Category Archives: Science

June 15, 2006

First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong

By James R. Hansen

Simon and Schuster, 784 pages, $30

For 35 years, astronaut Neil Armstrong shunned those seeking his thoughts about his adventures as the first man on the moon. While other astronauts wrote of their own harrowing moments in space exploration, Armstrong kept his story to himself, as if he could put the genie back into the bottle and elude history. One of only 30 astronauts chosen to fulfill President Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, Armstrong saw his role as more practical than iconic. He’s been quoted as saying that he hopes to be remembered as the first engineer on the moon, not the first “spaceman.”




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Auburn University professor and former NASA historian James R. Hansen convinced Armstrong to tell his story in First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. Hansen’s attention to technical aspects—and his knack for making them accessible even to novices—reportedly convinced Armstrong to cooperate. Despite the inclusion of launch trajectories and a jumble of acronyms, Hansen tells a compelling, and often riveting, story that reads like Jules Verne recounting the history of NASA’s lunar reach.

When JFK initiated the moon-flight project, NASA had three different methods under serious consideration. The first was called “Direct Ascent,” an improbable plan which required that a rocket called the Nova, approximately the size of the Empire State Building, be launched to the moon. The remaining rocket stage that would be in lunar orbit before touching down would be as tall as the Washington Monument. If the sheer size of the spacecraft were not cumbersome enough, another problem was how to get the crew down to the surface of the moon from such heights. Direct Ascent was quickly dismissed.

Dr. Wernher von Braun advocated a second procedure called Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR). Astronauts would be launched in a rocket separately from the main missile. The spaceships would dock while orbiting Earth and then proceed to the moon. Being much smaller than the Nova, the EOR rocket made return launch more feasible. EOR also included construction of a space station for future lunar missions.




Deployment of the U.S. flag by Armstrong and Aldrin was caught by a sixteen-millimeter film camera in the lunar module. (click for larger version)

To the surprise of many, NASA chose a third option: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR). Critics said it was too risky for rendezvous to occur in lunar orbit 240,000 miles away from Earth. A rescue would be impossible in the event of an accident. Hansen sums up the cold reality of such a disaster and how it affected the decision-making process: “The specter of dead astronauts sailing around the moon haunted those who were responsible for the Apollo program and made objective evaluation of its merits unusually difficult.” However, LOR required less fuel, and the necessary craft weighed half that of an EOR rocket. Besides, LOR was the only method that could meet JFK’s dream before 1970. “LOR saves two years and two billion dollars,” Armstrong wryly observed.

Armstrong’s close calls are legendary. During the Korean War, he lost eight feet from his wing when his jet clipped the ground on a mission. Armstrong climbed immediately back to 14,000 feet and bailed out. He wrestled control of Gemini VIII as the spaceship was tumbling and spinning in space. When Armstrong manually took control of the lunar module the Eagle upon descent to the moon and steered the craft to a less treacherous landing area with only seconds of fuel remaining, Buck Rogers had indeed become a reality. Armstrong’s unassuming, calm demeanor amazed his peers. Astronaut Alan Bean never forgot his first encounter with that nonchalance after one of Armstrong’s brushes with death. Armstrong was flying the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV), a high-risk, wingless contraption that used thruster rockets to propel the craft and was flown at a minimum altitude of 500 feet to ensure proper training procedures. The LLTV began to sway, slowly turning at an angle, out of control.

Hansen writes: “A ground controller radioed Neil to bail out. He activated the ejection seat with only a fractional second of margin. Neil’s parachute opened just before he hit the ground. He wasn’t hurt, but the LLTV was demolished in a fireball.”




Professor Armstrong teaching engineering at the University of Cincinnati in 1974. (click for larger version)

Armstrong immediately returned to the office that he shared with Bean after the mishap. Bean had overheard others discussing the incident, though Armstrong had failed to mention it. “I go back in the office,” Bean explains. “Neil looked up, and I said, ‘I just heard the funniest story!’ Neil said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I heard you bailed out of the LLTV an hour ago.’ He thought a second and said, ‘Yeah, I did.’ I said, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘I lost control and had to bail out of the darn thing.’”

Amazingly, NASA never lost an astronaut in orbit in the pre-space shuttle years. First Man recounts the tragedy of the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire, which killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White. Oddly enough, White lived next door to Armstrong and had helped Neil save his house from a blaze only a year earlier. The Apollo 1 disaster forced NASA to rethink the Apollo space capsule at the insistence of the astronaut corps. The fiery explosion that killed Grissom and the others occurred during a routine ground test in a pure oxygen environment. A spark ignited the cabin instantly. NASA learned from the setback, and from then on, all ground-testing was done in an environment that was 60 percent oxygen and 40 percent nitrogen.

A disconcerting aspect of First Man is Buzz Aldrin’s drama and bitterness in his lobbying to be the first man to step onto the moon. Armstrong reveals for the first time that he had the option of replacing Aldrin as pilot with Jim Lovell, but Armstrong felt that Lovell deserved to command his own Apollo mission (Apollo 13). He stuck with Aldrin, though a soap opera soon developed. Aldrin’s argument had been that the commander always stayed with the spacecraft while the pilot performed spacewalks. Veteran astronaut Gene Cernan recalls:

“Buzz had worked himself into a frenzy” about who would step onto the moon first. He came flapping into my office at the Manned Spacecraft Center one day like an angry stork, laden with charts and graphs and statistics, arguing what he considered to be obvious—that he, the lunar module pilot, and not Neil, should be the first down the ladder on Apollo 11 . . . How Neil put up with such nonsense for so long before ordering Buzz to stop making a fool of himself is beyond me.”

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Armstrong says he didn’t give much thought to who would be first out of the lunar module. Flight Director Chris Kraft shed some light: “Look, we just knew damn well that the first guy on the moon was going to be a Lindbergh . . . It should be Neil Armstrong . . . Neil is Neil. Calm, quiet, and absolute confidence. We all knew he was the Lindbergh type. He had no ego.” Thus, NASA changed the normal procedure that the commander always stayed with the spacecraft. “[Neil] was the commander, and perhaps it should always have been the commander’s assignment to go first onto the moon,” said Kraft.

For his part, Armstrong took everything in stride without a hint of romanticism. Searching for a quote that would reveal Armstrong’s true thoughts, historian Douglas Brinkley once asked Neil, “As the day clock was ticking for takeoff, would you every night, or most nights, just go out quietly and look at the moon? I mean, did it become something like “‘my goodness?’” To which Neil responded, “No, I never did that.” &

Weight of the Wind

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Weight of the Wind

One man’s experience floating more than half a mile above the earth in a “paper” airplane.

By Ed Reynolds

write the author

June 01, 2006

After climbing out of a dilapidated Oldsmobile ’98 Regency, sailplane pilot Tim Lockert surveys the sky for white cumulus clouds. “You know how to tell a glider pilot?” he asks. “They’re the ones with sunburned Adam’s apples.” The Regency is the official glider tow car. The car’s roof has been sawed off, the trunk lid is missing, and the words “Sylacauga Soaring Society” are painted in black on the green door. The front passenger seat has been realigned to face the rear. The battered Oldsmobile, referred to as The Rocket, is used to tow 700-pound gliders to a grass field that parallels the runway at Sylacauga Municipal Airport. The Sylacauga Soaring Society has been in existence for two years, and as many as a half-dozen members gather each weekend to be launched skyward aboard glider planes towed by cropdusters.

At 2,800 feet, the gliders are cut loose to sail like hawks in search of winds that provide enough lift to transport them as far as 60 miles east to Clanton. Sylacauga is an Indian word for “buzzards roost,” a term somewhat explained as the pilots scrutinize the sky for buzzards gliding in circles. This indicates an ideal spot for sailplanes to snag highly coveted thermal wind lifts. “Buzzards are lazy birds,” explains Lockert. “Where they glide is always a good spot.”

I swallow in fear when I first stand next to the tiny sailplane. On the ground, the silver glider leans at an angle, supported by the tip of one wing. The plane is only 10 inches off the ground. It’s a very sexy, sleek aircraft, though intimidating. The pilot’s compartment is smaller than the width of a canoe but flanked by a 55-foot wingspan. “I’m not trying to get friendly with you,” jokes Paul Golden as he connects a harness strapped across my crotch and shoulders. “How tight do you want it? We got two ways to fasten you in: open casket or closed casket.” With those words of reassurance, he lowers the plexiglass canopy.




“How tight do you want it? We got two ways to fasten you in: open casket or closed casket.” (click for larger version)

The Pawnee single-engine cropduster, to which the glider is tethered for takeoff, cranks to life while we sit silent except for vocal checks from pilot Lockert, seated behind me. “It’s nothing but a ski rope,” laughs Lockert as the yellow rope stretches taut, and we roll across the grass field at 40 mph balanced on a single 10-inch-diameter wheel under the center of the glider. Suddenly we’re airborne, and I really don’t want to be. My stomach tightens. At 100 feet, I start feeling queasy. My hands sweat profusely as I search for anything to hold onto.

There’s nothing to grip, so I venture from pressing on the inner walls of the cockpit to scribbling often unintelligible notes on a pad. One panicky note reads, “Hope I die on impact if we fall from the sky.” Carnival rides terrify me. I’m prone to panic attacks when strapped in, and the panic escalates once everything starts moving. This glider ride is a roller coaster without rails, and I want off immediately.

