Ted's Blog

Ever since before I bought my house there have been problems with the gutters. One of the things in my home inspection report (14 years ago!) was to re-attach some gutters that had come off and were directing water towards a side door of the house. They fixed that, but that same gutter caused problems later. I bought some new, bigger nails and tried using those to keep the gutter up, but it kept coming loose. I think when it would rain the water would concentrate the parts that were loose and sagging and pull the nails out even further. So I was thinking I could probably get new gutters, making sure the gutters were graded higher in between the downspouts so water would flow correctly. This would be expensive, so I was looking on the internet for advice on gutters and found out about gutter screws. Instead of nails they use long screws that replace the nails and hold the gutter securely even if the nails were slipping out of the holes before. I mentioned these to a friend at work and he said that’s what he used on his house when he installed new gutters and that I had used gutter screws a few years earlier when I helped him install a gutter at his neighbor’s house. I remembered it once he told me about it. The screws have a Robertson head which works kind of like an Allen wrench, but with a square wrench instead of a hex one like an Allen wrench. I’m not sure why they use this, but they include a Robertson drill bit in the package so you can attach it to your power screwdriver or drill and drive the gutter screws. I bought a box of 10 screws at Home Depot to try them out and installed six last night and four more tonight. I think these things will work great and probably save me several thousand dollars in the short term since I won’t need new gutters for a little while longer. I still need to do something because I have some water damage going on in some places, so that still needs to be looked at . . .

A lot of people (at least in the south) know that uranium fuel was produced in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War 2. However, plutonium was also used in the bombs and this was all produced at the Hanford Site in Washington state. Hanford is now the most contaminated nuclear site in the US and the site of the biggest environmental cleanup. It is also the home of Trench 94, which can be seen in satellite pictures available on Google Earth.

The United States launched its first nuclear powered submarine, the Nautilus, in 1954. And it has built hundreds more since then. Many of them served out their lives and were decommissioned. The problem then was what to do with the old nuclear reactors they carried. The old fuel was removed for processing or storage, but this still left a big piece of radioactive metal. So what they do is put the submarine in dry dock, cut everything in front of the reactor off, then everything behind the reactor off, This leaves them with a big steel cylinder. They then attach a plate to the front and back, barge it up the Columbia River to the Hanford Site, and put it in Trench 94. So each of the barrels in Trench 94 is actually a piece of submarine. You can see the process on this web page. One guy has put together page about that numbers all the reactors and tells which submarine they came from (that picture is at the bottom of this page.

Most of the reactors have been there for a while, but supposedly the trench has been left open so that Russia can verify the submarines are scrapped. Plus they probably keep having to put more reactors there. These containers are supposed to last for 600 years.

I saw an article about fires in southern Georgia recently. One of the fires has burned a huge area of more than 200,000 acres. The fire even has a name, the Honey Prairie Fire. You know it’s a really big fire if it even has a name. Not only does it have a name, it has a Wikipedia entry. 200,000 acres is a huge area: 400 square miles. Today I found out that almost the entire area is in the Okefenokee Swamp and particularly the national wildlife refuge. According to this page it looks like about two-thirds of the wildlife refuge has burned. Here’s a map showing the extent of the fire, but keep in mind that even the green part has also burned, it just burned back in May when the fire was first started by lightning. Maybe not so surprising, the Okefenokee Swamp is closed right now.

I don’t know how worrisome any of this is. The swamp is supposed to catch fire every now and then and clear out underbrush. However there has been a really bad prolonged drought in the swamp, so bad that some of the places where they take canoe trips are just dry ground now.

I was watching last night’s Daily Show today and the guest, Mitchell Zuckoff, was promoting his book, Lost in Shangri-La, about the rescue of some plane crash survivors in New Guinea during World War II. Some airborne soldiers parachuted in first and cleared off a patch so some gliders could land. Eventually they flew everyone out on gliders, which Zuckoff said was done with rubber bands, so I envisioned them building a giant slingshot and shooting the gliders into the air. I knew gliders were used on D Day, towed behind airplanes from England, but it was a one-way mission to land troops and equipment together in fields rather than spread out like paratroops would be. I didn’t think they could take off again especially since there was no runway, just a clearing. I found an interview with the commander of the rescue mission where he said they snatched the gliders up and everyone got out okay. Then I had to look up exactly how you snatch a glider up. It turns out they would tie an elastic tow rope up on some poles and a plane would fly in very, very low with a hook lowered that would catch the tow line and yank the glider up into the air. There’s even a YouTube video: