My mind went back to a hearing of the Environment Court in May 2000 in Nelson, where the same, bitter battle was being fought. In particular, to the death of one of the witnesses. Here’s how it was reported  at the time:

“Nelson, NZPA
May 4 – The death of a key witness has caused the adjournment of an Environment Court hearing on how aquaculture should be allowed to develop in Golden and Tasman Bays.

Marine biologist Andrew Ritchie, 37, a witness for a group of marine farming companies, died suddenly on Tuesday.

He died on the evening after he had given evidence, which he was to be cross-examined on.

The court is hearing appeals against the Tasman District Council’s proposed resource management plan, with the key issue being the council’s decision to ban marine farming within three nautical miles of the shore.

Mr Ritchie worked for Blenheim-based Marlborough Seafoods, one of the companies in the group seeking space for marine farming, mostly outside the exclusion zone. He had carried out surveys of sites  dentified by the group, to see whether they were appropriate for marine farming activities.

The court reconvened this morning to decide how the case should now proceed. The session was closed  to the public. A decision on how the case will proceed was to be given on Monday.  ”

The court had been under a lot of time pressure and the judge had ruled that no new expert witnesses could be called. Counsel for one of the parties objecting to marine farming wanted to make some points about the scallop fishery, so Andy Ritchie was asked to comment on a detailed stock assessment report. When he  complained that this was not his work and was outside his field of expertise, the judge ruled that the cross-examination should continue. She presumably felt that his opinions may be helpful to the court.  After an intense grilling, the court was adjourned for the day. Andy was told to take the report home for  study (but was not to discuss it with anybody) and the cross-examination would continue the next day.

When court resumed the next day the witness failed to appear. One can only guess at the pressure that poor guy was under.  His death was felt by everybody.

The incident prompted me to discuss the issues with all Cawthron staff who served as expert witnesses.  I advised them to simply refuse to answer questions they considered were outside their area of expertise, that Cawthron would back them all the way.  It’s fair  to say that we were appalled at the judge’s performance.

When the court eventually resumed a couple of weeks later, one incident helped to provide some light relief. A Cawthron marine scientist was the next witness, giving evidence on behalf of a marine farming
group. He was to be cross-examined by the lawyer acting for their opponents, the very same lawyer who had given Andy Ritchie such a hard time. “Dr Grange, ..” began the lawyer and then followed a long, complicated, triple barrelled question.  Our man stood up.  “I’m Dr Gillespie, not Dr Grange” he said and sat down again.  Muffled laughter from those of the legal profession in the court as the embarrassed lawyer had to repeat the whole question once more. (Then followed a virtuoso performance by Dr Gillespie, during which he even had the cross-examining  QC holding up marine charts for him so a point could be explained to the judge.)

The Marine Farmers Association eventually took up a collection, to which Cawthron and its staff were contributors, which was used to establish the “Andy Ritchie Scholarship” at Victoria University, for marine biology students.

Now, more than 11 years later, the battle over water rights between fishermen and marine farmers continues. I guess it’s not unusual, there must be many precedents around the world. I seem to remember the early settlers in the American West took a lot more than 11 years to sort out similar problems, between ranchers and farmers.  Let’s hope this new legislation provides a way forward.

There’s a very thoughtful analysis of Ken Ring’s predictions by Ph.D. student David Winter on SciBlogs, here.  Winter takes a careful look at the evidence, failing to find any correlation between the phase of the moon or its distance from the Earth and the intensity of the earthquake sequence since the September earthquake in Christchurch. He did find that Ring predicts very many earthquakes indeed, with lots of false positives and false negatives. (Many others have had a crack at Ring, just Google “Ken Ring earthquakes”.)

Scientific historian Michael Shermer, in his book “Why People Believe Weird Things“, helps us to understand why people like Ken Ring can generate such a following. Here’s a summary of part of his argument.

