evident because we are entitled to believe and react to the reality around us as if these opinions represented truths. This is an ugly aspect of American culture; these are the voices of unreason.

I used to be vaguely optimistic that things would turn out well; I used to consider myself patriotic. Not so much now. The term optimism has strayed into the realm of hope, and I don’t recognize the jargon of patriotism anymore. Hope is for the hopeless. Hope does not move grains of sand much less mountains. Faith  moves mountains because faith deals in relevance and fact. I have faith that when I drop this rock it will fall to the ground; I can’t prove this, only demonstrate it by dropping the rock time after time. I don’t hope the rock will fall; this would be an appeal to magic.  Upon that basis of faith in my experience, I build a real life.

June 2011, p. 42, Cleaner Times

Dr. Lydia Frenzel has been a significant force in the waterjetting industry since her early work in the 1970s and 1980s, which established waterjetting as a superior method for coatings removal. Lydia received her undergraduate and doctoral degrees in chemistry at the University of Texas in Austin and subsequently moved to southern Louisiana, where she worked with anti-fouling hull-coatings and then in pipeyards dealing largely with the effects of corrosion. After growing up on the Gulf Coast of Texas “with the chipping of rust in my ears,” this was a familiar battle.

While 3000–7000 psi water-blasting was used for cleaning pipes, Lydia reports, “When the pump companies started getting up to 20,000 psi around 1981–82, we started getting excited about coatings removal and surface preparation.” The lower pressure would clean and wash salts off, but Lydia observes, “When you go from 10,000 psi to 20,000 psi, magic occurs. You get a sonic wave on the surface and polymers would shear right off. The threshold pressure for most materials was 20,000 psi. I did a white paper for Butterworth on 20,000 psi surface preparation of metals for painting, and the result was that it could be done very elegantly.” Where technical papers typically have an audience of 50–100, around 3000 copies of Lydia’s “Water is True Grit” found their way to tradespersons and it is a classic Web item.

Charles Frenzel, a physicist from Vanderbilt as well as Lydia’s husband and coworker on the Advisory Council, notes, “I don’t know that anyone recognized at that time that we were opening an industry. No real science had been done on the idea of using waterjetting for coatings removal till that point. But when we cleaned the steel, we observed it had an immediate light yellowing that stayed that way for months. We have steel tests in storage that haven’t rusted in years.”

Lydia recalls, “We had a friend at the University of Kentucky who did the metallurgy on a cross section to prove that we had very clean surfaces. We had a small testing lab in New Orleans paint the surfaces for immersion testing, and we found the stuff was really cleaned off. With the waterjetting you not only got the salts knocked off, but the paint adhered better.”

“Immersion testing showed amazing performance!” Charles says, and this provided an application for equipment manufacturers to aim toward. Charles states, “Something had to come along to provide a reason for wanting more pressure, to control it in a certain way, and make a nozzle a certain way. Coatings removal gave people a handle on how this could be done and how it should go forward.”

After a typical cleaning by brushing or abrasive blasting, corrosion would often start within hours. Charles points out, “With abrasive blasting or brushing, they actually weren’t cleaning the salts off. People were looking at it in macroscopic terms—we can’t see anything so it must be ok. But corrosion starts at a microscopic level. By the next day the steel was black again.”

Though pump life was initially a problem with the higher pressures, Lydia notes, “The pump manufacturers have been very good at meeting needs for pumps, nozzles, and pump parts for this industry. They’ve responded to every request the industry has had.”

As waterjetting use expanded, Lydia continued work in related areas. “I worked for a coal mining plant in California and for Baker Sand Control in Lafayette, LA,” Lydia recalls. “My husband, Charles, and I had a computer consulting firm in New Orleans, and we were selling a water-based compound to keep pipes from corroding.”

Lydia became a committee chairperson for the Steel Structures Painting Council, now the Society of Protective Coatings (SSPC), and also for the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE). “I’m still doing that and that’s still fun,” she comments. “Along the way I became the expert for the United States in this particular area—surface preparation by wet blasting—for the International Standards Organization (ISO).

