Apple #693: Removing Pine Sap

I put up my Christmas tree this weekend.  A few years ago, I learned that pine sap makes me itch, so now I wear leather work gloves when I do this annual coniferous task.  I also wear an apron, as I have to lean across the tree to drape yon tree lights around its girth.  But despite my gloves and my apron, this year I somehow managed to get pine sap on my fingers and on my clothes.

Pine sap is sticky stuff.  What's the best way to remove it?



Pine sap. Sticky stuff.  To be said the same way Elwood says, "This is glue. Strong stuff."
(Image from Poppy Swap)

What is Pine Sap?

This wouldn't be a true Daily Apple if I didn't give you a little edumacation information first.

• Pine sap is actually resin.  

• It's sticky stuff that the tree secretes any time it's cut into.  

• Some scientists suspect that its purpose may be to help seal cuts in the tree bark, or to be toxic to any insects that might burrow into the tree, or both.

Amber is in a similar class of plant fluids as pine sap.  You know how bugs get stuck in amber?  They get stuck in pine sap too.
(Image from Legend Diamond)

• Over time pine sap (resin) will harden and even crystallize, but it will soften and turn sticky again when it gets warmed up.  This is why you might not get it on yourself as you're bringing the tree into the house, but you might after it's been in the house a while and you're decorating it.

• Various resins have various chemical structures, but in general they include a substance called terpenoid hydrocarbon.  Think turpentine.

• By their chemical structure, resins are resistant to water.  Which means you can't just wash pine sap off your hands with soap and water.  You have to use something else.

• On the other hand, resins are generally soluble in alcohol or in oils or fats.  Which means to remove pine sap, you'll want to use a cleaning agent that is one of these types of things, and that also won't harm your skin or your clothing.

Turns out, lots of people have lots of suggestions for things that will remove pine sap.  Probably any of these products will work on whatever surface has the pine sap on it.  But some are better in certain situations that others.  For example, nail polish remover might work to take sap out of your hair, but you wouldn't really want to put that all over your head.  Or, peanut butter might take the sap out of your carpet, but then you'll have a peanut butter stain.

Products that Remove Pine Sap from Skin

• Nail polish remover
• Rubbing alcohol 
• Hand sanitizer
• Margarine
• Corn or vegetable or olive oil

 

Rubbing alcohol. Do what the name says: rub it on your skin, and the pine sap will come off.

(Photo from HubPages)

Products that Remove Pine Sap from Hair

Put a gob of peanut butter or mayonnaise in your hair where the sap is, comb through carefully, then wash with warm water and shampoo.

• Peanut butter
• Mayonnaise
• Olive oil

Don't be shy with the peanut butter -- or the mayonnaise or the olive oil.  Put in a nice big dollop and comb it through carefully.  It will wash out.  Plus, your hair will feel nice and conditioned afterward.

(Image from Huffington Post)

Products that Remove Pine Sap from Clothing

As with any stain, try the removal product on a small area first to be sure it won't change the color of the fabric.

Rub the removal product into the sappy area, rinse with the warmest water possible, allow to air dry.

• Rubbing alcohol
• Nail polish remover
• Hand sanitizer
• WD-40 / rinse with vinegar and water
• Deep Woods Off! bug spray
• Pine Sol
• Goo-Gone
• For additional abrasive assistance, add baking soda to any of the above

If you use nail polish remover, you'll want the kind that comes in a bottle like this, not the pots you dip your fingers into.
(Photo from Redbook) 

Products that Remove Pine Sap from Carpet

As with any stain, try the removal product on a small area first to be sure it won't change the color of the fabric.

• Nail polish remover
• Rubbing alcohol
• Dawn dishwashing detergent

Dawn. I love this stuff.  Has so many uses.  They have lots of varieties that say "antibacterial" on the front. Stay away from those, and get the blue kind.
(Photo from One Good Thing by Jillee)

Other Removal Products

These products will remove pine sap, but they might also bleach your clothes or your carpet, or remove paint from your floor or walls or car.  Or they could render your fabric flammable.  So if you do use these, use them with much caution and rinse them out very well with water.

• Paint thinner
• Mineral spirits
• Lighter fluid

Mineral spirits and paint thinner are essentially the same thing. Mineral spirits have been refined further, so they have fewer additional elements you might not want, and they are not as stinky as paint thinner.
(Photo from Mineral Spirits Information Blog -- it's a crap site, but I needed the image)


Is it going too far to say that putting up a Christmas tree is a sappy tradition? Har har. 