Humans have evolved with a brain with a superb ability to make sense of incomplete data. We are very good at recognising patterns, reaching conclusions and making decisions fast. The problem is, we are sometimes driven to make conclusions, even when there is nothing in the data to support them. Humans have a strong urge to find “the reason” behind observations or events. Unfortunately, science often shows us that the reasons may be very complex, even beyond the capacity of our limited minds. The result is a wonderfully diverse range of beliefs, arising from all sorts of factors, not just a table of facts. We then sort through the evidence, keeping stuff that confirms our beliefs and throwing away or ignoring the rest. It’s a form of wilful blindness, not unlike how we behave when we’ve fallen in love.

But why do smart people believe weird things? Shermer contends that highly intelligent people are no less susceptible to forming unsubstantiated beliefs. Scientists too, that’s why there’s a system where others check the evidence to see whether they can confirm the same conclusion. But, Shermer says, smart people are very good at defending beliefs arrived at by unsmart means.

Links:

Ken Ring’s website

John Campbell’s (notorious) interview with Ken Ring on TV3

A lay person’s analysis of Ken Ring’s predictions

David Winter’s own blog , “The Atavism”

Professor Goff and his students have been looking for traces of ancient tsunamis in the Nelson region, including the Abel Tasman National Park.  They look for areas where marine deposits washed up by a tsunami would not have been obliterated, e.g. by a meandering river. Once found, these deposits can be dated by studying their contents. For example, a list of the remains of various marine organisms found in a sample can help to provide a ‘date stamp’.

Moawhitu, the bay shown in the photograph above taken on my return from a fishing trip last weekend, is of special interest. It’s at the northern end of Greville Harbour, on the western side of D’Urville Island. There was once a thriving Maori settlement here, on the flat land behind the beach. That suddenly changed.

Professor Goff and his team have found deposits from a tsunami which date from around 1450, up as high as 40m above the present sea level. Prior to 1450, there is apparently plenty of archaeology found in that area down near sea level. After that, there is nothing. All of the more recent items, dating from after 1450, are found at a much higher elevation.

The findings fit well with Maori history for the region. In their book “Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka: A History of Maori of Nelson and Marlborough”, Hillary and John Mitchell describe a disaster at (Greville Harbour): “a massive tidal wave called Tapu-arero-utuutu swept into the harbour and drowned almost everyone, tumbling their bodies into the sand dunes which were piled up by the force of the waves.” John explained to me that the area is still tapu ( ‘off limits’) to Maori.

Such waves were often attributed to ’taniwha‘, mythical beings that lived in caves, the water or sea.  They could be benevolent guardians or dangerous, predatory monsters.  Thinking of the shocking images of that black, rolling monster sweeping across the fields at Sendai after the March Tohoku earthquake in Japan, ‘taniwha’ seems a very appropriate description.

  
Here’s why I got interested in this building. Last week I had my first piece published in a local magazine, “Wild Tomato”. The topic was earthquakes, what’s the situation here in Nelson? It was a lot of fun. In fact, I spent so much time on the research that I think my pay rate ended up at about half the minimum wage.  Still, I have lots of material for this blog.

One of the issues in writing the story was how to deal with the safety of buildings. There are quite a few death traps around town, some of them quite photogenic. Trouble is, I didn’t want the magazine to be sued by irate owners.  Anyway, there has been so much coverage of collapsed buildings in Christchurch that we all have a pretty good idea of what’s dangerous and what’s not.

I thought of one of our heritage buildings that is very close to my heart, the Nelson School of Music.

It has had a lot of strengthening work done on it so that it is no longer considered “earthquake prone”. Even though more work is planned, I feel quite comfortable in it. But they have their music festival starting this month. The last thing they want is a magazine article with the word “earthquake” in the title and a picture of their building on the page.  People won’t bother to read the fine print. So that building was out.

I decided to approach the question from the opposite end. We have a new building at the Polytechnic (NMIT).  It is an outstanding example of an extremely strong, earthquake-resistant structure. And the really neat thing is its environmental footprint. It is built largely from sustainably grown materials sourced from within a radius of 100 km from Nelson. It is the first of its kind in the world, using a technique called “pre-stressed laminated veneer lumber”.

From the outside it looks much like any other building.

Inside it looks (and smells) very different. 