The sailplane, still attached to the cropduster, bobs in the wind. “You always worry about the tow rope breaking,” warns Lockert. And if it does break? “Say your prayers,” he laughs. “I don’t want to have to think at that point. Just react. If we’re at 200 feet and the rope snaps, I turn around.” Otherwise, he scouts for a place to land pretty quickly. “Straight ahead, straight ahead, straight ahead,” repeats Lockert, until he says, “Turn around.” He explains, “Even though I’ve been doing this for 25 years, whenever I launch, I verbally repeat, ‘Straight ahead.’ Then I say, ‘Turn around.’ The point is that I’m calling out to myself that in the event the tow rope breaks, I’m just going to go straight ahead and land it. And what you don’t want to do when the tow rope breaks is think. You want to react immediately. So it’s really part of the training to learn that every time you take off, call out: ‘Straight ahead, straight ahead, straight ahead.’ If the rope breaks you’ll know immediately what to do
. . . Once you get to 200 feet, you’re going to turn around, and you’ll just land right where you took off.”

At 2,800 feet, I’m a nervous wreck as I anticipate the inevitable loss of power. Suddenly, the glider jolts slightly. With a loud snapping noise, the tow rope disengages from the glider and flaps like a useless kite tail still attached to the disappearing cropduster. It’s a weird feeling. We’re on our own, yet the 900-pound aluminum plane (a single-seater plane weighs 700 pounds) with no engine immediately climbs to 3,200 feet. I am essentially floating more than half a mile above the earth in a paper airplane with a rudder. All that can be heard is the rushing of the wind around me.

When I ask Lockert to define “pitch,” he laughs and demonstrates it instead. “That’s the one that puts your heart in your throat.” The pilot applies pitch with a wicked cackle, and the plane dips and increases speed. My insides float for brief seconds somewhere above my head. “What pitch does, is it’s going to cause the nose of the airplane to point down or point up,” he says. “Because of the way the airfoil is shaped, if I point the nose of the airplane down, I’m going to go faster. If I point the nose up, I go slower.” The plane reaches speeds of 70 mph. “When you’re in control, the pitch is not as startling ‘cause you know what’s coming,” says Lockert.




Sylacauga Soaring Society president Tim Lockert straps himself into an LP-15 sailplane. (click for larger version)

He points to various ground landmarks of particular interest to a glider pilot. “When you’re down low, you don’t need to be looking for the clouds, you need to be looking at the sources for the hot air that is going to make a cloud. And typically that’s an area that is dry and dark, wherever the sun heats up the earth. Gliding is essentially solar-powered flight. The Wal-Mart parking lot is a great bet. Home Depot over there. The marble quarry is a good spot. Particularly in our area of the country you’ll find these areas of forests that have been harvested. What’s left has died, so it becomes this dark brown covering over the ground. So when the sun hits that, boy, it has great opportunity to heat the air. So cleared areas of forests are just great [for thermal lift].”

Unfortunately, excessive winds result in too much turbulence for an ideal flight afternoon, and we are aloft for only half an hour. “It’s a wrestling match out here today,” Lockert says. Turbulence prevents us from picking up good thermals. Lockert believes that under proper conditions, he could glide from Sylacauga to the Gulf Coast. The current gliding record is a flight from Chattanooga to Pennsylvania and back, continuing over the Smoky Mountains to a landing in South Carolina. The pilot used the Smoky Mountains as a thermal source, particularly in the afternoon when the sun heated the mountain range.

The small size of the plane immediately returns to mind as we approach the ground. “I’m going to put it in that grass strip down there,” says Lockert as we quickly approach earth at what seems a steep angle. I can’t stop thinking about how small the wheels are. Convinced that we’re doomed to crash nose-first into the earth, I brace myself for impact. Instead, the sailplane touches down with surprising ease at 40 mph, rolling to a stop in less than the length of a football field. I later watch Lockert take off and land the single-seat glider. Standing a couple of hundred feet away when he returns, I marvel at the graceful combination of physics and machinery. The sailplane is a mere 10 inches off the ground when its wheels touch down.

The Sylacauga Soaring Society currently offers a monthly membership for $99, including ground instruction and a half-hour flight. Call 205-807-0666 or visit www.sylacaugasoaring.com for more information.

Noah&’s Ark in Orbit

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Noah&’s Ark in Orbit

Chimpanzees and dogs were space travel’s first guinea pigs.

By Ed Reynolds

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May 18, 2006

More than a decade before Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts blasted into outer space aboard rockets, a squadron of chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, mice, mongrel dogs, and French cats were sent into space to ensure that space travel was viable for humans. Their missions tested the effects of weightlessness on organisms, especially their behavior under the stress of blastoff and zero gravity. Leave it to the French to launch a feline. In 1963, French scientists sent a female named Felix into orbit on a Veronique AGI rocket. An abandoned street cat, Felix was one of 14 felines specially trained in centrifuges and compression chambers in preparation for space flight. Ten of the original 14 cats were eliminated from consideration due to their propensity for eating too much. Mercifully, the French arranged for Felix’s capsule to parachute onto land instead of in the ocean.




	Nicknamed “Muttnick” by the U.S. Press, canine cosmonaut Laika survived 10 days in space. (click for larger version)

Animals began flying on spaceships immediately after World War II. Four monkeys, each named Albert (I, II, III, and IV, respectively), were launched aboard captured German V-2 rockets during American post-war tests. Each monkey’s parachute failed to open. Mice, on the other hand, often survived high-speed impacts on their return to Earth. In 1959, four black mice were launched on a Thor Agena A rocket that carried a spy satellite. The mice perished when the Agena upper stage fired downward instead of skyward, sending the vehicle into the Pacific Ocean. Official speculation was that the mice would have survived had their crash occurred on land. Adding to the mystery of possible spy sabotage, the dead mice were a backup crew that had been assigned to the mission after an earlier tragedy. The original rodent crew was found dead of chemical overdose after eating the krylon that had been sprayed on their cages to cover rough edges.

Space Hounds

In the early 1950s, the Russians strapped dogs, instead of monkeys, into rockets because dogs were assumed to be less fidgety in flight. Females were chosen due to the relative ease of controlling bodily waste. Soviet R-1 series rockets carried a total of nine dogs in hermetically sealed containers. Each was ejected from the spacecraft and parachuted to recovery at the end of the mission. Two dogs were onboard because more scientific evaluation allowed for more accurate test results. Dezik and Tsygan (“Gypsy”) were the first dogs launched in August 1951. Both were successfully retrieved. A month later, Dezik went back up, this time with a dog named Lisa. The pair did not survive. Smelaya (“Bold”) and Malyshka (“Little One”) were later scheduled for spaceflight, but the day before launch, Smelaya ran away. Two days later the dog wandered back to the launchpad and the test flight was successful.

Laika (“Barker”) was the first animal to orbit the earth. No plans had been made to bring Laika back alive from her ride on Sputnik 2 in 1957. She was a small, three-year-old, stray mongrel (mostly Siberian husky) rescued from the streets of Moscow. The U.S. press nicknamed her “Muttnik.” Flight controllers monitored Laika’s heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing. It was determined that she barked repeatedly and ate her food during her 10 days alive on the flight before her oxygen ran out. Sputnik 2 eventually burned up in the outer atmosphere in April 1958. A statue honoring Laika and cosmonauts killed in flight was erected in 1997 at Star City outside Moscow. The dog can be seen peeping out from behind the cosmonauts.




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A year before Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space on Vostok I in 1961, the dogs Strelka (“Little Arrow”) and Belka (“Squirrel”) rode a Vostok prototype spacecraft into orbit. The dogs were the first animals to return alive after orbiting Earth. Strelka gave birth after returning to earth. One of the puppies was presented to Caroline Kennedy as a gift by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The bodies of Strelka and Belka remain preserved at the Memorial Museum of Astronautics in Moscow. Belka is confined behind a glass case in the museum, while Strelka is part of a traveling exhibit that tours the world.

Among the last canines to ride in space were Veterok (“Breeze”) and Ugoyok (“Little Piece of Coal”) aboard Kosmos 110 in 1966. The purpose of the flight was to determine the prolonged effects of radiation during space travel. The dogs established a record for canines of 21 sustained days in space, a mark that humans finally surpassed in June 1974 with the Skylab 2 mission.

Space Apes

The United States sent monkeys into space instead of dogs to determine if the stress of space travel and weightlessness would affect basic motor skills or the ability to think clearly. In 1952, a pair of Philippine monkeys named Patricia and Mike were the first primates to survive spaceflight. Joining the monkeys were mice named Mildred and Albert. The monkeys were strapped into their seats but Mildred and Albert were allowed to float freely in zero-gravity. In 1959, Gordo, a squirrel monkey, flew 600 miles in a Jupiter rocket one year after the Soviets launched Laika. Gordo died on splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean when a flotation device failed. Nevertheless, Navy doctors determined from monitoring his respiration and heartbeat that humans could withstand a similar trip.

Sam and Miss Sam were a pair of rhesus monkeys named for the acronym for the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine. Housed in a cylindrical capsule, Sam was launched on December 4, 1959 in a Mercury spacecraft atop a Little Joe rocket. His mission was to specifically test the launch escape system. One minute into the flight at a speed of 3,685 miles-per-hour, the Mercury capsule aborted from the Little Joe launch vehicle. The spacecraft landed safely in the Atlantic Ocean, and Sam was recovered a few hours later. Miss Sam also tested the escape system a few weeks afterward. Upon being reunited, the two monkeys reportedly embraced.




	Ham was the first chimpanzee to fly in space. (click for larger version)

Riding a Mercury Redstone rocket, Ham was the first chimpanzee in space. Born in the French Camaroons, West Africa, Ham came to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in 1959. His flight was the precursor to Alan Shepard’s 1961 suborbital journey that made Shepard the first American in space. After leaving NASA, the chimp was placed on exhibit at the Washington Zoo in 1963 and later at the North Carolina Zoological Park where he lived alone until he died in 1980.