Sources

Oxford English Dictionary, resin

Cyberlipid Center, Terpenoids

Preparing for SHTF, Survival Uses for Pine Resin

Gardening Know-How, How to Remove Tree Sap
How to Clean Stuff.net, How to Remove Tree Sap from Clothing
WikiHow, How to Get Tree Sap Off Your Hands
Apartment Therapy, DIY Cleaning: 3 Household Items That Remove Tree Sap
Apartment Therapy, O Christmas Tree: Tips for Removing Pine Sap from Carpeting
Clorox, Drop in on Dr. Laundry, Removing pine sap
Do It Yourself, How to Remove Pine Pitch and Sap

Apple #671: Why are Barns Red?

I went on a trip last weekend, and I learned many things on that trip that I'd like to share with you. But I also have many pictures to go through and make them look better for public viewing. So while I get that stuff together, I'll tell you something I learned from another trip I took a week or two before.

So I was in the car with my parents, and we were taking a back-roads way to get somewhere.  My dad said, "Look for the big red barn."  That was his landmark at the corner where we were supposed to turn.  I thought, why are barns red, anyway?

Thus a Daily Apple is born.



Even this dog is wondering, I wonder why that barn is red.
(Photo from Bedlam Farm)

• When the States were first being colonized and Europeans were building barns here, they didn't paint them at all.

Present-day unpainted barn in Ontario.
(Photo from East Gwillimbury CameraGirl)

• People back in Europe painted their barns, but paint was really expensive and the early settlers didn't have that kind of money.  So they made do without paint.

• The problem with the unpainted barn was that it was susceptible to mold and sun damage and other forms of decay.  So you'd have to replace parts of the barn every so often, which could also get expensive.

• After a few decades of trial and error, people discovered that one particular mixture was good at protecting the wood from some of the decay.  Ingredients:

• milk--a very common base in what was paint in those days
• lime--the mineral, not the fruit, used as whitewash
• linseed oil--a plant-based oil, good at repelling termites and other wood-eating bugs.  It is naturally orange-ish tan and it stains wood that color too.

• But while the linseed oil was good at stopping bugs, it wasn't very good at stopping the mold.  Soon farmers discovered that mold really does not like rust.  So they started adding rust to their barn-painting mixture.  Rust, a.k.a. ferrous oxide or iron oxide, is also orange-ish in color, so that stained the wood an even darker color, something in between orange and dark red.

• Irony note (hey, that's a pun!): back then, people were adding rust to the paint to keep the mold away.  Today, people put paint on metal to keep the rust away. 

• (Read why physics guy Yonatan Zunger says we have dying stars to thank for red paint: short version; long version.) 

Someone in Leelanau, Michigan has a sense of humor.

(Photo from Ohio Barns)

• Then the Industrial Revolution happened, and toward the end of the 19th century, paint got a lot cheaper.  The cheapest color of paint was red.  Why? Because the ingredient that turns paint red is rust, and rust is some dirt-cheap and prevalent stuff.  So the rust made the red paint cheap.

• When people tell this story about the red barns, the don't say that the red paint also contained rust, though it probably did, at least at first.  People say that farmers bought the red paint because it was cheap. 

• The result was, a whole lot of people started painting their barns red.*  Eventually, barns eventually seemed to us non-farmers like they just plain ought to be red.

Red barn in Oklahoma
(Photo from Photos from [the Middle of] Oklahoma)

• I can't find anything that says for certain whether red paint today contains rust.  I suspect it does not.  I suspect the red is made using some other even less expensive materials.  Which in turn means that the red paint would not actually protect the wood from mold.  So probably the wood is treated in some other method, and then painted red for cosmetic reasons.

• *Not everybody painted their barns red.  In some places, whitewash was still the cheapest coating, so a lot of barns in those areas were kept white.  White is still the preferred color for dairy barns in some parts of the country, especially in Pennsylvania. But now that preference probably has less to do with cost and more to do with people's associations with white and milk and cleanliness.

Whitewash barn, location unknown
(Photo from donnan.com)

• *In tobacco-growing states like Kentucky and North Carolina, barns are often painted black.  This is because black absorbs and retains more heat, which helps to cure the tobacco that's stored in the barns.

Black barn with tobacco leaves hanging from the ceiling, being cured. This is in Harrison County, Kentucky.
(Photo from Prune Picker)

The red paint also makes a really nice contrast against green grass. So people like to paint red barns. I mean, they like to paint pictures of red barns. Like this:



Red barn painting by William Erwin
(Prints available from fineartamerica)

Sources
Howstuffworks, Why are barns usually painted red?
Live Science, Why Are Barns Traditionally Painted Red?
Mental Floss, Why Are Barns Usually Red?
Farmers' Almanac, Why are barns painted red?
Smithsonian, Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars
Elizabeth Jayne, Milk Paint: Easy to Make, Economical, and Eco-Friendly Too

Apple #667: The No. 2 Pencil

I thought, after my entry on 666, that I ought to do something at the opposite end of the spectrum.  What could be the opposite of fiery and dramatic and hysterical and murderous?  Hmm.  How about pencils.  So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Number 2 Pencil.