“The waterjetting community was excited about this application, and those contractors who used it liked it, but they were few and far between,” Lydia observes. “One obstacle comes from contractors who  own dry blasting equipment and would have to buy new equipment and re-educate their workforce. Another obstacle is that when you remove the rust, everything on the steel underneath now shows up— where the metal may have been scratched or welded.” With dry blasting, old mistakes are erased since the surface of the metal itself is abraded rather than just exposed. Lydia comments, “It’s still not uncommon to get a certified inspector who doesn’t know what he’s looking at. The surface looks different. But the refineries love the waterblasting because they have to test the little cracks and you can find them easily.”

Charles points out that some corporate cultures do not favor overall efficiency. “They didn’t worry about whether it was cheaper to replace— due to damaging rust from poor surface maintenance—or to repair. It’s cheaper to maintain, but the people who are in operations don’t get promoted by saving money. They are enamored by the shiny and the new.”

However, the advantages of waterjetting were recognized by paint manufacturers and the U.S. Navy. The Naval aircraft carrier repair engineers couldn’t believe the results. Lydia reports, “International Paint, Hempel, Sherwin Williams, PPG, and Ameron said they accepted and actually preferred the waterblasting cleaning method. The coatings suppliers are key because they have to warranty the work. If they don’t like it, nothing’s going to happen.”

“We got a breakthrough in 1994 because the U.S. Navy didn’t want sand left over after they blasted ship hulls. They wanted something ecologically friendly and recyclable, and that’s water,” Lydia states. “They had a demonstration of a full vacuum recovery and full recycling system.” Charles adds, “The waste stream should have no other waste than the coating that comes off. Waterjetting accomplishes this. The paint can be separated out, compressed, dried, and that’s the minimum possible.

Instead of thousands of tons of contaminated abrasive, such as sand, you have 15 barrels of paint chips. Waterjetting is incredibly green.”

Charles and Lydia formed the Advisory Council in 1996 with the goal of promoting education, cooperation, and development of new technologies that conserve resources, primarily dealing with water blasting or wet abrasive blasting. Lydia says, “Charles and I took photographs for NACE/SSPC standards, which were funded by the National Shipbuilding Research Program (NSRP), a joint shipyard/navy program. NSRP is still funding projects favorable to waterjetting.”

Education efforts involve workshops all over the globe, massive e-mail, and multiple websites to introduce users to the waterjetting process, and an ongoing battle against the inertia of doing things the same way they’ve always been done. “After 20 years some people are still wondering if water will dissolve salts,” Lydia wryly comments. “The standards have been out since 1994, and I still have people saying, ‘I’m not sure we can paint over waterjetted surfaces.’”

As Charles points out, “It would be easier to change chemistry than some people’s opinions, and we educators don’t like that!”

Successful waterjetting also calls for a higher level of expertise, which takes time to develop. Lydia explains, “You can calculate what happens when the water hits and ‘splats.’ You can calculate the velocity, energy, and force from a nozzle, and the cohesive force to drill through a layer and the adhesive force to shear along an interface. You can take off exactly the layers you need at a very specific level.

“A lot of the time contractors are not into calculations,” Lydia observes. “They want to pick up the equipment and just have it work, but this is sophisticated. Most of the time blasters will start at an inconspicuous spot with low velocity and pressure, or they might start at 30,000 psi and see what it takes to remove one layer and not the next. It becomes an art.”

Since Europe has been ahead of the United States in their environmental awareness, they have also been ahead in the use of waterjetting technology. Lydia notes, “In the l980s a company in Canada put together a massive waterjetting system and came to the U.S. Now they maintain pipelines in Russia and the Middle East. They come along the pipeline and clean and recoat it, but people in the U.S. aren’t using it even though it’s proven technology.” Charles and Lydia both see restoration of the oil, gas, and chemical pipelines in the U.S. as a critical need where waterjetting could be instrumental. Lydia reports, “Our pipeline system is old and corroded. It’s a major crisis point in our infrastructure. It costs $7 billion annually to monitor, replace, and maintain the 484,000 miles of U.S. pipelines. In our country we’re patching rather than cleaning and repainting.”

Since pipeline ruptures range from disruptive to dangerous, Charles muses, “Why isn’t the refurbishment of the pipeline system of the U.S. recognized as one of the largest business opportunities of recent times?” Charles feels that a vision of what can be achieved is necessary for change to occur. “We’ve got a society that’s so litigation-conscious that they do the same, usual thing,” he remarks. “There’s no incentive to look at something new or different.”

Lydia’s concern is, “After 30 years I don’t see how waterjetting is new any more, but I keep finding people who’ve never thought about waterjetting for their cleaning and coatings removal.”