The best animal spaceflight story of all concerns the mission accomplished by a chimpanzee named Enos. His flight was a full dress rehearsal for the Mercury launch on February 20, 1962, which would make Lt. Colonel John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth. Purchased from the Miami Rare Bird Farm in 1960, Enos completed more than 1,250 hours of training for his mission at the University of Kentucky and Holloman Air Force Base. His training regime was more intense than Ham’s because he would be exposed to weightlessness and high g-forces for longer periods of time. Three days before his November 1961 flight, Enos was chosen to fly on board a Mercury Atlas 5. The chimp was originally scheduled to complete three orbits but was brought back after the second because the spacecraft was not maintaining proper altitude. One of the stabilizing rockets on the Mercury capsule had malfunctioned, causing the ship to spin in circles as it orbited Earth.

Then another problem arose. Something went wrong with the wiring that controlled the shock and reward system. Enos had been trained through a reward-and-punishment, “electrical shock” system that included pulling designated levers as part of daily tasks. However, the system malfunctioned during the mission, and Enos received jolts of electricity when he should have received banana pellets. Scientists at mission control assumed that Enos would do whatever it took not to be shocked and therefore compromise the mission. Despite the 79 electrical shocks he received for doing his tasks correctly, the chimp performed his commands as he had been trained. After recovery from the Atlantic Ocean, Enos reportedly jumped for joy and ran around the deck of the aircraft carrier, gleefully shaking hands with his rescuers. &

The Scientific Deep End

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The Scientific Deep End

By Ed Reynolds

November 03, 2005

The most fascinating lesson garnered from the Einstein exhibit currently at the McWane Center is Albert Einstein’s confession that his imagination played a major role in the “thought experiments” the famed scientist engaged in as he contemplated the mysteries of the universe. “Imagination is more important than knowledge” was his philosophy. Oddly, he never proved his own scientific notions. Einstein merely speculated about time and space, leaving others to prove that he was correct. The most famous of these was Arthur Eddington’s confirmation of Einstein’s speculation that light is bent by gravity. During a 1919 solar eclipse, stars hidden behind the sun were proven to exist because their rays were curved by the sun’s gravity. Only the blotting out of the sun allowed the starlight rays to be seen as they curved around the sun.

The exhibits on display explaining Einstein’s observations are interesting, though somewhat frustrating to the curious lay person when it comes to fully grasping the concepts of one of the greatest scientists in history. Don’t let this discourage you. Simply standing in the presence of handwritten pages by Einstein explaining his 1916 General Theory of Relativity is nothing less than mind-boggling. One wall is covered with a 72-page handwritten manuscript that is the earliest known description of relativity in Einstein’s handwriting, as he did not keep any of the drafts of his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity.

Also on exhibit are the FBI files that addressed Einstein as a security risk. Beginning in 1932, J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prove that Einstein was affiliated with traitors. The scientist had upset some with his support of civil rights. Renowned black opera soprano Marian Anderson was refused a room at a hotel in Princeton, New Jersey, after a concert. Einstein invited her to stay with him, forming a friendship that lasted his entire life. Einstein became an American citizen in 1940, one year after warning President Franklin Roosevelt that defecting German scientists told him the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb. Einstein urged Roosevelt to get America involved in the creation of nuclear weapons. The Manhattan Project began two years later. Interestingly, despite Hoover’s efforts to discredit him, Einstein supported the American war effort by penning a handwritten version of his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, which was auctioned off to raise $6.5 million in war bonds.

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By the 1950s, however, Einstein had embraced pacifism, calling for the United States to share nuclear technology with the Soviet Union. His denunciation of McCarthyism prompted a letter from House Un-American Activities Committee member John Rankin, who wrote, “It’s about time the American people got wise to Einstein . . . He ought to be prosecuted.” Also on display are letters exchanged with Sigmund Freud regarding human nature and the urge to go to war.

Among the memorabilia is a Birmingham connection. A copy of a letter Einstein wrote to Dr. Robert S. Teague, a UAB professor, is on display. In the correspondence, Einstein sought $1 million to educate Americans on responsible use of atomic power, which Einstein refers to as “the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man’s discovery of fire.” In another letter Einstein refused to accept the presidency of the newly created state of Israel in 1945.

Then there are the letters from children. In 1954, a child wrote in a first-grader’s crude scrawl: “Dear Mr. Einstein, I am a little girl of six. I saw your picture in the paper. I think you ought to have your haircut [sic] so you can look better.”

“Einstein” will be on exhibit at the McWane Center through January 22. For more information, call 714-8300 or visit www.mcwane.org.

Strange Angel

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By Ed Reynolds

Strange Angel

The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

For the past two years, a pair of robot vehicles, each the size of a golf cart, have been exploring the surface of Mars. The robots were created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which was also responsible for the first spacecraft to orbit another planet (Mariner 2, around Mars in 1962) and the first to land on another planet (Viking 1, on Mars in 1976). In the late 1930s, an explosives genius named Jack Parsons co-founded JPL, which was sometimes referred to as the Jack Parsons Laboratory, with his gang of curious rocketeers known as the Suicide Squad.

Parsons’ legend is the most peculiar chapter in the history of space exploration, told with wide-eyed fascination by author George Pendle in Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Parsons’ revolutionary work with liquid propellants and sustained engine-powered rocket flight introduced America to the jet age. Without the Suicide Squad, Neil Armstrong would never have walked on the moon, nor would shuttle flights today ferry crew and supplies to the International Space Station. Despite his respected status as a true rocket pioneer, John (Jack) Parsons was beyond eccentric. As a genuine mad scientist and a dedicated follower of occult figure and sexual hedonist Aleister Crowley, he baffled the scientific community. Parsons however, did not view science and magic as contradictory: “It seems to me that if I had the genius to found the jet propulsion field in the United States, and found a million-dollar corporation [Parsons started Aerojet Corporation, which today employs 2,500] and a world-renowned research laboratory, then I should be able to apply this genius to the magical field.”

Parsons began playing with explosive black powder as a teen in the Southern California desert just before the Depression hit. Mixing chemicals to create explosives to launch crude bamboo rockets, he soon realized that in order to achieve the dream of reaching the moon, a sustained flight required liquid fuel-powered engines that could fire repeatedly. After high school, he supported his family with work as an explosives expert at the Hercules Powder Company in California. The family fortune disappeared after the 1929 stock market crash. Before then, a limousine took Parsons to school daily. He continued his desert rocket experiments and started informal discussion groups that included his Suicide Squad comrades and writers of science-fiction pulp stories obsessed with interplanetary travel. Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov often attended meetings.

Members of the American Communist Party also began showing up at meetings. Their inclusion in the book adds an element of intrigue to a story of good guys, bad guys, and those caught along the blurred line that separates the two. Though he declined to join the organization, Parsons’ loose affiliation with the Communists would come back to haunt him as World War II evolved into the Cold War. His security clearance to work on government projects was removed and reinstated several times. Meanwhile, Joe McCarthy would pick off several of Parson’s pals one by one.

Interestingly, Parsons had earlier been in regular communication with Wernher Von Braun, the German scientist who built the V-2 missile for the Nazis and who was later primarily responsible for designing the rockets that put Americans into orbit. Ironically, Von Braun never hesitated to share ideas with Parsons and his friends in the 1930s. The father of American rocketry, Robert Goddard, however, refused to help the young Suicide Squad when they visited his laboratory in Roswell, New Mexico. That Goddard lived in a desert city which would later become best known as the place where an alien was supposedly discovered adds an even weirder note to the curious story of Jack Parsons.

Strange Angel is more than weird tales, though. The book is not only a fascinating peek at the history of American rocket science, it also provides glimpses into the world of explosives that anyone fascinated by Fourth of July fireworks should appreciate:

Learning explosives from other workers, Parsons soon discovered such essentials as the difference between a high explosive and a low explosive. A high explosive such as nitroglycerine (the base constituent of dynamite, made by treating a natural by-product of the soap-making process, glycerine, with sulfuric and nitric acids) decomposes into gases in a few millionths of a second, about a thousand times faster than a low explosive such as black powder or gunpowder . . . Because of their rapid and violent detonation, high explosives are better suited for demolition work, while low explosives such as gunpowder are better used as a propellant, pushing projectiles out of gun barrels.>Three-quarters into the story, the most unexpected of antagonists appears in the life of Jack Parsons: L. Ron Hubbard, the mid-century science-fiction writer who stole Parsons’ girlfriend (who was also Parsons’ sister-in-law, a relationship he flaunted in front of his wife) and dashed off to Florida to start the religious cult known as Scientology. Descriptions of Hubbard’s charisma convey the image of an irresistible snake-oil salesman, and readers may subsequently understand how Hubbard would mesmerize Hollywood’s finest decades later.

Parsons does not meet with a happy ending. Having forsaken much of his dark-side infatuation as he approached 40, he met his fate in an ugly but predictable manner. Lying on the ground with half his face blown off and one arm missing amidst the rubble of an explosives accident, he died at age 38. The explosion was determined to be the result of the mad rocket scientist’s careless insistence on mixing explosives in a coffee tin rather than reliable chemical flasks. Regardless, his short but fascinating life had lived up to the original birth name his mother later changed to John: Marvel Whiteside Parsons. Decades later, JPL scientists named a crater on the dark side of the moon “Parsons Crater.” &

Lift-off Letdown

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Lift-off Letdown

A report from the Discovery launch pad.

By Ed Reynolds

July 28, 2005

In 1961, NASA launched the first American into space aboard the Freedom 7 Mercury spacecraft. I watched on a black-and-white television in my first-grade classroom as astronaut Alan Shepard blasted off into history in a 15-minute flight. Televisions perched on teachers’ desks for NASA launches soon became a schoolhouse tradition as the two-man Gemini spacecraft replaced the Mercury series, which was subsequently replaced by the three-man Apollo missions that eventually put Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969.

