Pic of the Day: Pickens--the leaning wall

I've been all over that fort since 1999 and I never noticed this little detail until a few nights ago while I was picking out stuff for Pic of the Day.

If you look at the right-hand wall where it meets the back wall, you can see a sizable lean-out at the top. This is the same room as in the POTD for Feb. 21, looking at the opposite end. (click to make it larger)

I'd remembered from reading the Historic Structure Report for Pickens that engineers had trouble with the south face of Bastion B. The rooms of the three bastions on the west front--B, C and D--are built differently from nearly all the other casemates (rooms) in the fort in that those big arches are turned directly off of the outer walls instead of standing independently of them. There's a lot more stress on this wall, then, than there is on the one on the other side of that small doorway.

The fort was built on sand. All of Santa Rosa Island is a glorified sand bar 40 miles long, less than a mile wide. The only thing that holds it all together is the vegetation, especially sea oats. Sand doesn't compress--not like clay. The grains are still able to slip no matter how tightly they're packed. When the engineers started building the fort, they dug up tons of sand, leveled and tamped the area, laid down a "grillage" (3-inch thick birch planks laid up in two layers as a footing for the foundations), then started with the masonry itself. The island's only a few feet above sea level (depending on which dune you're on), so the fort's foundations are under water, which keeps the wood from rotting.

The wooden grillage helps to spread out the weight of all that masonry, but there's bound to be some settling. That one wall likely started leaning out as soon as the weight of the overhead arch came to bear on it. If you look at the small doorway, you can see several concentric arches where Engineer Major Chase tried to add support, almost plugging the opening with solid brick. Between this and adding 3 feet of brick to the outside of the south wall, the motion of the south face was arrested.

Stupid Things To Avoid Doing.

Back in 1998, on the job at [undisclosed car repair shop, as a tire tech], I spent a little idle time with one of the other guys in the parking lot.

We had decided to see whether a shop rag could be used as a sling.

Neither of us had ever used a sling before.

I loaded a D-cell battery, whipped the rag around like I've seen in movies, and released one end at just the right moment in its arc...

...and the battery sailed off in a lovely curve. I'd been aiming straight down the middle of the side parking lot, hoping to land the battery in the big field out back. Damn thing pulled to the right.

Then we realized that its trajectory had it sailing beautifully toward a parked van. A customer's van. Shiny, with lots of shiny glass windows. Expensive, job-losing glass windows.

[sphincters tighten]

WHACK!! It hit the parking lot retaining wall about 18 inches from the van, rebounded, and skittered along the pavement at the foot of the wall.

Enough excitement for one day.

My Salamander is a Teabagger!

I just realized this while feeding the little critter. I've had it for nearly 6 years now and it's always amused me how I can put food right in front of its nose and it'll just sit there, completely unaware, looking up at me with its froggy little face and wondering when I'm going to feed it.

Teabaggers are the same way with facts and reality: you can put a "Spark Charts" version of the Constitution or American History in their hot little hands and they'll just look at you with utter incomprehension.

The newt is sometimes on the ball, though, snapping up a food pellet before it even hits the water--but within moments, it's forgotten there was any food at all.

Teabaggers are like this, too: they see words they like in the Constitution and bite down hard--words like "Lord" or "bear arms" or "impeach" and miss everything else.

In six years, I haven't even named my newt, just called it things like bug-eater, frog-face, or goober (especially when it's looking right at the food and missing it).

Maybe I should name it "Teabagger."

Pic of the Day: Pickens--Hands Up, Varmint!

This is somewhere you didn't want to be, if you didn't belong near one of these old forts.

That's the muzzle of a 32-pounder smoothbore cannon peeking out of Casemate #2. Big guns like these were the primary defense of the fort and were trained on the Gulf, the channel, and Pensacola Bay. Especially on the channel--50 cannon in the lower tier alone, with about as many more up on the roof. Down inside the walls, the gun's better protected from direct fire, but it's got a 90 degree field of fire side to side and a few degrees up and down. You could expect a mile and a half effective range, maybe 2 miles if you weren't picky.

Given the technology of the time, these old forts could not be beaten by a wooden ship. You've got a stable gun platform, lots of guns, and hundreds of men. Once you've dialed in your range on a target you can keep throwing iron at it until it sinks or surrenders.

A ship the size of the frigate USS Constellation was rated for 38 cannon, but they weren't all on the same side of the ship. Even given a good gun crew and 19 big guns on one side, you're still dealing with a platform that's moving with the waves--up & down, rolling left to right, pitching front to back, and there's no way to keep getting direct hits on the same spot on that fort no matter what a big target it is.

Once ships got rifled guns, iron plating and screw propellers, the tables were turned. A rifled gun is more accurate, iron plating more resistant to impact, and a propeller lets you move your ship against the winds and currents, something a sailing ship can't do.

Pic of the Day: Pickens Building 8, Broken

Here's the Library/Auditorium/Museum building near Ft. Pickens. This shot's from Nov. 11, 2006, more than 2 years after Hurricane Ivan nudged the building off its original pilings and broke the south wing loose. Much of the library's contents were irreparably damaged.

The National Park Service stabilized the broken building, getting it up on temporary footings, and eventually moved everything back together on the proper side of the sidewalk.



The next time I saw it in July, 2009, the building was whole but gutted--no doors, stripped interiors. The last time I visited it, just 2 weeks ago, the building was completely refurbished.

Pic of the Day: Pickens Flooded, Hurricane Ivan

This is how the west end of Santa Rosa Island looked after Hurricane Ivan passed over in September of 2004. Several feet of seawater were retained by a concrete seawall that was built in 1906 to protect the fort and its batteries and buildings from hurricanes.

The fort and concrete batteries didn't suffer much, but Building #8, the Museum/Library/Auditorium, was floated off its pilings and had its south wing snapped loose. Three-fifths of the museum's contents were ruined.

The same storm surge tore up about 1.5 miles of road leading to the fort, flattened the big steel doors covering Battery Langdon's casemates and drove right out the back of the battery, and flattened a lot of homes along the island outside the park.

For months after the hurricane, crews were pulling home appliances, Dumpsters, boats, and such out of Pensacola Bay. Downtown Pensacola itself was flooded for a quarter-mile inland from the waterfront. The I-10 bridge across Escambia Bay was demolished by a 35- to 60-foot-high wall of water that washed over Santa Rosa Island and roared right up the bay, flinging sections of bridge deck like they were plywood.

Pic of the Day: Discovery Launches!

This is the shuttle Discovery right at main-engine ignition. Just moments before the flame front from that one engine, there was a cough of soot, something I'd never noticed before. Pretty neat, though.

It sucks not having high-speed internet, having to watch the launch on CNN. There's always YouTube for catching it after the fact, but nothing comes close to seeing it live.

It also sucks that this is Discovery's final flight.

It sucks even more that after the shuttles are done this year, we don't have a spaceship to replace them.

But it's utterly cool seeing those mains light up, seeing the entire shuttle stack leaning as they build up thrust. Then the solids ignite and everyone who remembers Challenger gets a lump in the throat, watching those boosters for telltale tails of flame, or thinking of Columbia we're looking for chunks of foam or ice. It's always a relief when the boosters separate safely and when the ship's wheels-down on the pavement again.