Laminated veneer lumber, or LVL, is made from thin 3 mm strips of pine glued together. The process enables very large pieces to be formed. We have a major producer here in Nelson, Nelson Pine Industries. While LVL has been around for a while, the way it is used in this building was a first. The joints are designed to move in an earthquake, held together by tensioned steel ropes. They’re called “rocking joints” (so I guess they’d be ideal for nightclubs and bars?) 

To dampen down the movement, the building has “energy dissipaters”.  These heavy steel pieces are designed to be twisted and bent, soaking up energy in the process. Then they can be replaced once the earthquake is over.

I managed to persuade Murray Sturgeon, the managing director of Nelson Pine Industries, to hug one of the columns. It wasn’t very difficult, he’s a real enthusiast and very proud of his product.

A lot of the design ideas have come from Canterbury University.  Professor Andy Buchanan (along with a lot of other staff and students) has been doing some fantastic work on timber design. I believe their research results are going to prove extremely important for Christchurch as the rebuilding gets underway.

By the way, this construction has another benefit which at first seems counter-intuitive:  timber has an excellent fire rating.  Of course we know that steel doesn’t  burn.  The problem with steel however is that, if it gets hot enough, it loses a lot of its strength. That’s why steel beams and columns have to be protected with some kind of insulation. Timber, on the other hand, burns relatively slowly and actually retains its strength a lot longer.

One last picture before I give you some links:

links:

more on the building itself:

http://www.nmit.ac.nz/schools/artsmedia/artsandmediabuilding.aspx

http://www.nzwood.co.nz/case-studies/nmit-arts-and-media-building

and some stuff on laminated veneer lumber:

http://www.nzwood.co.nz/what-wood/structural-materials/laminated-veneer-lumber/

http://www.nelsonpine.co.nz/LVLNZ.htm

Nelson Pine Industries:
http://www.nelsonpine.co.nz/

“When the first news came out concerning the Fukushima nuclear reactors, especially reports that backup diesel generators had failed, I became very worried indeed. It was as if all the process engineering stuff in my head, almost an obsession for the first 20 years of my working life, popped up to the surface again. I brushed up on BWR type nuclear reactors and tried to make sense of the often completely garbled news accounts.

At the time of writing, around 30 hours after the event, information is still very sketchy. We hear that the fuel rods have been exposed, fission products have been detected outside the plant which indicates that a partial of fuel elements may have occurred, and seawater is being used as a coolant. I understand that last step, along with the injection of boric acid to “poison” the reactor, may be fatal for the reactor, ending its useful life.

Even though the outcome is still very unclear, some things are:

• Traditional media? Great images, best viewed with the sound off. The accompanying commentaries have been garbled, full of nonsense statements and contradictions. Surely the networks could have people on tap have at least some scientific and technological literacy, to help the editors? It was almost 24 hours before we started to see intelligent comment.
• The web, social media, etc? Light years ahead. With just Google, Wikipedia and the knowledge of what to search for, I was able to find some great material. Wikipedia was being updated every hour or so, for example.
• The reassuring statements provided by the nuclear power industry, for example,

There seem to be three distinct kinds of “expert” opinions out there:
• The ‘anti’ lobby, emphasising radiation risk, questioning design decisions and noting a lack of transparency about risks and incidents.
• The nuclear power sector, reassuring us that reactors are extremely safe, that such an accident could not happen elsewhere. The level of redundancy built in to their safety systems means the probability of multiple failures such as those at Fukushima is apparently vanishingly small (but we are seeing them!). Confidence seems to be especially high in the US, rather ironic in view of recent events (e.g. Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil leaks).
• Academics, whose contributions are often great: clear, well written and informative. I’ve yet to find one however that moves beyond the theory into the real world, where things don’t always happen as expected and people don’t do what they are supposed to.

I note that GE say that their newest reactors are designed to withstand seismic forces of 0.18 G, in any direction! Ground shaking in Christchurch last month reached more than 10 times that level.

If the authorities were to gain control of all the reactors right now, this would apparently still rank as the third most serious accident in the nuclear power industry. It will probably have a major effect on the political acceptance of nuclear energy as a low-carbon power source.

I’ve worked in heavy industry, industrial plants with potential hazards, where safety was critical. For years I subscribed to a journal which documented case studies of failures so we could learn from others’ mistakes. I was acutely aware of the variety of mistakes that can be made, by owners, operators or designers.

Now we are being reminded of the role that nature can play. For geologically active New Zealand, with its miniscule infrastructure, (not to mention its free, easy-going culture) to consider nuclear power as a credible option for the future is just crazy!

Some relevant links:

Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident
Boiling water reactor safety systems
The Energy Collective (an independent, moderated community of professionals focused on the complex challenges of meeting the world’s energy needs sustainably)
World Nuclear News on the battle to stabilise the reactor (12 March, additional coverage after this date)”

The pressure was intense, very palpable. The value of the production from the mill was more than $1 million per day (that’s 1980 dollars, probably three times that now). I used to spend my first hour at work preparing for the meeting, walking through the mill looking at log sheets, computer printouts, paper test results, talking to people, all to get a feel for what had happened in the past 24 hours. We had to be ready with instant answers for any one of a myriad of questions which could crop up.

That pressure took its toll. (One of the other paper mills in New Zealand lost several paper machine superintendents in succession, all to heart attacks. But they were having huge problems starting up a new paper machine at the time so I guess they were special circumstances.)

Humour was vital for the health of the participants. Everyone understood that (well, all the regulars at the meeting did) and there was plenty of it. One of the most important contributors was Ron, the Power and Steam Superintendent. He had a huge job. When his Boilerhouse went down, it shut down the whole mill.

One morning it was clear that the previous 24 hours had been a disaster. We’d lost 14 or 15 hours of production. “Tell us about it Ron” asked the Mill Manager with a face like thunder. “Well, first a shear pin failed in the scraper arm on the B side of the precipitater on No 4 Recovery Boiler, so we had to slow her back to avoid air emissions. That meant we got full of strong black liquor on the No 4 side, so we had to slow back No 4 Evaporators. When we tried to start up No 3 Evaps we got priming which caused a big black liquor loss…..” The saga went on and on. Virtually every unit in Ron’s patch had experienced problems and the resulting shortage of steam had shut the rest of the mill down. “So all in all, it was complete and utter shambles” concluded Ron.

“You can f**king say that again” said the Mill Manager, thinking of the massive financial cost.

“All right then” said Ron. “first a shear pin failed in the scraper arm on the B side of the precipitator in No 4 Recovery Boiler, so we had to slow her back to avoid air emissions. That meant we got full of black liquor on the No 4 side… ‘ and he kept on going, all the way to # 3 Evaps before the Mill Manager, couldn’t keep a straight face any longer. Then we could all laugh.

On another occasion, we been told that the Managing Director was down from Auckland and planned to attend the meeting. Indeed someone saw him walking down the path towards our meeting room. “When he comes in, let’s all jump to attention” suggested one bright spark. We all got ready. We had a good idea of exactly when he would arrive.

Sure enough, the door opened, we all jumped to stand at attention and in walked not the Managing Director but Ron! “As you were” said Ron with a perfectly straight face and with a wave of his hand walked straight to his seat and sat down, as if that was an entirely appropriate way for him to be greeted in the morning. It was a great performance which generated a roar of laughter. That then was what greeted the Managing Director when he entered the room moments later. I doubt whether anyone ever explained (he was not particularly highly regarded – ).

When I travelled north in October/November last year, I managed to catch up with half a dozen of my former colleagues from the pulp and paper industry. I really enjoyed the chance to talk about some of the highs (and lows) of the more than 20 years I spent in the forest products sector.  Looking back, we were really fortunate to start work in that industry at a time it was on a real high.  New Zealand had a huge competitive advantage compared with the rest of the world.  New Zealand’s large, very well managed and sustainable plantation forests of pinus Radiata could produce high-quality cellulose fibre at a very low cost.  What’s more, due to a quirk of that species growing in NZ, we could get a wide range of products once we understood  how to segregate and use the various parts of the tree (but that’s another story).

(If you mainly visit this blog for the pictures, you may be disappointed in this post. But if you’re still interested, read on …..)