The advent of the space shuttle as a reusable spacecraft capable of landing on a runway made space travel routine. Complacency soon replaced curiosity and awe in the public mind. The explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 briefly jolted that indifference. Over the next 17 years, however, shuttle missions again became commonplace and predictable. That is, until February 1, 2003, when Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas as it re-entered the earth’s atmosphere at 17,000 mph. A couple of weeks earlier during the liftoff of Columbia, a suitcase-size chunk of foam insulation that weighed a pound and a half fell from the bright orange external tank that provides liquid oxygen and hydrogen to fuel the spacecraft as it leaves Earth. The foam insulation prevents ice formation and helps keep the liquid oxygen in the upper section of the tank chilled at minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit and the liquid hydrogen at minus 423 degrees in the lower section. Foam has always fallen off the external tank during liftoff to harmlessly strike the craft, but on this particular launch, the debris hit the left wing of the orbiter Columbia. The foam ripped a hole that allowed hot air and gases to penetrate Columbia when it returned to Earth [the hole was not a threat while Columbia was in the vacuum of space], tearing the spacecraft apart in seconds and burning to death all seven crew members as they plunged to the ground.

After a two-and-a-half-year delay, NASA has decided that it’s time to fly again. The mission has been dubbed Return to Flight. The initial launch period targeted for fall 2004 was rejected, and May 2005 was chosen instead. Heightened concern about falling ice damaging the orbiter (just as foam had done to Columbia during liftoff in 2003) prompted more testing, pushing the launch date back to mid-July.

Two days before the launch of Discovery, the Kennedy Space Center was bustling with activity. Satellite news trucks and television crews secured ideal spots to telecast the July 13 launch. Inside the press room, stacks of information were available, as was a video and photo library. Scale models of the shuttle were displayed so NASA officials could better explain the intricacies of the spacecraft to reporters. An afternoon bus tour took a media contingent out to the launch pad, but the shuttle was obscured by the gray servicing structure that functions as scaffolding to allow continued work on Discovery.




Space Shuttle Discovery is carried back to the launch pad aboard the shuttle crawler transporter. (click for larger version)

Dr. Michael Griffin, a former NASA engineer, is NASA’s eleventh administrator. A relaxed, confident man, he’s been in charge of America’s space program since April of this year after a management shake-up. NASA officials readily admit that the agency had grown lax concerning safety in a deadly enterprise. “It’s a dangerous business, and it will be for the foreseeable future,” he explained at a Tuesday afternoon briefing to update the media on the status of the next day’s launch. “We work every time to make it less dangerous than the time before.” Referring to the current state of NASA as “the most difficult period in the history of American space flight,” Griffin emphasized the importance of outer-space exploration: “I believe that it is important for America to be the preemininent space-faring nation in the 21st century. . . . I think the proper purpose of the United States civil space program is to explore, develop, understand, and discover the solar system, and extend the range of places where human beings live and work. We’re at the very beginning of that right now. Technology is primitive compared to what we would like it and need it to be. The expense is great; the risk is very significant. But we will never be where we want to be if we don’t take these first steps.”

The mission of STS-114 Discovery (STS stands for “space transport system,” and it is the 114th flight of a space shuttle) is to bring supplies to the International Space Station, return experiments and garbage from the space station to Earth, and test repair techniques during scheduled EVAs (extra vehicular activities, or “spacewalk”) developed to address any debris damage to the orbiter Discovery. This shuttle mission has no “substantive” repair capabilities, as only repair experiments will be conducted. Should Discovery be too damaged to return to Earth, the seven-member crew would share the space station with its current two-member crew until Space Shuttle Atlantis arrives as a rescue ship six weeks later.

Lingering reporters were warned that they would be left behind and no doubt shot if discovered by security guards. It’s hard to tell if our escort was kidding.

Following Michael Griffin’s briefing, the media gathered outside for the bus ride to view the rollback of the rotating service structure. The trip is a NASA ritual that gives photographers the opportunity to take photos of Discovery at sunset, with the scaffolding rolled away to reveal the orbiter, rocket boosters, and external tank. Suddenly, the drama that had slowly been building that day erupted without warning as word began to spread among the media throng that an accident had occurred at the launch pad. Reporters returned to the press building as NASA press liaisons explained what they knew of the problem. A plastic window covering the roof of the orbiter Discovery had inexplicably fallen off, plunging 65 feet, where it damaged a fragile heat shield tile covering one of the engines near the tail of the spacecraft. One surprised NASA official admitted he’d never seen such a freak occurrence at the launch pad.

It was the first glitch in an otherwise smooth preparation for the next day’s launch. Up until that point, the main worry had been the weather. On Tuesday, Space Shuttle Discovery had a 60-percent chance of favorable conditions to launch. Favorable conditions include no thunderclouds within 20 miles of either the launch pad or the 15,000-foot landing runway five miles away. Lightning is the major concern, though on this particular mission a heavy cloud cover would obscure the many cameras being used by airplanes tailing Discovery’s ascent to check for any debris damage, forcing the launch to be possibly canceled. Apprehension grew among the media that the launch would be scrubbed.

At 6:30 Tuesday evening, NASA announced a 7 p.m. briefing regarding the falling window cover and spacecraft damage assessment. Fifteen minutes later, the briefing was pushed back to 7:30. Suddenly a photographer dashed into the press briefing area to announce that the problem had been solved and the buses were leaving for the launch pad. The press conference room emptied as the media ran for the buses. The contingent of about 150 photographers and reporters gathered 100 yards from the launch pad at 7:30, waiting for the half-hour rollback of the service scaffolding to begin in anticipation of the 8:30 sunset. Two hours went by without any movement of the service structure as more work was performed on Discovery.

The mosquitoes at the launch pad are vicious monsters that bite through clothing. Kennedy Space Center is a veritable jungle of menacing beasts; a day earlier, alligators were spied in the marshy wilderness within the space center acerage. Buzzards sit in trees, adding an ominous reminder of the danger of returning to outer space. To combat the mosquitoes, members of the media lined up to be sprayed from a single can of insect repellent wielded by one of the NASA escort officials. The can was emptied within an hour, so everyone retreated to the buses to wait in the air conditioning. At 10 p.m. six buses abruptly pulled up next to the press buses. A NASA official boarded each press bus and warned in no uncertain terms that anyone who pointed a camera in the direction of the newly arrived buses would have their media badge taken away. We later learned that these buses were carrying family and friends of the Discovery crew and NASA VIPs.

Within half an hour of the VIP arrival, the service structure rollback began. By 11 p.m., Space Shuttle Discovery was revealed in its entirety a mere football field away, illluminated by spotlights. After half an hour of taking photos, our NASA escort urged the media to return to the buses for the ride back to the softball fields five miles from the Kennedy Space Center. The softball park functioned as a parking lot. Lingering reporters were warned that they would be left behind and no doubt shot if discovered by security guards. It’s hard to tell if our escort was kidding.




(click for larger version)

At midnight I arrived back at my car. Since I planned to be at Kennedy Space Center at 4 a.m., there was little point in driving to Orlando where I was staying. Napping in my automobile in the sweltering Florida heat was impossible, so I drove half an hour to Titusville to a 24-hour drugstore to replace the sunglasses I’d lost at the launch pad earlier that evening. Another hour was spent in a Cocoa Beach Waffle House, where the toothless cook told me his brother had been a student in Miami of Christa McAuliffe, the school teacher killed in the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger. I didn’t tell him that McAuliffe was teaching in Connecticut when she got the opportunity to fly on Challenger.

At 4 a.m. I boarded one of the Bluebird schoolbuses NASA uses to ferry the media to the space center. Individual vehicles were allowed onto Kennedy Space Center only if there were at least three passengers. Single drivers and foreign media were required to take the buses.

I shared my bus with three members of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a pair of French reporters. Our bags were checked before we boarded, but the inspector failed to give the driver a “search placard,” indicating that passengers had already been through security. This meant that at the checkpoint a mile from the entrance to Kennedy, our bus was told to return to get the search placard. When the Canadian television broadcaster asked the security guard if we could simply be searched again, as he had a 5:30 a.m. live remote broadcast to do, the guard said he was just following NASA orders, and that all incoming buses must show a search placard on launch day. “That’s an idiot decision!” the Canadian thundered. Apologizing, the guard politely told the television reporter that there was nothing he could do. The Canadian responded, “The next time you talk to NASA, tell them I think you’re the biggest asshole I’ve ever met!”

At 5 a.m. I walked into the quiet press building. There was little activity as a half dozen reporters and a handful of NASA officials prepared for a busy day. Outside, the 20-by-10-foot countdown clock glowed in the dark as the minutes ticked away. Behind it lay a lagoon, with Space Shuttle Discovery in the distance bathed in floodlights that reached several hundred feet into the sky. Suddenly, a soothing female voice came over the space center’s outdoor audio system. “At 4:45 this morning, space shuttle crew and managers met and gave a ‘go’ to proceed with the tanking operations [filling the tank with liquid hydrogen and oxygen] for the launch attempt this afternoon for the STS-114 Return to Flight mission.” The voice came from the audio broadcast of NASA Television, which has monitors throughout the space center facilities detailing updates on the planned launch. As I walked around the empty field in front of the countdown clock, the sun began to turn the lower sky a neon orange. The broadcaster continued to reel off details of the mission over the speakers when it hit me that her voice was eerily similar to the woman’s public-address voice in the spaceport in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A malfunctioning heater associated with one section of the orange external tank forced a 90-minute delay in beginning the tanking process. Again, worries mounted that the launch would not happen that day. By 7 a.m., the heater had been repaired and the three-hour fueling began. Unfortunately, NASA’s weather monitors had downgraded launch probability to 40 percent from an earlier 60 percent. Most of the morning was spent monitoring NASA TV and the sky overhead. July weather on Florida’s Atlantic coast is unpredictable, and the dark thunderclouds rolling by were an aggravation. A 10 a.m. interview with famed Apollo flight director Gene Kranz (he coined the famous phrase, “Failure is not an option!”) briefly took my mind off the rolling clouds. As the astronauts rode to the launch pad at noon to enter orbiter Discovery, a thunderstorm began in earnest. An anxious mood flooded the press building as pessimists and naysayers speculated that there would be no launch.