The ever-present yellow #2 pencils.
(Photo from the Iqra Foundation)

Let's begin with the basics and then we'll progress to the more complicated questions.

Why, if the writing stuff inside pencils is graphite, do we call it "lead"?

• Partly because once upon a time, way way back in Roman times, the forerunner of the pencil, the stylus, was made of lead.  But of course there is more to the story than that.

• In 1564, in Borrowdale, England, someone walked past a whole bunch of shiny black stuff stuck to the roots of a tree.  I suppose its shininess made it look like it ought to be good for something, and after people played with it a while, they discovered it made dark marks on paper -- good for writing things down, they decided.  Since it looked similar to lead, they called it "blacklead."  (Some people called it plumbago, which is Latin meaning "lead ore.)  Turned out, the stuff was graphite.

• Sidenote: Borrowdale happens to be in the Lake District.  How fitting was it that graphite, a great tool for writing, was literally in the ground of the birthplace of some of Western literature's finest poetry?

Graphite mixed in with tree roots, as it was discovered in Borrowdale, England.
(Photo from the Museum of Everyday Life)

• Holding blacklead by itself was messy and hard to use, so people thought it would be easier to use if they put it inside some sort of holder.  Hey, if you take a wooden stick, hollow it out, and fill it with blacklead, sort of like putting ink inside a quill, then you've really got something there!  (That was the first pencil.)

• In 1796, a German mineralogist figured out that blacklead was a different substance than actual lead.  So he called this stuff graphite.  Which comes with the Greek graphein meaning "write."  He was, in effect, saying, Hey, you can write with this!

• Thereafter, everybody knew that blacklead should be called graphite.  But for whatever reason, when it was inside a pencil, they still called it lead. You know, people. So resistant to change.

• (By the way, Germany started mass-producing pencils in the 1600s.  Faber-Castell, a name many artists will recognize, was founded in 1761 as one of those very early pencil-making companies.)

As the image says, this is the oldest known pencil encased in wood, from Faber-Castell.
(Photo from Pencils.com)

Faber-Castell 250th edition limited edition wooden case of pencils in 120 colors, plus watercolor pencils, pastel pencils, black-lead pencils, woodless graphite, compressed charcoal, and more.  All this started in 1761, from lowly hunks of black stuff stuck in some tree roots.
(Photo from Extravaganzi)

Was Henry David Thoreau really a competitive pencil-making manufacturer in his day job?

• The short answer to this question is yes.  

• (Test-taking hint: if they ask a complicated yes/no question, the answer is usually "yes." They wouldn't have asked it otherwise.)

• Now for the essay response.

• So, in the early 1800s, people in New England discovered that there was a whole lot of graphite thereabouts. Thus, many pencil-making businesses were founded in New England.

• One of those businesses, by the way, was the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company, founded in 1829 in Massachusetts.  One of its graphite mills was located in Ticonderoga, NY. Thus today we have the omnipresent Dixon Ticonderoga pencils.

  
The Dixon Ticonderogas.  These days, probably the most prevalent brand of No. 2 pencils in the US.  This package is available from Amazon for about $10.  Pre-Sharpened Pencil, #2, Yellow Barrel, 30/Pack - DIX13830

• Dixon's company was one of many pencil-makers in the early 1800s in New England.  Another such company was John Thoreau & Company.  John was Henry David's dad. 

Broadside advertising J. Thoreau & Company Pencils, circa 1845.
(Image from the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries)

• Thoreau's pencil company was in Concord, New Hampshire.  Another guy, David Munroe, had a pencil-making business of his own, also in Concord, New Hampshire. Munroe & Thoreau, being so geographically close and making the same product -- graphite pencils -- were therefore quite competitive.

• Munroe hired a cabinet-maker, Ebenezer Wood (yes, seriously, he was a cabinet-maker named Wood), to help him cut the cedar wood necessary to hold the graphite.  Wood was also pretty inventive, and he figured out better and faster ways of producing the pencils.

• The way Munroe was making pencils was faster than hollowing out sticks of wood and jamming solid graphite in the middle, but it was still pretty labor-intensive.  He basically made a graphite sandwich inside two slabs of cedar.  Munroe took the graphite, ground it to a powder, and mixed it with glue.  Meanwhile, he took the cedar wood, cut it into slabs to form a rectangular casing, hollowed out a trough in the casing, and then poured the graphite-glue mix into the trough.  Then he put another hunk of cedar on top of the first, and sealed the two with a veneer.  Once everything was dry, he cut the pencils out of the slab in a suitable size & shape. 

• Wood made this whole process go faster.  He was the first one to use a circular saw to cut the pencils out of the slab, and he also invented a machine that could mold & trim the pencils 12 gross at a time. He was also the first one to cut pencils in the octagon shape -- the same shape most pencils have today.

