Nicholson Baker - Double Fold - Libraries and the Assault on Paper

The hurry had to do with money: the library had spent several million on the NASA project so far (and the NASA project followed the GE project, which hadn’t been cheap), and Peter Sparks and William Welsh (the deputy librarian of Congress) needed to get beyond feasibility studies and tap into the $11.5 million that Congress had budgeted for a bona fide high-volume treatment plant, to be built at Fort Detrick, which would possibly handle books for other libraries as well. Later, Welsh admitted 19that the library had diverted $1.7 million from the library’s personnel accounts into the diethyl-zinc fund without congressional permission. (“The time drivers 20on this project [were] the limited funding, and the Library of Congress pushing to get the job done,” said one anonymous respondent in an official NASA report. “There were overruns, and budget problems in October 1985 that caused the Library of Congress to pressure Northrup on this project.”)

On December 5, 1985, Dr. Anand Apte, one of Northrup’s senior project engineers, was nearing the end of the first test cycle of the new plant in NASA’s Building 306. There were no books in the chamber. Apte couldn’t tell how much diethyl zinc was left inside — the temperature gauges were reading cold, indicating the presence of a liquid, but they weren’t reliable. At 6:45 A.M., hoping to neutralize whatever was left, he opened a valve and allowed some water in. The door of the vacuum chamber blew open. “Shortly after the water injection,” 21according to the mishap report, “Dr. Apte observed flames shooting out of the chamber door and immediately vacated the building.” The walls and ceiling were charred; the chamber door and O-rings had fire damage; the sprinkler system went off.

Yes, it was bad, but not horrible, and the library was determined to get the system purged and proceed — a congressional appropriations-subcommittee meeting was on the calendar for the end of February 1986. (“[Name whited out] has been applying pressure 22to get the job done even after the December 5, 1985 incident,” reads the NASA report.) Before NASA had completed its investigation 23into the accident — the agency was in turmoil anyway after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle on January 28, which also involved hypergolic fuels — a “disenchanted” electrician 24was called in to make some repairs to the DEZ delivery system, and workers cleaned the inside of the reaction chamber. Not all the diethyl zinc had been consumed in the fire, as it turned out; a substantial volume 25still lurked in the complex of delivery pipes and brine-seal tanks. (Afterward, in a weighing of a supply tank, seven hundred and thirty pounds of the chemical were unaccounted for.) A jet of “black goop” 26spurted from one valve on February 11, 1986; the next day, a copper elbow pipe 27was discovered to have mysteriously straightened. Other plumbing was too hot to touch. 28Northrup did not inform NASA 29of these anomalies. On February 14, at a signal from one of his colleagues, the hapless Dr. Apte pressed a switch to open valve V-303. The pressure gauge spiked, there was a boom and a flash, and (said the NASA report) “the walls were blown apart, 30and the two doors leading into the room were blown off.” The NASA report theorizes that something pyrophoric happened in one of the vapor condensers: “The violence of the explosion 31suggests a mixture of DEZ and water (brine) or air resulting in a rapid overpressurization of the condenser and subsequent rupture of adjacent piping and blower housing.” Nobody was hurt, though.

February 20 was looming — the day of the crucial appropriations-subcommittee meeting. Daniel Boorstin was planning to make a cri de coeur for more money. Meanwhile, engineers from Texas Alkyls were flown up to take a look at the situation in Building 306; they noticed, among other things, that there were no relief valves 32to vent trapped fluids in the piping. And the piping itself wasn’t going to hold forever — the DEZ was attacking the seals, and there was a thought that it could even react with the metal oxides in stainless steel. NASA, unable to figure out how to drain all the abscesses safely, called Welsh and said, “We’re going to blow it.” 33Welsh was upset. He offered to go in himself, wielding an infrared camera, escorted by armored vehicles 34if need be, to locate pressure spots. But NASA said no.

On Thursday the twentieth, the congressional subcommittee was called to order. Daniel Boorstin, a chronic bow-tie-wearer who could really crank it out when he needed to, told the members that the “vast and unprecedented cuts 35in the Library’s budget” were “dangerous, and could become tragic for our nation, the Congress, and the whole world of learning.” (The library was being asked to cut about seven percent.) Boorstin was not an alarmist, he told them — far from it. His library had, he hoped, acquired “a reputation for honesty and conservatism” in its budgetary requests. The current crisis “has not been created by inexpertise, neglect, waste, indolence, or dishonesty in the Library of Congress.” No — the crisis was created by Congress. “We will fail in our duty to our posterity,” Boorstin said, “if we do not hand on to them the fully stocked, properly organized treasure of wisdom of the past which it has taken us two centuries to accumulate.”

The next day, an Army demolition unit drove over from Fort Meade. Welsh wanted to be there, but he wasn’t allowed to watch. Half a million dollars worth of pilot-plant piping was, to quote the NASA report, “disassembled by means of shaped 36explosives.” There was a whoomp 37 and a surprisingly large fireball. The DEZ bomb had finally gone off.

The marvel is, though, that even this disaster wasn’t the end of the program. Leading off a rather grim discussion of diethyl zinc before the subcommittee in 1987, Boorstin said that “there has never been an important 38technological advance that was not controverted by people who had rival schemes or who didn’t think any scheme should be pursued.” There were still large sums to be spent — including over a million devoted to forcing rats 39to inhale megadoses of zinc-oxide dust in order to demonstrate that deacidified books weren’t toxic. (The library had already paid to have rats gassed with a mixture of diethyl zinc and hexane vapor — the tests were “inconclusive” 40because it wasn’t clear which of the two poisons killed the animals.) What were a few rodents, though, when all of written history was on the brink of disaster? Peter Sparks was a very determined man, and William Welsh’s pride was also on the line. The two of them had been talking up DEZ for years as one of the library’s two top-priority projects (the other was the optical-disk program 41) — it just had to work.

The first step was to muffle the NASA disaster with some confusing specificity. “On Friday, February 21,” 42said the Library of Congress’s Information Bulletin several weeks after the fireball, “the line cutting charges were set off opening the pipes. Liquid diethyl zinc in the lines spilled out and burned for about 30 seconds and the wood structure burned for about one hour, causing considerable damage to the temporary building frame, walls, and roof that was over the chemical delivery section of the test facility.” The second step was to shift blame from the library to Northrup and NASA — which wasn’t difficult to do, since the space shuttle had just blown up, and Northrup had been incontrovertibly sloppy. “The Library’s own review 43of the test facility has revealed serious design and procedural deficiencies in the prototype chemical delivery system that will be addressed and corrected in a redesign of the facility,” reported an article in the Information Bulletin in July. Welsh told the congressional subcommittee that he hadn’t known that NASA and Northrup “didn’t have the chemical processing experience.” 44