An hour later, the rain stopped and a gorgeous blue sky lit up the Kennedy Space Center. Menacing thunderheads hovered near the outskirts. It was 2 hours and 50 minutes until blastoff and the air was charged with excitement, which grew with each 15-minute weather update. The dark clouds appeared to be blowing inland. With the countdown clock ticking at 2 hours and 33 minutes, the audio on NASA TV suddenly warned that a fuel sensor had malfunctioned. Two minutes later, NASA officially scrubbed the launch. I felt like a four-year-old who had been told that Santa was not coming this Christmas. As of press time, the intermittent failure of the fuel sensor had yet to be resolved. This was not the first time the device had malfunctioned during the past few months.

Space Shuttle Discovery was rescheduled for launch on Tuesday, July 26, but I won’t be there. I’ll be watching a telecast, as I did 44 years ago on a little black-and-white television set. Only this time, I’ll be watching in color. &

The Real Man in the Moon

Of all the people who fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, Gene Kranz is probably the most integral. Kranz was the crusty, determined flight director of the Apollo 13 lunar-landing mission in 1970 that had to be aborted after a series of system failures in midflight. He was portrayed in the Apollo 13 movie by actor Ed Harris, and immortalized the famous line, “Failure is not a option.” That statement summed up NASA’s tenacity as Kranz, and the the flight team he led, saved the Apollo 13 crew from almost certain death. —Ed Reynolds

Black & White: I know you’ve been told this a million times, but the Apollo 13 mission is the most exciting true story I’ve ever heard.

Gene Kranz: “[Laughing] Apollo 13 was just one of the stories, so I was surprised when the movie came out. But America is not familiar with the many close calls we had during the lunar program. To put it bluntly, risk is the price of progress. Risk is the nature of exploration. And I thank God that we have risk-takers and the astronauts and the people in launch control and the people in mission control who are willing to control the risks to allow us to see solutions to problems in the majority of the very difficult and complex missions we fly. On Apollo 11 we almost ran out of fuel, down to 17 seconds. Very dicey land/abort position. On Apollo 12 we were hit by lightning. Apollo 13, you know the story . . . Apollo 16, in order to get into lunar orbit we had to solve a problem with the steering engines. So this business of risk and risk management, and basically controlling risk, making the level of risk acceptable, is the nature of the beast.”

B&W: Though technology during the Apollo program was less sophisticated than what NASA has today with the space shuttle, Apollo only lost one crew whereas the shuttle program has lost two crews. How do you explain the discrepancy with advanced technology?

Kranz: We’ve flown a lot more shuttle missions. Apollo was a relatively tight system, a relatively small system. We had a space system that was designed for a single objective: go from Earth to the moon and then return back to Earth—a difficult mission. But if you think about the shuttle, it deploys satellites, it retrieves satellites, it carries scientific modules in there, it does repair work in orbit, it brings things back from space, it carries stuff up to the space station. The shuttle is a much more complex system than that which we flew during the Apollo programs. I really consider it quite remarkable that during all of the missions that we have flown with the shuttle we’ve only had two accidents.




	Gene Kranz

B&W: Is returning to the moon still important?

Kranz: Oh, heck yes! I think that if we intend to remain a great nation, if we intend to keep the economics of our engine churning out, we have to do difficult things. Going to the moon and Mars is a difficult thing, energy independence is a difficult thing. There are many things that will focus American know-how to develop new technologies, and new technology is the only way we are going to compete with the rest of the word. We can’t out-mass produce them anymore . . . President Kennedy said we choose to go to the moon and other things not because they are easy but because they are hard. Because he recognized that his nation had to do difficult things in order to remain a leader in the world.

B&W: In the Apollo days, did you have any notions or visions that the present shuttle spacecraft would look as it does today?

Kranz: Back in the Apollo day, frankly, the shuttle was the last thing on my mind [laughs]. My job and my organization’s job was, once we had landed on the moon, fly the remaining missions, bring the crew back safely and successfully, move into more difficult landing sites with a diminishing team—because I had to move team members, flight directors, and instructors over to the Skylab program. So once we had finished Skylab, now we could start focusing on the shuttle. We were intimately involved in the design of the shuttle, but it was in the post-’73 time frame . . . Basically, my job during the Apollo era was to really make sure we finished Apollo safely and successfully. We were landing in sites that had mountains that were higher than the Grand Canyon is deep. So we had our hands full.

B&W: Did you ever wish the early astronauts, who had reputations for wild living, were more tame like today’s shuttle astronauts?

Kranz: No, I think the nature of explorers changes. Sort of like mission control. In the early days most of us came in from aircraft flight testing because that was our background right on down the line. We were working with very rudimentary system; technology was very primitive. So we relied upon extremely intense preparation, innovation to a greater extent. The generation today has to be a hell of a lot smarter than we are. On Apollo, we had a computer on board each spacecraft. On board the shuttle now, you’ve got five computers, four of them working in what they call the redundant set, you’ve got a backup system . . . God, when I was deputy director of flight operations, I used to go crazy with these guys bringing me all these problems, and I’d have to go home and study all night long in order to participate in the meetings the next day. So the nature of the technology we are working with and the nature of exploration continues to demand a different kind of people. You think about Lewis and Clark going across the United States—that was the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo generation. &

Shelter from the Storm — The Greater Birmingham Humane Society

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2005-04-21 Features

Shelter from the Storm

The Greater Birmingham Humane Society has a new state-of-the-art facility, but old problems—such as pet over-population and irresponsible pet owners—remain.

By Ed Reynolds

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April 21, 2005Photographs by Mark Gooch




Buddy is a lab mixed breed awaiting adoption. (click for larger version)

“I hope somebody loves you as much as you ought to be loved,” the woman cooed sweetly as she and her husband surrendered a box of puppies to the Greater Birmingham Humane Society. Like so many others who bring animals to this shelter, they had an explanation: Their male mixed lab had gotten into the fenced area where their female purebred Husky was kept. Pointing to one black pup, the husband said, “He’s going to make somebody a beautiful dog; I’d love to keep them if they stayed this size.”

The litter was the fifth delivered to the shelter in two days. The couple promised the clinic worker who was receiving the puppies that their male dog would be neutered. As a clinic technician named Tonya took the puppies to the isolation room for medical procedures and observation, she gloomily predicted that the onset of spring and summer will drastically increase the number of puppies and kittens brought to the shelter.

The Greater Birmingham Humane Society has existed in one form or another since 1883. Originally known as the Birmingham Humane Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and Animals, it was the first such facility in the South and the 12th humane society founded in the United States. In 1926 it relocated near the state fairgrounds on Lomb Avenue. Some 50 years later, it moved to another building in the same vicinity. In November 2004, GBHS’s years of fundraising happily resulted in the construction of a state-of-the-art shelter on Snow Drive in the West Oxmoor area. The new facility is considered one of the finest in the United States.

There were 27,000 animals surrendered to the GBHS in 1977, with 20 percent of those adopted out and the others euthanized. The number of animals turned in during 2004 totaled 10,321. Of those, 8,186 were euthanized, while 2,057 were placed in homes. Adoptions, however, are up nearly 20 percent since the move to the new facility. “That’s the result of educating the public,” says GBHS public relations director Melissa Hull. “It’s all about education. If the pet owners are educated, we don’t have to be here . . . People don’t get it. They show up saying, ‘We’re bringing you a donation,’ but instead of money, it’s a dozen black lab, mixed-breed puppies.”




Dr. Miguel Cruden worked at the GBHS shelter while attending veterinarian school. Currently living in Virginia, he flies to Birmingham twice monthly to perform spay and neutering at GBHS. (click for larger version)

According to Jacque Meyer, a transplanted New Yorker who took over as executive director of GBHS seven years ago, black dogs are the most common at the shelter. A head count indicated 22 black adult canines and 20 others of varying combinations of browns, whites, tans, and grays. “It’s harder to find homes for black dogs. People seem scared of them. It’s a stupid perception,” says Meyer. The reluctance to adopt black dogs means that their color makes them a liability. There is only so much space available, and that has to go to the more adoptable dogs. Dogs weighing less than 20 pounds are the easiest to find homes for. Terrier (usually pit bull) and shepherd mixed breeds are difficult to adopt out because they often end up with prospective owners who are simply interested in transforming their pet into a vicious trophy animal. GBHS adoption counselors try to avoid such scenarios when screening prospective owners. “We don’t strive to be a pet store,” says one adoption counselor. “We’re not looking to send them out the door with just anybody.”

The Greater Birmingham Humane Society receives no government funding. It depends on donations, including funds raised by the annual Do Dah Day festivities each spring. The shelter only takes in animals that have owners; strays go to Birmingham-Jefferson County Animal Control. On any given Saturday, the busiest day of the week, as many as 120 animals may be brought to the shelter. Receiving Supervisor Ann Haden, who has worked at GBHS for seven years, is the first person to see the surrendered animal. She has the toughest job because she has to deal with the public more than anyone else at the facility, but Haden is not shy about being direct with irresponsible pet owners. “It’s never an animal issue. It’s always a human issue,” she says. “An animal is not a lawn ornament. It is not an alarm system.”