Lydia served on the WJTA Board for 12 years and says, “I really enjoy working with the waterjetting industry. They’re very competitive, but they will get together and talk about what’s good for the industry. Through the years they’ve been very cooperative.”

Because of its versatility, waterjetting has quite diverse applications. “I love it that you can go into someone’s research lab and they may be cutting stained glass or parts for a motorcycle fender,” Lydia exclaims. “It’s used as a cutting tool for blue jeans, mashing potatoes, and pulverizing orange juice. One of the biggest uses of waterjets is cutting baby diapers because you have a fast stream of water that doesn’t get anything wet. It’s a knife blade that never gets dull. I would love to see more water used on bridges, structures, and roads. It pains me to see someone with a jackhammer on a highway. With waterjetting you can remove what you want without fracturing the rest of the surrounding concrete.”

Lydia has enjoyed serving as an expert on unique projects where waterjetting could provide both the precision and power needed. “We were involved in the conservation of the Titanic Big Piece and the Saturn V rocket,” she recalls. “I found the Saturn V to be the most interesting because you’re working on an icon—a part of history. We worked with the conservators to use waterjetting and not damage the artifact. We were letting them know how you could get one coat off without tearing the rest to pieces.”

The reason for Lydia and Charles’s promotion of waterjetting is not just professional interest; Charles says, “You might think we’re just technologists, but we think about the welfare of people. We search for excellence.” Since Lydia has been a District Governor with Rotary International, they have visited hundreds of clubs and Charles observes, “Community-aware people do not come from the engineering and science professions, but they have the biggest impact on lives. Scientists are often not aware of social implications because living in a gated community doesn’t give a picture of what’s going on at the food bank.”

“We really hate to see the ill effects of misapplied techniques and old ideas because people don’t want to change,” he continues. “That’s why we got involved—we were concerned about the waste of money and lives. We needed to develop a network to bring this community together to look at conservation of resources and the infrastructure of the United States.”

Lydia has been recognized as “Distinguished Citizen” by Alpha Gamma Delta sorority and was honored in 2004 as one of the 20 most influential people in the coatings industry by the Journal of Protective Coatings and Linings. As well as giving workshops and providing expert advice, Lydia and Charles have found time to write seven fiction books, with the latest released January 2011. Charles accurately says, “We do a lot of things!” From the ground up, Lydia has been pushing the water-jetting frontier forward, and she welcomes others to join her to build the future with action and vision!

Drs. Charles and Lydia Frenzel live in San Marcos, TX, and can be reached at Frenzelfrenzel@advisorycouncil.org.

IWA Jun 2011 45

Underlying Beverly Barton’s recent stories is a language of deep contradictions. She loved to do two story lines simultaneously: one where relationships bloom and attraction springs slowly into being; the other where hatred grows and deepens and violence escalates in the extreme. Rather than weave these two elements together, she chose to separate them in a way that heightens the tension in each polarity.

The problem is that sometimes, by the time she brings them together at the end, the essential and often cataclysmic epiphany that each character achieves has often been defused by an endlessly repetitious thematic development. How many times can a character cycle through saying I love you…oh wait, I can’t really love you…oh, you can’t really love me without losing all the emotional tension in the lines. In the last book I read, the evil character had invented so many ways of killing and torturing his victims that I became convinced that these scenes were more about the violence itself rather than the results of the violence.

Why care? Well, I couldn’t find the romance anywhere in these books. Not anywhere. I found plenty of sex and enough violence to make James Patterson flinch. I found enough blood and sliced flesh to establish a meat market. I didn’t find scary, only a vague sense of sorrow. In short, Beverly Barton seemed like a writer in transition from Romance to something else. I can’t help but think that her editor let her down. I can’t really think that Barton had any association with actual violence. If she had, I think her descriptions of decapitation would have been more personal—I mean, getting one’s head chopped off is about as personal as possible.

The other thing that is telling is the lack of a sense of place. Memphis, Tennessee and Knoxville, Tennessee, two settings for three books, come to mind. How can you set an entire book in Memphis without seeing the River or the jazz clubs? How can you miss the place of Elvis Presley’s la vivre.

And Knoxville. What about those beautiful river valleys and huge lakes, the mountains to the north and the lush greenness of everything? It’s the smell of green. The smells and sounds of the great Mississippi and Jazz are part of what makes Memphis a unique city. Both are landscapes providing plenty of opportunity for romance, and plenty of opportunity for slowly escalating suspense.