• All these innovations were a big deal.  Faster, cheaper, better -- everybody a hard time competing with that.  Thoreau and his dad were no exception.

Ebenezer Wood, inventor of many pencil-making processes that sped up the works, and a gadfly to the Thoreaus.
(Photo from Acton Conservation Lands)

• Although Ebenezer Wood was working & inventing for Munroe, he was also grinding the graphite in his mill for the Thoreaus as well as for Munroe.  In an act of further competitiveness, Munroe tried to get Wood to stop grinding the Thoreaus' graphite.  But he continued grinding the Thoreaus' graphite because, as it turned out, the Thoreaus had more customers and a bigger business than Munroe did.

• How did that happen?  Enter Henry David.

• After graduating from Harvard, good old H.D.T. wanted to make a go of it as a writer & teacher, but it didn't go too well.  So he went back home to his dad's pencil business.  He worked part time, probably writing in his non-pencil-making off hours.  But while he was doing his part-time-pencil-making, he came up with some pretty major inventions.

• He figured out how to inject the ground graphite goo directly into a hollowed-out pencil.  With his innovation, none of that cedar-slab-making-and-cutting business was necessary.  Sped up the process enormously, much faster than Wood's circular saw ever could.  Thoreau also invented a machine that would grind the graphite to an especially fine powder.

• Not usually how you think of old "I went to the woods" Thoreau, is it?  As an inventor of early industrial machinery?  But that's what he was first.

Henry David Thoreau, civil disobedient, woods-goer, and transcendentalist, was first a pencil-maker and a machine-inventor.
(Daguerreotype by Benjamin D. Maxham from Wikipedia)
 

• In fact, Thoreau continued to work in the pencil-making business off and on for most of the rest of his adult life.  A final nail in your coffin of innocence, I know.

• By the way, a lot of people are a little fast & loose with the facts, and they say that Thoreau came up with the idea of mixing poor-quality graphite with clay to make the ground graphite easier to work with and yield a better result at a lower cost.  In fact, this process was first invented by a French guy named Nicholas-Jacque Conté in 1795.  Thoreau's contribution to this process was to improve upon it a bit and to make it part of how his father's company made their pencil leads.

Are pencils rated on a scale of "hard" and "black"?

• Answer: yes.  Porno-industry-like though that may seem.

• The reason for this rating has to do with that process we just learned about, that graphite and clay are mixed together to make the pencil lead. 

• Sidenote: see, I'm still using that phrase "pencil lead."  Because the core of the pencil, as we now know, is not entirely made of graphite.  So it would also be erroneous to call it the "pencil graphite," or the "pencil clay."  The easiest shorthand to refer to the entire inner core regardless of its mixture is to say "pencil lead."

• As you cooks and chemists might guess, the ratio of clay to graphite makes a difference in the kind of mark the pencil lead will make on the paper.  Contrary to your expectations, the more clay, the harder the lead.  

• It also makes a difference what kind of graphite you have.  If you've got graphite from the Lake District in England, which is much harder and higher quality, it actually makes a lighter mark on the page.  If you've got the New England Thoreau graphite which is softer and of poorer quality, it makes a darker mark.

Pencils with different ratios of graphite & clay make marks of varying degrees of lightness & darkness
(Image from Artmaker)

• So British pencil-makers came up with a system of indicating the hardness of the lead in the pencil.  Hard was denoted with an H and soft was denoted with an S -- no, a B.  Huh?  Since when does Soft = B?

• Since the softer leads produce a darker, or blacker mark.  So Soft = Black which = B.  Harder leads got HHs or HHHs, and the softest/darkest leads got BBs or BBBs.  

• The midway point on this scale is M -- no, it's F.  Again, huh?  Some people say the F means the lead can be sharpened to a finer point, but that makes no sense because there's no reason that lead should sharpen to a finer point than any other lead.  Other people say there is no known logical reason for calling the midpoint F, and they leave it at that.  So I will leave it at that too.

• Leave it to the British to complicate things.  But wait, there's more.

• The British then decided they didn't like repeating all those Bs and Hs, so they put numbers in front of the Bs and Hs.  There was no number to put in front of the F since it's the midpoint.  Then, for reasons no one understands, they also added an HB (Hard-Black, apparently) which is just slightly darker than the F.  So in the end there is no actual midpoint.  And you get this:

How pencil leads are graded according to the British scale
(Image from The Almighty Guru)

• Do you feel us closing in on where Number 2 business comes from?  We are, but wait, there's still more.

• So, you'll remember that Americans were making pencils, too.  They decided they wanted a different scale for indicating the hardness/softness/blackness of their pencil leads.  They decided they wanted to use strictly numbers.  And their numbers would not exactly correspond with the numbers in the British scale.