Dr. Miguel Cruden worked at the GBHS shelter while attending veterinarian school. Currently living in Virginia, he flies to Birmingham twice monthly to perform spay and neutering at GBHS. (click for larger version)

A dog named Ruby was brought in earlier that day. Her friendly demeanor was replaced by a menacing growl after she was placed in the isolation kennels. After going through medical procedures and observation for 24 hours, Ruby will face a temperament test. “It depends on how well she adjusts and how much space we’ve got,” Haden explained about Ruby’s chances of survival. Space is a valued commodity at GBHS. Not all dogs can adjust to kennel life while waiting for adoption, which means they’re not likely to be adopted.

The new GBHS facility is designed to keep both kennel stress and the spread of disease to a minimum. Only staff members are allowed into the actual kennel areas for direct contact with the dogs and cats. Glass partitions allow the public to see all animals available for adoption without getting the animal overly excited. Spay and neutering surgeries can be observed through glass windows for educational purposes. A washing machine and dryers whir in the clinic area of the facility, keeping stacks of blankets and freshly washed stuffed animals available for new arrivals. Cages are constantly being cleaned. Dogs are walked daily. Two vets currently perform spaying and neutering procedures. Dr. Miguel Cruden, who worked at the Lomb Avenue location while in school, flies down from Virginia twice a month. Dr. Vaughn Walker, a local veterinarian who makes house calls, comes in two days a week.




	According to Greater Birmingham Humane Society employees, potential cat owners are less picky than those who adopt dogs. (click for larger version)

Marty Patock, clinic supervisor, is about to begin a series of temperament tests. If an animal reacts with aggression, it is euthanized. Once it is placed on the adoption floor—GBHS tries to put dogs on the floor within three days of surrender—the animal will stay there until it is adopted or shows signs of kennel stress. Ruby is the first dog tested. She quickly tries to bite Patock when he pinches between her toes, one of the primary test procedures. The aggressive behavior leaves Patock with no option other than to mark an “X” on the placard on Ruby’s kennel pen to indicate that she will be put to sleep. (Each dog has a card that gives the name, age, reason for surrender, and various personality characteristics.)

Ruby is led from her kennel to the euthanasia room after several mange-infested puppies have been put down. As many as 100 animals may be euthanized in a week, with up to 60 sometimes put to sleep on Saturdays during the summer when large numbers are surrendered. “It’s hard on the staff. Some days we never leave the euthanasia room,” says Patock. “It’s often because of lack of space, and that’s the worst reason to do it.” Ruby is surprisingly friendly for a dog that growls menacingly at all who come near her cage. “A terrible waste,” says Patock as he injects sodium pentobarbital into a vein in Ruby’s leg. The dog is unconscious within 10 seconds. A minute later, Patock confirms with a stethoscope that her heart has stopped beating. “It enables an animal to leave this word in a responsible way,” he says as he shakes his head. &

The Greater Birmingham Humane Society is located at 300 Snow Drive. The shelter is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m. GBHS adoption centers are located at Pet Supplies Plus, (1928 Highway 31 South) Southgate Village, and Pet Supplies Plus (4606 Highway 280, near Super Target). Adoption costs for dogs and cats are $75 for any spayed or neutered pet, and $65 for any unaltered pet, plus a refundable $65 spay/neuter deposit. For more information, call 205-780-7281 or visit www.gbhs.org.

City Hall — Hearing On Public Smoking

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By Ed Reynolds

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March 24, 2005

On March 16, the public safety committee of the Birmingham City Council held a public hearing on a controversial proposal to ban smoking in all public buildings in the city. Nearly 20 residents and local business owners addressed the committee, chaired by Councilor Joel Montgomery, with roughly half the speakers in favor and half against the proposal.

The smoking ban proposal has been before the public safety committee twice previously. Loretta Herring, day-care director of Bethel Baptist Church, told the committee that she was tired of the delay and demanded that the proposal be moved out of committee to the City Council. “[The public safety committee] is just going around like a dog chasing its tail . . . cancer is so devastating . . . I was a smoker, and it’s hard for people who have been smokers to understand how devastating this dangerous disease is.” Councilor Roderick Royal, who sits on the committee, disagreed with Herring’s assessment that the committee was using delaying tactics. He explained that the law department has been studying the smoking ban proposal at the committee’s request to find a workable ordinance that is in compliance with state law. “So it’s not true that [we're] like a dog chasing its tail,” said the councilor.

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Royal, noting that he has a daughter with asthma, said that he is a cancer survivor and had no reason to delay the ordinance. “I have every reason to support a total smoking ban. But I’m not here as an individual,” said the councilor. “I’m here as a representative of the citizens of Birmingham. Some are smokers, and some are not. So I have to lay aside my personal feelings about smoking. I do not smoke, and I never have smoked, except for the time when I was in the Persian Gulf, trying to figure out whether or not I was going to get captured by the Republican Guard in the first [Gulf] war.”

Local attorney Lenora Pate, who sits on the board of the American Cancer Society, said that data and research studies show that business, sales, and revenues from bars and the hospitality industry have increased when smoking is banned indoors. “It is absolutely imperative for the workers of the next generation who work in the service industry in this city,” said Pate. “They are the ones who are vulnerably at risk for the carcinogens. More importantly, many of these are women, and the latest studies show that it is correlated with breast cancer.” As a board member, Pate met with the city law department regarding the ban. The American Cancer Society favors banning smoking in all indoor public places.

“Most of the businesses that undertake this actually have an increase in their business,” agreed Dr. Max Michael, dean of the UAB School of Public Health. “The other perspective is that we immunize our children even though our children probably don’t want to be immunized; we require ourselves to wear seatbelts; we try not to allow people to be on the streets driving drunk. These are all things we do to protect the individual and to protect the public’s health.” Local attorney Barry Marks said that “smoking in public is bad for Birmingham’s business and Birmingham’s image . . . It does not put Birmingham in a good light.” Marks noted that restaurants lose customers due to “secondhand smoke hangovers,” and added that his wife had undergone several surgical procedures as a result of “secondhand smoke.”

Henry “Bubba” Hines, owner of Bubba’s Pub, was not happy with the proposed ban: “This is not a smoker’s rights, this is a business’s right to pick and choose how he wants to do his business with legal activities . . . Let the customers decide what goes on in these bars. Let us decide, because our customers will choose if we’re going to stay in business or not stay in business.” T.C. Cannon, a former mayoral candidate and long-time owner of TC’s bar in the Lakeview district, also opposes the ban. “It is opening a big can of worms if you pass this ordinance,” said Cannon. “The American Cancer Society does great work. Their research and development have saved many lives. However, there are many carcinogenic agents, businesses, etc., that are allowed to exist . . . To restrict this to Birmingham is a definitely a grave injustice to the business owners in this city.”

David Ricker, chairman of the Freedom to Choose Committee, said, “We do not need more government control of our personal choices. I’m amazed that some politicians feel that they should treat individual citizens and business owners as infantile babies.” Ricker said that other municipalities with less stringent restrictions will draw business from Birmingham. Irene Johnson, a South Town resident, irately opposed the no-smoking ordinance. “I am opposed to this ban. I do not smoke . . . I have the choice to walk out if I go to a restaurant where there’s smoking . . . After a while you’re going to put a law on people sneezing in public because it spreads viruses! Those smokers pay taxes. It’s a disgrace they have to stand outside in the rain, smoking.”

Lawrence Fidel, president of the Alabama Restaurant Association, said that his group opposes the ordinance. “We’ve always been opposed to local smoking bans because it just seems to drive business from one sector to another. I’m not going to say that there are maybe some nonsmokers who might be attracted to come to a restaurant, but it doesn’t offset the loss of smoker business in our research and studies.” Fidel added that his organization is working with State Senator Vivian Figures, who introduced the statewide Clean Indoor Act a couple of years ago. “We are going to support legislation to ban smoking statewide in restaurants,” said Fidel. He explained that this would level the playing field by banning smoking in all bars, restaurants, private clubs, and even outdoor smoking areas adjacent to restaurants. He added that bars that function as restaurants early in the evening before becoming late night entertainment bars will “suffer greatly” because patrons will go to bars that are not declared restaurants.

“Clean air is important to me. Health is important to me,” surmised Councilor Joel Montgomery. “I do believe that people have choices in life. I do believe that business owners have rights as well.” Montgomery recommended a compromise which would exclude bars and lounges from the smoking ban. The public safety committee, with the law department’s blessing, approved the anti-smoking ordinance with the amendment. The City Council will vote on the amended smoking ban at the March 29 council meeting.

After the meeting, Montgomery said: “This is the best thing that I can come up with. And I’m still not so sure that the city is not going to end up with some type of litigation.” The councilor said he has been concerned that businesses will move to surrounding municipalities should the ban pass, and he disputes numbers that indicate an increase in business when smoking is prohibited. “Even in New York City you’ve seen a drop in business as much as 30, 40, or 50 percent. Most of it is in restaurants that have bars and lounges as part of their establishment. You can make a case for it either way . . . It is a health issue, but it is also a freedom of choice issue and a civil liberties issue, and we just have to balance it out, and it’s a tough thing to do.” In closing, Montgomery issued a caution as ominous as the surgeon general’s warning on a pack of cigarettes. “I believe that people who are proponents of this smoking ban want a prohibition on tobacco, period. From there, what’s next? I don’t think you’ve heard the last of this.” &

Dead Folks 2005, Authors, Inventors, and Astronauts

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2005-02-24 Features

Dead Folks 2005, Authors, Inventors, and Astronauts

A look back at the notable names and personalities who called it quits last year.