Most of the wood destined for pulp and paper went to two companies. One of them (Tasman Pulp and Paper Ltd) made newsprint, competing in world markets at international prices. It’s paper machines were amongst the biggest and fastest in the world.  Concentrating on just a few grades of paper, the mill operated at a very high efficiency, on lean margins.

The other (NZ Forest Products Ltd) made almost everything else, many hundreds of different paper grades.  Its machines were smaller, slower and less efficient.  It’s Kinleith mill was probably the largest and most complex pulp and paper mill in the world at that time.  It was all about import substitution and subsidised exports, which for a long time was quite profitable.  Three factors help to offset the inherent inefficiencies involved in making a huge range of products:  export tax incentives; protection from competition from imported products; and of course that low wood cost.  As well, even though 5 of the 6 the paper machines at Kinleith were inherently inefficient due to the frequent grade changes, the pulp mill was ‘state of the art’ and ran very well.

That profitability gradually changed, for a whole lot of reasons.  Labour costs became more and more significant, for example,  as a highly unionised workforce managed to extract a bigger slice of the cake. In such capital-intensive industry, it was usually easier to pay up than risk the cost of an extended strike.

To show you how well they succeeded: in 1981 when I got the job of technical manager, the lowest annual earnings of any of the shift workers in my department was $35,000. Probably around $90,000 in today’s currency.  That person, a shift tester, was 18 years old and had to have successfully completed three years of secondary school education.

That situation was not sustainable. The profits came from the pockets of consumers: anyone who bought a writing pad, a bag of cement, a carton of beer or even a new benchtop for their kitchen.  One of our products for example was saturating base paper, used to make laminates such as Formica. I heard a customer claim that the price of the Kinleith product was four times as high as that of the dominant producer (Westvaco in the USA).  I quite believe it. They were locked into us by a ban on imports. 

In the mid-80s, ‘Rogernomics’ put an end to the import barriers and export tax incentives.  The writing was on the wall.

Now the Kinleith pulp and paper mill has one paper machine, not six. It makes just a dozen or so grades. Its production is higher then what we got from six paper machines, when we made around 2500 grades of paper. 

The mill employs a few hundred people, compared with several thousand back then. In spite of the efficiency gains, I’m sure the return on capital is not very flash.  It’s no longer a public company with thousands of New Zealand shareholders, but a private company owned by billionaire  Graeme Hart.  It’s part of a global packaging business.

There are however alternative uses for that forest land, some providing a higher return.  Dairy farming, for example.  Here’s what I saw as I drove down from Rotorua to Taupo along a stretch of road that I hadn’t travelled for perhaps 30 years.  For miles, you used to feel shut in by dense pine forests on either side.  Now, on the eastern side:

I have to say, that was a fairly ugly logging operation:  lots of slash and high stumps.  But it cleans up OK, you could see what it would become by the example on the other side of the road:

Quite what this change in land use will do to Lake Taupo is still being researched.

The image above shows the star attraction,  the “Champagne Pool”.  It’s easy to see why this features on many postcards of this place.  It’s much harder to explain the atmosphere in that place.  Early in the morning the steam rising from the pool gives a shifting, elusive view of the pool:

(You will find a high-resolution image of the Champagne Pool in my galleries, here.)

The whole time I was there we were surrounded by a very special sound: the millions of small bubbles of dissolved CO2 hissing away, exactly like a glass of the wine that gives the pool its name.  They are everywhere, and tiny:

The pool is surrounded by gleaming white silica deposits, but just under the surface of the water are brightly coloured mineral deposits (sulphides of arsenic and antimony).  Small crystalline mounds appear above the water:

Even though the water is very hot (75 C) and acid (pH 5.5), there are microorganisms known as ‘extremophiles’ living in it.  Studies have isolated several novel bacteria, as well as an unusual ‘archeon’.  You can read a little the chemistry and biology of this pool on Wikipedia, here.

A different mixture of minerals have given a nearby pool a completely different colour.  It’s called the “Devil’s Bath” (and the colour is real!):

Finally, nearby there is the “Lady Knox” geyser which obligingly blows at 10:15 each day (when seeded by some surfactant powder), reaching a height of  up to 20 metres:

(Note – the ‘green flash’ in that picture is not caused by the geyser, the soap powder or even a sunset but is a reflection from shooting with a wideangle lens directly into the sun.)