• The American scale goes like this: 1, 2, 2½, 3, 4.  It's like they were saying, "I'm going to count to five, young lady," and so they threw the 2½ in there.  No, really, I don't know why the 2½.

• When you put the two scales together, you get this:

As you can see, the American #2 matches up with the British HB.

(Image from Jet Pens)

• So the Number 2 pencil that you used to take all those standardized tests in school was really the Hard Black pencil.

• You might be tempted to think that an HB pencil made by, say, Faber-Castell would be of the same darkness as a Number 2 pencil made by, say, Dixon.  It would be lovely if that were the case.  But it's not.  

• This grading scale does not correspond to any kind of industry-wide manufacturing standard.  The relative hardness/blackness of a company's pencils applies only to the company's own pencils.  Thus an HB you get from Faber-Castell may not be of the same HB-ness as an HB from, say, Uni.  So, serious pencil-purchasers are advised to try the pencils of various manufacturers to find the hardness/blackness they prefer.

So is the whole Everybody Must Have a Number 2 Pencil thing kind of a scam?

• Sort of, yes! 

• Not all Number 2 pencils are equal.  Since different manufacturers make their Number 2s to their own specifications, one company's Number 2 will be different than another's.

• The differences might be slight, but they are real.  

• The point of everybody having to get a Number 2 pencil was that was the closest approximation the test-makers could get to making sure everybody had the same writing instrument.  

• I want you to think about that for a minute and let that expand in your mind, especially in this era of standardized school testing.  They can't even get everybody using the same kind of pencil lead.  The best they can do is settle on an approximation. 

Those of us taking standardized tests are not the same.  Even down to our Number 2 pencils, we are different.
(Photo from New Futuro)

• Now seems like the right time to introduce the hotbed topic:

Was a pencil ever used as a murder weapon?

• (You know how to answer this) Yes.

• Most famously, when Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by members of the Senate, he tried to defend himself with the only weapon he had -- his stylus (a.k.a. pencil).  He managed to stab Casca with it, but it wasn't enough of a blow, what with all those other guys with their knives, and he was killed.

• More obscurely, a priest and teacher from the times of early Christianity/Roman rule, Cassian of Imola (a.k.a. Cassianus) was arrested for being a Christian.  He was told to renounce Christianity and he wouldn't do it, so his students "were invited to hack him to death."  The weapons they used were their styluses (pencils).  So it took a really long time for him to die.

• Talk about a violent classroom.

I guess the painter decided not to include the pencil in Caesar's other hand.  Probably thought it too undignified.
(Image from History in the Headlines)

Bonus Question: Why are number 2 pencils yellow?

• When an Austro-Hungarian pencil-making company, the Hardtmuth Company introduced their fancy new pencils at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, their pencils were painted yellow.  

• The graphite in these pencils came from the Far East, and it was supposed to be the very best graphite in the world.  So to enhance the fanciness of their pencils, they named them after the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a famous diamond in India and the height of luxury, and they painted the outside of the pencils yellow.  Much fancier than the plain old bare cedar wood, these pencils were not only painted, but painted yellow, a color that was difficult to come by in paint in those days.

• Naturally, everyone copied the Hardtmuth Company.  Soon everybody's pencils were painted yellow.

• So, once upon a time, your yellow Number 2 pencils would have been considered luxurious by their very yellow-ness.

Ah, a bouquet of yellow pencils!  How lovely -- and how erstwhile decadent!
(Wallpaper of Bouquet of Pencils from IDMarching)

• Congratulations!  You have reached the end of the test.  Please put down your pencil to signal you have finished.

Sources
Mental Floss, What Makes #2 Pencils So Special?
The Straight Dope, How come you see #2 pencils but no #1 pencils? 
Online Etymology Dictionary, graphite
Jennifer Schuessler, Thoreau's Pencil, The New York Times, May 1, 2009
Pencils.com, Pencil History and Pencil Myths: The Unleaded Pencil
Acton Conservation Land, Early American Pencils
The Museum of Everyday Life, A Visual History of the Pencil
Today in Science History, Joseph Dixon: The Story of a Lead Pencil
Dixon Corporation, Joseph Dixon 1799-1869
The Almighty Guru, Pencil Grades
Jet Pens, Picking the Perfect Pencil Lead Hardness Grade 
Catholic Online, St. Cassian of Imola
New Advent, Classical Latin Literature in the Church
CBS Money Watch, Why Are Pencils Yellow?

Apple #638: No Basements in Oklahoma

Your Apple Lady has come down with something, cold or flu I'm not sure what.  But my head is a bit fogged and I'm kind of slow-moving, so if you see typos or anything in this post, have a heart and cut me some slack.  Because my brain is slack.