By David Pelfrey, Ed Reynolds, J.R. Taylor

February 24, 2005

Authors

Susan Sontag




	Susan Sontag (click for larger version)

Once viewers catch on that Woody Allen’s 1983 comedy Zelig is a fake documentary about a man who never actually existed, the joke is in how extensively Allen creates a pastiche of the documentary form. The requisite pauses in the story for comments by observers, analysts, and sundry talking heads are the funniest part of Allen’s method, and the funniest talking head is Susan Sontag. That’s not because she has any funny lines. It’s because she doesn’t. So influential, profound, and brilliant are Sontag’s critical views on all matters cultural, that her very presence in the film signifies the ultimate commentary. The scene is equivalent to Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, or Jean Paul Sartre making a cameo appearance in a Bob Hope comedy.

After entering college at age 16 and fairly blowing away everyone at Berkeley, University of Chicago, Harvard, and the Sorbonne, the groovy brunette with a bride-of-Frankenstein streak in her mane decided to share with the world her innumerable ideas about art and life (for her they were indistinguishable). An article published in Partisan Review in 1964 called “Notes on Camp” was, in literary circles, akin to The Rolling Stones appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” or maybe even the premiere of Citizen Kane. With that essay, and subsequent “assaults” in The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and various other intellectually inclined periodicals, Sontag provided a brand new way of discussing significant ideas in Western culture and minor ideas in popular culture. The new Bob Dylan album, Godard’s latest film, William James, and Freud were all part of the same story—or critique. Each was crucial to understanding the human creative experience. Yet during her explosion onto the arts and literary scene of the 1960s, what was most exciting for the hipsters, bohemians, and New York intellectuals who embraced/feared her was that Sontag made feasible the notion that one could read everything and know everything that mattered. She simultaneously demonstrated that no one could do it better. In that context, it’s extremely revealing that Sontag once defined the term “polymath” as “a person who is interested in everything, and nothing else.”

The publication of Sontag’s collection of essays titled Against Interpretation (1968) was virtually tectonic in its impact. Here she argues that understanding any work of art starts from intuitive response and not from analysis or intellectual considerations. “A work of art is a thing in the world, not just text or commentary on the world.” Other important works such as On Photography and Illness as Metaphor brought challenging ideas about contemporary culture out of the academy and into popular discourse. Not on Johnny Carson’s show, of course, or in the daily newspapers, but Sontag did to some extent prop open the doors to formerly exclusive salons. That’s mainly because her lucid, confident writing style, which is reinforced by a devastating (and yet somehow celebratory) wealth of intellectual inquiry and research, remains free of academic jargon and postmodern tics.

Such a position as a cultural critic implies a certain amount of controversy, which Sontag always could generate with a few comments. The left-leaning, radical thinker might be famously wrong at times, but one feather in her cap was confronting her lefty pals and stating that “socialism is the human face of fascism.” She was also right about Sarajevo. But regarding her notorious claim that September 11 was the result of U.S. international policies and actions, well, remain on the far left long enough and you’re bound to self-destruct. —David Pelfrey

Daniel Boorstin

The Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987, Boorstin loved books and couldn’t understand why anyone else might not; he coined the term “aliterate” to describe those who could read but chose not to. During his tenure, appropriations for the Library of Congress rose from $116 million to more than double that figure, the vast holdings were opened to the public, and Boorstin established the Mary Pickford Theater to call attention to (and utilize) the library’s huge archive of motion pictures. He was the nation’s top cheerleader for libraries in general. Boorstin’s deepest interest was in history, although he was fond of pointing out that he was an amateur and not a professionally trained historian. That’s actually not worth pointing out, however, as he taught history at the University of Chicago for 25 years, held a post as director and senior historian at the Smithsonian Museum of History and Technology, and wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning trilogy on American history and a subsequent four-volume history of the world. —D.P.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“Whoever has seen the horrifying appearance of the postwar European concentration camps would be similarly preoccupied.” That’s Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (78) speaking of her obssession with changing the treatment of dying patients. Kubler-Ross was greatly disturbed by what she witnessed in New York hospitals when she visited the U.S. in 1958. Her interest in death and her intensive study of the behavior of the terminally ill led to the publication of On Death and Dying in 1969. In less than a decade the book was a standard reference text for medical ethics and hospital policy. Her celebrated theory of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) remains a valuable model of human behavior not only for patients, but also for loved ones, medical professionals, and caregivers. —D.P.

Olivia Goldsmith

The film version of The First Wives’ Club was a jaunty celebration of older women getting revenge on the thoughtless husbands who abandoned them for younger women. There were also plenty of jibes at cosmetic surgery, as also found in the source novel by Olivia Goldsmith (54). Too bad the author didn’t take her pro-aging stance more seriously. Instead, Goldsmith died from complications related to anesthesia during cosmetic surgery. —J.R.T.

Norris McWhirter

Along with twin brother Ross, Norris McWhirter (78) founded the Guinness Book of Records. Its first edition was printed in 1955, and among its earliest records was a Russian woman who gave birth to 16 sets of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets from 1725 to 1765. According to its own records, the Guinness Book of Records is the world’s best-selling copyrighted book, with more than 100 million sold. The McWhirter twins personally crammed 70 people into a compact car just to set a record. Ross was murdered in 1975 after posting a 50,000-pound reward for information leading to the arrest of Irish Republican Army terrorists. —E.R.

Inventors and Innovators




Estee Lauder attracts a crowd (click for larger version)

Estee Lauder

Growing up in an apartment above her father’s hardware store in Queens, Josephine Esther Mentzer was a nice Jewish girl with an ambitious spirit and an intense fascination with the lotions and potions her chemist uncle prepared in a little shop. She liked them so much that in 1946 she began selling skin creams at beach resorts and hotels. The determined Esther expanded her product line and practically bullied her way onto some counter space at Saks Fifth Avenue two years later, by which time she and her husband Joseph Lauder had created a “nice little company.” The products were fine, but the sales program was outstanding: exquisitely attired staff, sophisticated sales patter, and, by the way, madam . . . here’s a free sample (a.k.a. “the gift”). By 1953 the company was a well-recognized force in the cosmetics industry.

Its success was due to Lauder’s making certain that those free gifts and samples found their way into the handbags of the hottest celebrities, the social elite, and the otherwise well-to-do. If that meant entertaining guests on a lavish scale (plenty of fine wine, fine cuisine, and cartons of free cosmetics), well, that was just part of the sales game; “If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard,” she was fond of saying. A more famous, and certainly more profit-generating, quote was “There are no ugly women.” It was that attitude, along with Lauder’s sheer force of will, that helped create a $10 billion enterprise with locations in 130 countries and a daunting product line that includes MAC, Aveda, Clinique, Aramis, and Prescriptives, the sum of which currently constitutes a stunning 45 percent share of the cosmetics business in the United States. Estee Lauder is the only woman on Time‘s list of the 20 most influential business figures of the 20th century. She was 97. —D.P.

Al Lapin, Jr.

In 1958, Lapin and his brother Jerry invested $25,000 and founded the International House of Pancakes. “Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity” was an early marketing slogan for ridiculously sweet fruit-topped pancakes and waffles drenched in blueberry, boysenberry, strawberry, or maple syrup. Lapin (76) later owned the Orange Julius chain. His first venture was Coffee Time, carts that delivered urns of hot coffee to offices. Attractive presentation was of utmost importance, both in his personal attire and restaurants. Among his favorite sayings were “People eat with their eyes before they eat with their hands,” and “You have to look like a dollar to borrow a dime.” —Ed Reynolds

Francis Crick

Everyone who ever suffered through sophomore biology classes in high school has sketched (or traced) in their lab notebook the double helix, that famous twisted ladder of deoxyribonucleic acid, more commonly known as DNA. Today the term has made a complete transition from scientific jargon to the popular lexicon. Disparaging remarks about the origin of someone’s DNA or gene pool are common, as are police investigations (in the real world or in television dramas) that rely on DNA evidence. The business of bio-engineering and gene therapy is a huge industry now. Half a century ago, however, the very structure of DNA was a great mystery.




	Francis Crick (click for larger version)

It certainly intrigued the British-born biologist Francis Crick (88) and his young American-born colleague James Watson, both of whom were grappling with this puzzle at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, during the early 1950s. The pair finally concluded with the double helix, although confirmation of their results did not come for years. Crick nonetheless announced to friends at the University that they had “discovered the secret to life.” His approach was more subtle when it came time to publish their results in Nature in 1953, yet one particular understatement may resonate for all time: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” In 1962 Crick and Watson were awarded the Nobel Prize. —David Pelfrey

Sir Godfrey Hounsfield

In the 1960s, British electrical engineer Sir Godfrey Hounsfield created the computerized axial tomography scanner—the CAT scan. The CAT scan used X-rays to create three-dimensional images of the body’s interior, revolutionizing medical care. —E.R.

Dr. William Dobelle

William Dobelle (62) developed an experimental artificial vision system for the sight-impaired that involved transmission of electrical signals to electrodes implanted in the brain by way of a tiny camera attached to the user’s glasses. A portable computer receives images that are then sent to electrodes in the brain’s visual cortex. Four years before his death, his creation restored navigational vision to a blind volunteer. “I’ve always done artificial organs,” Dobelle told the New York Times. “I’ve spent my whole life in the spare-parts business.” —E.R.

Tom Hannon

The “father of the automated teller machine,” Tom Hannon pioneered the use of ATMs in locations other than banks. In the early 1990s he had machines in four Southern states. By the time he sold his U S. operation in 2002 to enter the British market, he had 2,500 machines in 40 states. —E.R.