I really enjoyed the visit and would go back there like a shot.  A great place!

I wonder, when people gaze at this beautiful lake, how many realise they’re looking at one of the world’s true supervolcanoes? For example, an eruption around 26,000 years ago at a place called Oruanui is said to be the world’s largest known eruption in the past 70,000 years.

Years ago I attended a lecture by volcanologist Ian Nairn which made a big impression upon me. He talked about the little volcanoes in the central North Island, and the big ones. The little ones include Ngaruahoe (Mount Doom in the “Lord of the Rings”), about 2399 m high. Here’s a picture from a couple of weeks ago, of Mt Ngaruahoe in a dramatic mood:

The big ones are not so obvious. Lake Taupo is one, while others lie to the north and east. He explained that much of the magma in this region is rhyolite, very different from the stuff you see erupting in Hawaii or Iceland. It’s very stiff and so, as the pressure builds up over thousands of years, it bulges upwards to form a large dome. Here is a very innocent-looking example of a small one:

When a rhyolite dome does eventually blow, the high dissolved gas concentration in the magma means that it goes off like a shaken champagne bottle. The column of molten rock and superheated gas can go up 15 km or so. When it eventually falls down, it spills out across the countryside at high speed, solidifying as it cools down to form a kind of rock called ignimbrite. Of course, because of the huge scale of these eruptions (1000 times bigger than Mt St Helens for example), then the whole world changes!

I used to keep a core sample on my desk of genuine, certified, 200 km/hour ignimbrite. (Geologists can estimate its velocity by studying the bottom layer of the deposit. The faster the flow, the higher the hills it can scale.)

Just south of Rotorua, on the road to Atiamuri, there’s a tiny village called Horohoro. It sits on land which has dropped a few hundred metres, exposing the rock underneath. The fault line runs along the cliffs behind this church:

The cliffs are higher than they look, up to 300m in some places. They are impressive, even more so when one realises that a hundred metres or more were laid down overnight in a flow that went for hundreds of kilometers at high speed. This is actually part of the Mamaku Plateau.

15 km away, at Waikite Valley, you can see more of this same flow (these cliffs face north and make up the other side of the fault valley):

The supervolcanoes in the Taupo Volcanic Zone typically blow out so much magma that the ground collapses to form a large “caldera”. These then fill up with water (hence Lake Taupo, although I understand this is also a rift valley). Over time the ground bulges upwards again, leaving a ring of smaller lakes around the rim. My host in Rotorua explained that the centre of one of the supervolcanoes, Okataina, is rising at the rate of a centimeter a year (if I remember correctly).  So some time in the next 100,000 years or so we can expect another large bang!

For a good description of the Okataina Volcanic Centre, check out Ian Nairn’s paper. Wikipedia has some good stuff on supervolcanoes here (two of the top three in its list of the really big ones were in New Zealand!)

I had a great time on my road trip revisiting the geothermal areas created by all this activity, as you could see from that earlier post on mud pools.  More images from the trip soon!

The award was specifically for his work on starting the world’s only selective breeding programme for mussels. It is well-deserved. Henry has made a huge contribution to the Cawthron Institute over the last few decades. It was Henry who identified the perfect location for an aquaculture research centre, at the Glen just north of Nelson. Henry was the one who backed a young PhD student, Sam Buchanan, who solved the problem that had baffled government scientists for many years: how to grow the unique New Zealand green shell mussel in a hatchery. It was Henry who insisted that Cawthron embark on an ambitious selective breeding programme, rather than spend years fine tuning hatchery technology.

It is a big step for industry. A massive investment of capital will be required before shellfish growers and processors can take advantage of the considerable benefits arising from this research. However, it seems as if the first steps in that direction are already being taken. We heard recently about plans for the world’s largest shellfish hatchery, to be set up alongside Cawthron’s research facilities.

I doubt very much that would have been possible without Henry’s efforts.  Well done!