After the tornado ripped through Moore, Oklahoma at the end of May, my dad said he wondered why houses in Oklahoma don't have basements.  I didn't jump on that question right away, so when the disaster faded from the headlines, I thought the topic would no longer be of any interest. But then more tornadoes hit Oklahoma, one of them even tracing the same path as the one that hit Moore in May. That, plus the fact that Oklahoma is practically the tornado capital of the world convinced me that maybe I should do an entry about the absence of basements in Oklahoma after all.



Damage in Moore, OK, following the tornado that hit on May 20, 2013. 24 people were killed and more than 300 injured. An estimated 15,000 homes were destroyed.
(Photo by George Armstrong, FEMA, sourced from Emergency Management)

Tornadoes in Oklahoma

• First, a few statistics about how many tornadoes hit Oklahoma.

• From 1950 through 2012, a total of 3,473 tornadoes have touched down in Oklahoma. 

• The average number per year in that 62-year span: 55.

• So far in 2013, there have been 37.

• In 2010, there were 103, with 91 of them happening in May.

• The city that has been hit by the most tornadoes is Oklahoma City.  The known total is over 100.

• The only state that has had more tornadoes touch down since 1950 is Texas, with 5,490.

Tornado alley--the region of the country that experiences the greatest number of tornadoes
(Map by Concannon et al. at NOAA)

• There are no guarantees of safety during a tornado, but if a tornado is coming, one of the best places to go is the lowest place possible and stay away from glass.  A basement sure fits that bill pretty well.

• But as we all learned when the big tornado hit Moore, there are hardly any basements in Oklahoma.  One home buyer posted on a real estate site, "While searching for a house in Oklahoma City area for the past year, I think I found only 3 or so houses with basements."

• Even after the devastating tornado hit Moore in 1999, killing 36 people in Oklahoma and Kansas, only 6 of 40 new homes built had any kind of safe room.  None had basements.

• So if your state gets hit by this many tornadoes, and basements are a pretty good safety measure, why don't you build your houses with basements?

• The primary answer: money.

Soil Composition

• The first reason people give for the paucity of tornadoes in Oklahoma is that the soil isn't basement-friendly.

• Oklahoma's soil has high levels of clay, which means it tends to get wet as you dig deeper to make a basement. 

• Also, clay doesn't hang onto water very well.  In the rainy months, the clay becomes saturated and will rise with water.  In the summer when the water dries up and the water table drops, the clay level will drop too. 

The salmon- and bright pink-colored areas indicate clay, where it's harder to build basements.

(Map from STATSGO, sourced from the Weather Channel)


Compared to the rest of the US, Oklahoma does have more clay in its soil than other parts of the Midwest and Plains states where tornadoes are common.  But you can see that there's even more clay in Texas.
(Map from NASA's Land Data Assimilation Systems)

• Of course the water & clay combination won't rise and fall evenly but will do so all catty-wumpus.  And every one of those risings and fallings will put pressure on the walls of a basement foundation.  It won't take long before the basement walls crack and let in water or otherwise pretty much fail. 

• Building a basement that could withstand the shifting and the expanding and contracting clay soil to keep out water and keep cracks from happening was possible, but expensive.  So a lot of builders chose not to dig basements.

Cracks in the foundation and the shifting of bricks are two types of damage that can be the result of expansive clay soil.
(Photo by the US Army Corps of Engineers, from geology.com)

 Not Required

• Builders could get away with omitting basements because building codes in Oklahoma didn't require them.  In the north, state building codes usually require that homes are built with their foundation based below the frost line.  (This also explains why basements are dug to different depths in different parts of the north--it depends how far you have to go to get below the frost line.)

•  In the south, because the ground doesn't freeze down there like it does up north, building codes don't require basements.  Oklahoma's ground doesn't freeze like it does farther north, so its building codes don't require basements.

The 4 basic home foundation types. Which one your home has probably depends on whether or not the ground freezes in the winter.  Most houses in Oklahoma are of the 4th type: house on top of a slab.
(Diagram from Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

• After the big monster-tornadoes of 1999, even though various reports recommended that if homes in Oklahoma were still going to be built on slabs, the slabs should at least be secured with bolts, they're still being built on slabs and secured with the relatively flimsy nails and pins -- because it's cheaper.

• Especially in an economy that has been tough on a lot of middle- to low-income people, nobody wants to add to the cost of a house.

They've Always Done it That Way

• The idea that Oklahoma's soils have too much clay and water, and that therefore a waterproof basement is difficult and expensive to build dates from the 1950s and 1960s when there was a boom in home building. Back then, it was true that it was expensive and difficult to make a basement that would stand up to the rigors of clay soil.

• Since nobody in Oklahoma was willing to pay extra for a basement that would probably leak, nobody built basements.  Since there wasn't a market for basements in Oklahoma, contractors who knew how to make them didn't do business in Oklahoma.  Since nobody was available to build a basement, even if you wanted one, it could get even more expensive since it was harder to find the expertise and labor.