Samuel M. Rubin

Popcorn was probably reasonably priced when Sam Rubin (85) began selling it in movie theaters during the Depression. He’d already built an empire with assorted New York City locations, but Sam changed the way we enjoy movies when he took his popcorn stands into theater chains such as RKO and Loews. His empire signaled the end of vending machines as the preferred mode of movie snacking. Rubin can also claim credit for inventing those oversized boxes of candy that sell for five times what you’d pay outside a movie theater. —J.R. Taylor

Red Adair

During the Gulf War in 1991, Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait set fire to oil wells in the high-producing Ahmadi and Magwa fields, creating a potentially monumental economic and environmental disaster. All the task forces and experts, along with the team working for legendary oil well firefighter Paul “Red” Adair (89), agreed that extinguishing these mammoth fires would take three to five years. Thanks to the consultation, logistical support, and special equipment provided by Adair’s organization, the task was accomplished in nine months. This was a stunning feat, but observers familiar with Adair’s history were not really shocked. At the time, Adair already had more than 40 years of experience battling wild wells, blow outs, and other conflagrations in the deserts and on the high seas. (Adair’s amazing story is told in Hellfighters, starring John Wayne.)

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, any time an oil rig exploded Adair’s team was called into action; the media coverage of these events justifiably portrayed Red Adair as an American hero. One of his more spectacular deeds involved the huge oil flame in the Sahara known as “The Devil’s Cigarette.” Today the highly specialized devices designed by Red Adair Service and Marine Company, Inc., are regarded as the Rolls Royces of firefighting equipment. —D.P.

Space is the Place

Gordon Cooper

One of the original seven Mercury astronauts, Gordon Cooper (77) was perhaps the most controversial for his belief that the U.S. government was keeping secrets about UFOs. In 1951, Cooper was part of a squadron scrambled into the air over Germany after metallic objects resembling saucers were spotted flying in formation. Cooper also maintained that he saw a UFO crash at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He filmed the incident, but the film was confiscated by government officials. While orbiting the earth in Gemini 5, Cooper infuriated federal authorities when he inadvertently photographed the top-secret Nevada military base known as Area 51 while shooting outer space photos as part of a Pentagon film experiment.

Cooper was the first American to remain in space for an entire day when he flew the last Mercury mission in 1963. Despite his controversial UFO fascination and associated conspiracy theories, he was the backup commander for the Apollo 10 mission that flew to within 50,000 feet of the moon. On his Mercury mission, the electrical system failed, and Cooper had to pilot the spacecraft manually back to earth to splashdown. Cooper’s belief in UFOs was so strong that he testified about them to the United Nations in 1978 in hope that the U.N. would become a repository for collecting UFO sightings. He also wrote a book urging the government to tell what it knew about UFOs. Most, however, probably remember Cooper through Dennis Quaid’s portrayal of the astronaut in The Right Stuff. —E.R.




	Gordon Cooper (click for larger version)

Maxime Faget

While scientists were designing rockets to launch astronauts into outer space, Maxime Faget’s job was to bring space travelers home in one piece. Designer of the Mercury space capsule, which ushered the U.S. into the age of manned space flight, Faget’s dilemma was to protect a spacecraft and its occupants from heat when re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. (Astronauts return at 17,000 miles per hour in a craft that reaches temperatures of 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.) Earliest theories called for a needle-nosed spaceship to cut down on air resistance, but Faget (83) scoffed at such Buck Rogers notions and designed a blunt-bodied craft that entered blunt end first to deflect most of the heat away from the craft. —E.R.

Fred Whipple

Originator of the “dirty snowball” concept, comet expert Fred Whipple (97) introduced the idea in 1950 that comets were balls of ice. This broke from the popular notion that comets were wads of sand held together by gravity. Whipple recognized that a comet’s arrival at a particular destination in outer space did not follow the predictability of gravitational pull only. He instead theorized that as a comet approached the sun, sunlight vaporized ice in its nucleus. Jets of particles resulted, functioning as a rocket engine to speed up or slow down the comet. Close-up photos of Halley’s Comet in 1986 proved Whipple to be correct. Whipple was also responsible for coming up with the idea of cutting aluminum foil into thousands of pieces and releasing the fragments from Allied aircraft over Germany. The tiny bits of foil confused the enemy; it appeared that thousands of planes were attacking. Some speculate that this is where the phrase “foiled again” originated. —E.R.

William H. Pickering

Director of Jet Propulsion Laboratories in California from 1954 to 1976, Pickering (93) was in charge of the United States’ first robotic missions to the moon, Venus, and Mars. Three months after Russia put the first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit in 1957, America launched Explorer I, its first orbiting spacecraft. A New Zealand-born electrical engineer, Pickering was a central figure in the Ranger and Surveyor landings on the moon, precursors to the Apollo flights that landed men on the moon. Initially, the Army oversaw Jet Propulsion Lab activity, but turned it over to NASA after the Russians launched Sputnik. —E.R.

Russian Roulette — Cahaba River

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2004-01-29 City Hall

Can the Cahaba River survive another commercial development? The Birmingham City Council and the Mayor’s office proudly declare that they don’t know and don’t care.

By Ed Reynolds

write the author

“This could be absolutely the most important decision that we make in our lives,” warned Councilor Carol Reynolds at the January 13 Birmingham City Council meeting. The list of problems that plague the Cahaba River, the drinking source for 25 percent of Alabama residents, includes low oxygen levels, high bacteria levels, and toxins such as metals, insecticides, and herbicides. “Higher water purification costs will increase costs for rate payers,” Reynolds added.

Her colleagues on the council dais, however, refused to budge from their determination to boost the city’s economic fortunes—even if that means the degradation of the river. Voting 6 to 3 [Reynolds, Councilor Valerie Abbott, and Councilor Joel Montgomery opposed the project] to approve the development of 256 acres into a subdivision in the Overton Community by Grants Mill Estates, LLC., the council joined surrounding municipalities in another round of Russian roulette with one of the nation’s cleanest (for now) water systems.

The development will include 281 single-family homes and 14 apartment buildings (totalling 464 units). Originally, developers wanted to include a service station on the land that is part of the Cahaba watershed, but at least the city had enough sense to make them toss out that idea. Other concessions from the developers include retaining vegetation along Grants Mill Road and expanding a 50-foot buffer zone protecting tributaries of the Cahaba to 100 feet.

“This project is going to discharge dirt into a tributary and then into the Cahaba River,” said Alabama Environmental Council attorney Bart Slawson, who has threatened to sue over the development because of permit violations regarding the amount of sediment allowed into the river. “The bells and whistles [in the covenants protecting the Cahaba] will not change the discharge.” The position of the Alabama Environmental Council is that the Cahaba River cannot tolerate any more sediment. The river is currently listed by the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] and Alabama Department of Environmental Management [ADEM] as so polluted already by sediment that any additional pollution will severely impact water quality, according to an e-mail sent by Slawson to the City Council.

A recent meeting between the developers, the council, and other city officials, to ensure that steps are taken to protect the Cahaba, exposed some bitter truths regarding Councilor Elias Hendricks’ willingness to exclude the public from meetings with councilors [any meeting with a quorum of the Council present is an open meeting, unless the meeting is declared an executive session involving litigation or discussion of someone's character]. Hendricks criticized councilors at a council meeting two weeks earlier for urging the public to attend the meeting with developers. “When you’re working out differences, the fewer people involved, the better. It’s not like you’re hiding anything from the public,” said Hendricks with a straight face. “When you’re sitting down, trying to negotiate a solution, and you’re going to be dealing with scientific things, I think the fewer people in the room, the better.” Hendricks did not explain why the public should not be privy to “scientific things,” but then, condescension is the norm at City Hall. As usual, a flippant Councilor Bert Miller could not resist sticking his foot in his mouth. “We act like these developers are terrorists. They’re not going to poison our drinking water!”

Also at issue is the $250,000 that Birmingham and surrounding municipalities contributed to the Upper Cahaba Watershed Study. The Zoning Committee, chaired by Councilor Abbott, had recommended that the council wait until the study is completed in the spring before acting on the development. Councilor Reynolds questioned why so much money was spent if the study was just going to be ignored. “We have just funded a study and taken taxpayer dollars and thrown them out the window,” said Reynolds in disgust. “It is our responsibility to protect public health and public drinking water.”

In an interview after the council action had been taken, Mayor Bernard Kincaid agreed with Council President Lee Loder’s assessment that development in the Cahaba watershed was inevitable. “How does Birmingham balance those very, very competing interests of development, which are absolutely necessary for us to grow, and yet protect what is one of the highest quality water systems in the nation?” asked the Mayor. “That’s a tough call. At some point Birmingham has to get in the mix.” With absolutely no hint of irony, Kincaid described the balance between economic development and water protection as “a kind of ecological balance.” After admitting that he was “comfortable” with the conditions his staff reached with developers regarding the watershed protection, Kincaid seemed to contradict himself. “Where the need for development and preserving the pristine quality of the water intersect is the point where you start making compromises,” said the Mayor. “And I’m not sure that we can compromise the water quality at all.”

Kincaid disagreed with Councilor Reynolds that the $250,000 spent for the Upper Cahaba Watershed Study was a waste of money. Insisting that Birmingham has done more than other local jurisdictions to protect the Cahaba River, Kincaid said, “I don’t hear other municipalities being pushed back from their development ideas based on the outcome of something as nebulous as a study.” This statement begs the question, why spend $250,000 on a study if one believes studies are nebulous? &

Updates and archives of the writing of Ed Reynolds

Category Archives: Science

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Dead Folks 2005, Authors, Inventors, and Astronauts

Dead Folks 2005, Authors, Inventors, and Astronauts

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Russian Roulette — Cahaba River