The Worst Hard Time

In the spirit of “Well, it could be worse…”, I recently finished reading The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. This book wraps first-hand accounts of the Dust Bowl into a chronological picture of the extreme hardship experienced by High Plains farmers and entrepreneurs throughout the 1930s. The storytelling is detached from the pain of its main characters, people trapped in an unimaginable hell that has largely worn away from our collective memory. Despite growing up in Oklahoma, I was surprised by the coarse brutality of dust storms and the rooted resilience of the people who survived.

First, dust storms are worse than I ever imagined – and I study severe storms! Not only did these ‘dusters’ whisk away topsoil and kill crops, getting caught outside in one was practically a death sentence. Respiratory conditions like silicosis and dust pneumonia claimed hundreds of lives, a threat so serious and continuous that homesteaders would seal windows and doors with a wet rag to impede the inevitable infiltration of insidious particles. The static electricity from blowing dust could incinerate vegetable gardens as well as short out vehicles, stranding motorists in remote dunes. Airborne dust twice drifted as far east as New York and Washington, coating cars and buildings with a grubby film of Heartland strife. Meteorologically, dust storms form when a gust front (or just persistent winds, it’s frequently windy in this part of the country) crosses an expanse of loose, desertified territory. There were a few in 1930 and 1931, 14 in 1932, 38 in 1933, then too many dust storms to count on windy days throughout 1934 and 1935. People could eventually tell a cloud’s origin by its color – black from Kansas and Nebraska, red from Oklahoma, gray from Colorado and New Mexico, sandy tan from Texas.

Black Sunday (April 14, 1935) duster descending on Rolla, Kansas. (History Channel)

Second, the arc of the crisis was unsettling – and in a way, prescient. The 1920s were a decade of plenty, as ‘nesters’ flocked to the high plains to take advantage of cheap land and high wheat prices. But when drought and dust storms ravaged the newly-plowed land, many nesters moved on to greener pastures, and those who stayed plowed their plots with a stubborn urgency. Marketing campaigns urged more settlement and more planting, since “rain follows the plow.” A pyrotechnics expert was hired to bomb the sky to whip up some rain. When that didn’t work, perhaps it was God’s will to inflict suffering on his people – though never because they were too proud for having superseded nature. The federal government swooped in to offer New Deal subsidies for tree-planting and grassland conservation projects, and prominent voices representing the people rejected any government involvement on the grounds that they were tough people and could pull through themselves. Residents of Dalhart, Texas founded the fatalistic ‘Last Man Standing Club’ as they watched formerly prosperous ranching country turn into a lifeless wasteland.

Denial is often as dangerous as a crisis itself. After optimists said “this drought can’t possibly go on” in 1931, it was a full eight years until substantial rain fell and over 10 years until wheat became profitable again. Likewise, two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s a growing sentiment that normal activities should be resumed despite the fact that case counts continue to increase. Rather than denying the scope of the problem, or simply returning to what we’ve always done, I would advocate for exploring every possible avenue for a solution. The Dust Bowl likely wouldn’t have lasted as long if there was a concerted, government-led effort to either a) drill deep wells into the Ogallala Aquifer or b) restore native prairies/plant ‘shelterbelt’ forests prior to 1937. The COVID-19 pandemic could be similarly abated with a concerted, government-led effort to mandate mask-wearing, social distancing, and sanitization precautions in public places until a vaccine is available. Only if people accept the reality of the situation can we improve it, opening up in a way that optimizes the protection of lives while also preserving livelihoods.

The Curse of Continuity

We made it through the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting to the social disruption while ‘essential’ workers chugged courageously along. For those stuck at home, about 20% of the workforce has been laid off or furloughed, which means 80% of jobs have been deemed ‘essential.’ Whether out of a sense of duty or necessity, most people are still working, often under more stressful and dangerous conditions than usual, often at a discount to their employer. They are truly essential, from healthcare professionals to food service employees to sanitation workers to package handlers and more, because our economy runs as a complex machine. And I recently realized that the reason that our machine is breaking down, the reason tensions are building and protests are mounting, stems from a fundamental idea of engineering design that continuous processes are always optimal.

In college I majored in chemical engineering, a discipline that evolved from industrial process engineering. The overarching theme of the curriculum involved solving different permutations of mass and energy balance calculations for batch, semi-batch, and continuous flow processes. For mathematical and infrastructural reasons, continuous processes have the highest efficiency and are strongly preferred in industrial design. My team’s senior design project was to design a mobile biomass-to-biofuel refinery, optimizing energy consumption versus throughput for a continuous process. Despite the frequent on-and-off switching inherent to a mobile operation, our professor urged us to focus on the continuous flow specifications and completely ignore the much more rigorous calculations for startup.

I can imagine that the oil industry operates under the same principles; after all, much of our curriculum was tailored to groom us for the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. Oil futures are traded months or years in advance, and wells and pipelines are designed to serve this demand on a continuous basis. As consumption plummeted in March, our oil and gas infrastructure continued pumping at the same rate well into April: there were orders to fulfill and significant costs associated with shutting down and subsequently restarting the pumps. Since the cost of storage infrastructure is also significant, the limited storage capacity filled up quickly, causing the crude futures market to crash. “Why not keep the oil in the ground instead of paying customers to take it” was never a valid question before, since revenues had always been positive.

Similar choke points have been exposed in other supply chains. When a large pork processing plant in South Dakota closed due to a COVID-19 outbreak among its staff, it triggered an absolutely dreadful domino effect. Farmers throughout the region scrambled to find slaughterhouses for their juvenile hogs, whose value diminishes significantly as they reach adulthood. These farmers are short on barn space, even with the implementation of a high-fiber diet to slow hog growth. Tens of thousands of hogs that were already queued for slaughter have been euthanized to be composted; since up to 80% of hogs contract pneumonia from close-packed conditions before slaughter, the animals can’t feasibly be sent to other meat-packing facilities or back to the farm. To fulfill domestic demand and profit from the new export deal with China, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to keep meat processors open, shielding corporations from liability while putting workers at risk of contracting the virus. All this mayhem for an 8% drop in pork supply, which you’d think we could atone for with an 8% reduction in pork consumption. But that’s not how our consumer markets operate, as we’ve seen with the hoarding of toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

I had expressed optimism that we could reshape the American economy, support essential workers relative to the value they provide, and strengthen our communities in a way that better prepares us for the next economic disruption or global pandemic. I was wrong: the opposite is happening. Corporate behemoths like Amazon and Walmart are profiting immensely while rebuffing their employees’ demands for hazard pay and workplace PPE. The Paycheck Protection Program designed to loan money to keep small businesses afloat ran out of funds within days, with much of its money usurped by larger companies. Meanwhile, a larger share of government stimulus money has gone to prop up Fortune 500 companies, and I completely understand the interests of keeping the economic machine moving as usual. But our obsession with growth has come at the expense of resilience. And I don’t expect anything to change.