• So the practice of building homes without basements simply continued.  

Again with the Money

• Since few homes in OK have basements, appraisers in the state don't really know how to put a value on a basement. So they tend to omit the basement in their appraisal, which means homeowners who want to sell have a hard time getting back the money they put in to building the basement in the first place. 

 

Too Tough for Basements

• Oklahomans joke that, since they see so many tornadoes, when they hear the sirens go off, instead of taking shelter, they go outside to get a good look.  They're kind of proud of this tornado-toughness, maybe to the point of being reluctant to admit they could actually use a safe place to go hide.

• They also tend to dislike being told what to do, especially by some governmental body.  You know, that whole independent spirit of the West that is suspicious of the US government trying to dictate people's lives.  So they're not very keen to impose a lot of regulations on themselves.

Is this what too-tough-for-basements looks like?
(Photo by Sue Ogrocki/AP)


Maybe this is.
(Photo by B at Complete and Total)

The Truth

• The truth is that "Virtually any foundation type and construction system can be built in any location in the United States" (ORNL) 

• OK, sure. But isn't building a basement in Oklahoma too expensive?

• Answer: not anymore.

• Contractors know more about how to deal with clay soils than they used to.  One contractor says that floating walls that allow for expansion and contraction are the primary method of building a basement in clay soil.  

• Waterproofing methods have also improved, which means that not only is waterproofing more effective but it's also cheaper than it once was.

• In all, one contractor estimates, a small basement would cost around $15,000 to $20,000. A concrete cellar built during new-house construction would cost as little as $2,200. (Cellars are very bare-bones, unfinished, maybe even with a dirt floor. Basements are more finished and waterproofed.)

• Even $20,000 seems like a small price to pay to give your family a place of far better protection than a closet.

To be sure, digging a basement is no small undertaking.  But maybe better to bring out the bulldozers sooner rather than later?
(Photo from Conner Excavating)

• Here's more truth for you: above-ground safe rooms can be even better than basements. For one thing, they're much more accessible for people with disabilities.

• A tornado safe room can be built to accommodate any number of people, from 1 to 16.

• The walls are built to withstand winds of up to 250 mile per hour, as well as any flying objects.  They're also built without windows, so there's no danger of flying broken glass.

• They should include a first aid and emergency kit with blankets, water, flashlight and batteries, emergency radio, and snacks.

Basics of a FEMA-recommended tornado safe room, inside and out.
(Diagram from USA Today) 


A tornado safe room that did its job well.
(Photo from Abundant Life)

• All of those things can be an improvement on a basement, where you may still be vulnerable to high winds and flying objects if your house is torn away from over your head.

• Safe rooms can also be relatively cheap, costing between $2,500 and $5,000 depending on size.

• FEMA has very strict recommendations about how safe rooms should be constructed. So if you're thinking about having one built, definitely consult FEMA's free (but very large) information booklet on how to build a safe room.

• If ADA compliance isn't an issue, FEMA notes, the safest place to put a safe room is -- guess where?  In the basement.

• There's also this:

Curtis McCarty, a member of the Oklahoma Uniform Building Code Commission and a builder himself, said the twister on Monday [in Moore, 2013] would have defeated attempts to resist it above ground. “You cannot build a structure that’s going to take a direct hit from a tornado like that that’s going to stand,” he said. (NYT)

The Good News

• Following the 2013 tornado that devastated Moore, the mayor announced that he was going to propose an ordinance that would require new homes to be built with either a reinforced storm shelter or a safe room.

Glenn Lewis, Mayor of Moore, OK.  He says they rebuilt their town once before, they can do it again. Maybe this time, they'll build a few basements. Or tornado safe rooms, at least.
(Photo from US Mayors)

• Other towns in Oklahoma are starting to talk about requiring schools and other public buildings to have shelters for people to use during tornadoes.

• A contractor who builds basements and is headquartered in Edmond, Oklahoma recently said in an interview that he has built more than 600 basements in and around Oklahoma City in the past 15 years.  He said, "I've got 32 basements to put in the ground right now."

• So nobody seems to be requiring actual basements in Oklahoma -- yet. But some OK communities are starting to talk about requiring some type of shelter.  And apparently, a few more homebuilders are building a few more basements here and there, even though they don't have to.  

• So maybe in a few years, the news coming out of Oklahoma will be, not about how many people were killed, but rather about how many people survived the sure-to-come wicked-strong tornadoes.

The May 20, 2013 tornado in Moore, OK.  It was an unusually big one, but there will probably be others.
(Photo from CNN)

By the Way

• Most homes in Texas don't have basements either.

Related Post: Where Does the Debris Go?