But we are led away from this into poorly understood, emotionally immature sexual encounters and fantasies of violent murder that the CIA might do well to include in its case studies. I’m coming back to the role of the editor. Beverly Barton had an interesting vision that peeks through the opacity of her language. I think we can only regret that it never quite made it into her stories.

I just got a frantic call from my wife who is normally pretty cool around animals. But Billy has become  agressive and he may weigh as much as my wife, so she had to abandon her camera on top of the trash can and escape with her laptop computer while I wrestled with Billy who was trying to follow her in the back door. Naturally his owners are nowhere to be found and now I have a crew coming to remove some antiques for a fund raiser this afternoon. I wonder how this confrontation will transpire. I managed to lock Billy into one side of our yard but I don’t have much hopes for our flowers or anything else that looks edible.  I’m starting to think in terms of smoked goat wrapped in banana leaves, Hawaiian style if the owners don’t show up before all my red poppies are gone.

There is an update on this story. Billie has moved to a farm.

 

In the Children’s Series,The Adventures of Sarah Jane, she presented children who were brave and thoughtful, bright and tolerant to a world where the stereotyped child is a spoiled, over-entitled brat unloved and unloveable by friends and family. And, even though it was a children’s series, I found myself watching in amazement as Elisabeth Sladen wove her magic to create a world where the unknown and bizarre must be met head on without undue fear and without prejudice.

I will miss her.

Elisabeth Sladen Dies at 63.

I sighed. Nothing in life ever seemed easy. I had lifted up the heavy steel top on our dumpster outside Isaac’s office and discovered that some wretched person had decided to add their garbage to our trash. I could see the box I wanted, only now it had been shoved deeper and was partially covered with left-over fried chicken and what I sincerely hoped was cast out chili with beans.

I went back inside and poke my hands through the ends of a couple of plastic garbage bags, rubber banded the bags as high as possible up my jacket sleeves, and slipped on the new rubber gloves that I had purchased to use when handling the acid toilet bowl cleaner. Prudently armored against contact with stuff, I returned to the task of retrieving the information.

“Interesting. Every good investigator is a dumpster diver at heart,” I heard Isaac’s voice behind me. I was acutely conscious that my butt was up in the air and my head was down in the smelly confines of a green steel box. I’d seen dogs, Boo for instance, digging into buried fish heads with only their wagging tails showing.

“Paper work,” I shouted back at him. “There were some old files on Sleepy Hollow in the batch I threw out yesterday.” I started to pull back to ask him if he remembered what they contained. Unfortunately, I found I was overbalanced and couldn’t push myself out. “Damn!”

“Trouble?” Isaac’s voice was infuriatingly patronizing. I heard him chuckle.

“A little help, please!” I returned.

“Now, let’s see, where shall I grab hold,” he teased. I felt his hand close under my belt and I was yanked backwards before I had a chance to respond. “Better?”

“It’s hanging upside down,” I explained, feeling how red my face probably was. The lawyer was looking a bit out of place in jeans, a plaid jacket, and black watch cap.

Isaac ignored my blush, bending over to look at what I was trying to do. His nose wrinkled at the smell, and he jerked back. “I hope it’s important.”

“It might be,” I explained. “I just got raked over the coals by Kerry Barnes at Lehman House. She asked me not to come back to Sleepy Hollow. She said something about causing her problems. I don’t think she meant to act so mean. She ran off rather upset.”

“And you think there is something among my partner’s old papers that is pertinent?” Isaac sounded skeptical and rubbed his chin. I noticed that he hadn’t shaved today.

“I ran across it yesterday; I  didn’t know I’d need it.”

“Mm? At least let me keep you from sliding into the possum spew.” He held my belt while I reached past the chili and beans and fetched the large wad of mildewed paperwork that I wanted.

“I thought it was chili and beans,” I told him as soon as was back upright outside the dumpster.

The third book of Callie Houston’s adventures is due out in June, 2011. An excerpt from Callie’s second adventure in Emerald Green is located on Fat Squirrel Publishing.

Thirty-five women of the Alpha Zeta chapter of Chi Omega, the nation’s largest fraternity (according to Chi Omega) arrived at my house on Saturday morning at 9:30 in the morning. A program called Bobcat Build parcels out a large number of city beautification projects to various groups of students and citizens. We continue to apply for assistance, and nearly every year we get a work crew to help us trim, dig, plant, paint, and improve our residence which is in the middle of the historic district. Why do we need help? Well, I’m getting old.

This year they planted over fifty pots of flowers, cleared small stumps out of an area so I can cut weeds, pulled up massive amounts of grass from the rose garden where it grows in preference to the lawn, trimmed bushes back that were threatening the air conditioner, and drank 48 bottles of water in the ninety-degree heat. They also hauled fifty pound sacks of dirt, spread grass seed where last year’s drought left bare earth, sprinkled fertilizer over the lawn like professional peasants tending crops, and took a group picture with me and my wife embedded right in the center.

But none of this is what really impressed me.

The women divided themselves into numerous small groups. I circulated around, asking questions about their campus life, what they planned on doing, when would they graduate, and such questions as I’m sure drive college students crazy when they are dealing with old people. I got a lot of very thoughtful answers, I must say.  In particular I asked them what they thought about legislation here in Texas which is slated to allow people to carry guns on campus (appalling as this may sound, it’s one of those Texas issues that I personally consider insane).

I was very gratified to hear them uniformly reject the idea of carrying guns on campus. “We’ve got nuts on our campus as it is,” one student, who seemed typical, said. “Are we now going to have nuts carrying guns? I certainly won’t feel safer.”

I especially liked one comment reported to have been voiced by a teacher. “Are you telling me that, on the one hand, we can’t discuss sex for fear of giving students a license to have sex, and on the other hand promote placing guns in the hands of the young and inexperienced and expect that they will act rationally and with restraint. It’s insane.”

I wonder how many Texas legislators will send their sons and daughters to local institutions where nearly everyone could qualify to carry a weapon?

A lovely young woman brought us some snacks in the form of pretzels and peanut butter crackers. The treats  came in a charming red sand bucket of the kind I remembered using on the beach when I was a child. The original kind was thin enameled metal that rusted, and the shovel, which was also metal,  had the tendency to bend and break when you shoved it too deep into wet sand. My main memory was that my cousin like to use hers to dump sand on my slice of watermelon.

There was some juice which claimed to be made from  strawberries, mangoes, and sweet potatoes. The label said 68% juice; the other 32% of ingredients weren’t mentioned. My wife said it tasted pretty good when she drank it during the second bag of chemicals dripping into her veins. I sat across from her and thought about a lot of things we should do together. We need to make another trip down to our favorite places in Australia, especially the cliffs along the Tasmanian coast. There’s a particularly favorite spot of ours on the Coromandel Peninsula on the east side of New Zealand where a beloved cheese shop carries local sheep’s milk cheese that is the best in the world. And of course there are dear friends of ours scattered all over the world.

There was one bit of humor that I could take away with me, however. It was the kind of line delivered on stage to an unsuspecting audience. “I sat there hour after hour and watched my wife undergoing her treatment and wished that I could switch places with her. I was thinking that she had a much more comfortable chair than I.”

So much for noble-sounding impulses.

The amazing thing (I paraphrase Justice Breyer) is that we embraced the institution we know as the Supreme Court. It’s appointed, not elected, and it often makes highly unpopular decisions.   Outside observers of American Democracy are quick to point out that our Supreme Court is a reflection of our belief in the rule of law, something that continues to be firmly embedded in the American psyche and noticeably absent in other parts of the world.

As I listened to this very practical discussion on the “Rule of Law” and all of its implications, I found myself reaffirming my belief that  the Supreme Court is the institution that keeps our Constitution from being nothing more than a quaint document hanging on the wall of our national museum. As well written and broadly applicable as our Constitution is, we would soon step outside the frame of its intent and be lost in a wilderness of well meaning intentions (or perhaps not so well meaning) were it not for the efforts of a few men and women whose goals are to create concise reasons and frameworks for decision making. This does not mean they always come to the most popular conclusions or even, on occasion, the right conclusion as judged in the light of history, but they happen to be pretty good at their job.

I think that Breyer was correct when he said that our democracy will remain healthy as long as we make sure that the 300 million or so of us mostly understand the role that our courts, particularly the Supreme Court, play in our democratic institutions. To that end, we all need to educate ourselves about the one branch of government that remains something of an enigma. I even know a few lawyers who might benefit from remedial studies.