Sources
NOAA National Weather Service, Norman, OK, Monthly and Annual Tornado Statistics for the State of Oklahoma, Tornadoes FAQ, Tornado Safety
StateMaster.com, Tornadoes, Total number by state
NewsOK, Oklahoma tornadoes: Cost, custom keep basements scarce, May 25, 2013
Weather.com, Why Don't More Homes in Oklahoma Have Basements? May 21, 2013
Tom Watkins, Basements scarce in tornado-prone Oklahoma City area; here's why, CNN, May 22, 2013
Melissa Block and Scott Neumann, Basements Not An Option For Many Homes In Oklahoma, NPR News, May 22, 2013
John Schwartz, Why No Safe Room to Run To? Cost and Plains Culture, The New York Times, May 21, 2013
DOE ORNL, Foundation Design Handbook
Gibson Homebuilders, Basements in Texas Part 2
Reader's Digest, How to Design a Tornado-Safe Room
National Geographic, Taking Cover: A Guide to Tornado Shelters, 2013
Chad Lawhorn, Oklahoma City tornado sparks discussion of building code standards at Lawrence City Hall, Lawrence Journal-World, May 22, 2013

Apple #605: Microwave Steam Bags

I have a request!  Daily Apple reader Rodolfo wants to know about those plastic bags that are specifically used for steaming frozen vegetables.  He wants to know how they work.  He suspects they're different from a typical plastic storage bag, but how, exactly?



Rodolfo was even kind enough to send me a picture of the type of steamer bag he uses.
(Photo from my friend Rodolfo [his name has been changed to protect his innocence.])


I suspected the answer to Rodolfo's question would require a patent search, and I was right.  But, never fear, when it comes down to it, how those bags are put together is pretty easy to explain.  And the best way to explain how they work is to explain it in terms of how they are different from a regular old sealable (or zippable) plastic storage bag.



Regular plastic storage bag on the left, zippable plastic steamer bag on the right.
(Photo from Cross My Heart)

• I should admit right up front, I've never actually used plastic steamer bags.  I steam my vegetables the way my mom taught me, in a pot of water with a steamer basket.  But in order to answer Rodolfo's question, I read a lot of people's descriptions about how they work.  I'm a little nervous generalizing on the basis of read-it-only, but I'll do my best.

• First, the plastic in the steamer bags is made of materials that won't leach toxins into your food when microwaved.  Whew!  Specifically, the Ziploc bags are made from polypropylene (PP #5) and polyethylene (PET #1).  

• The bad plastics we've heard about recently are bisphenols (BSPs).  The steamer bags do not contain those kinds of plastics.  

• By the way, a Good Housekeeping test of various food storage plastics revealed that, of 31 types of plastics (wraps, containers, bags), 27 did not have any of the bad BSPs or phthalates.  4 did, but only in 1 of the 2 tests they ran.

• So, the fact that the steamer bags don't have the bad plastics in them doesn't seem to make them all that different from a typical storage bag.  So how else are they different?

• If you've ever compared a freezer storage bag to, say, a sandwich storage bag, you would have noticed that the plastic in the freezer storage bag is much thicker.  In order to withstand the temperatures in the freezer, and to resist getting torn or broken if the bag gets knocked around, the plastic is made of several layers of plastic.  There might be two or three layers of plastic, depending on the manufacturer, and the layers might be of different types of plastic that are tolerant of various temperatures.  The outside layer, for example, might be able to withstand colder temperatures than the inside layer.

Thicker freezer bag on the left, thinner sandwich bag on the right.
(Freezer bag photo from Made in China.com, sandwich bag photo from Industrial Laboratories)

• The same is true about these steam bags.  The plastic is thicker and it's usually made of layers.  The difference is with the steamer bags is the inside layer has to withstand a melting point, because the stuff inside is going to get really hot when it's heated in the microwave. 

• Fortunately, since cooking times are relatively short, it doesn't have to be able to stand the heat for very long, but it does have to hold up to high temperatures.

• If the bags are designed to go from freezer to microwave, then the bag is probably going to have more layers, or the plastics will be a little different because they will have to be able to hold up under the cold temperatures of the freezer, and not get torn or broken during transport.  

• But the upshot is, the steamer bags have multiple layers of plastic, and the layer inside has to be able to withstand higher temperatures.

• The next big difference is the steam bag has to have a way to release the steam.  If you put those vegetables in the microwave and sealed them up tight with no way for the steam to get out, the package would explode, and you'd have pulverized broccoli all over the inside of your microwave. 

The problem for steamer bag makers: how to let out the steam so the bag doesn't explode, but not let out so much that the vegetables don't actually steam?
(Photo from dipity)

• If you told the consumer to puncture the bag before microwaving, as we all have done with frozen dinners, that still wouldn't be ideal because the hole would allow too much moisture to escape during cooking, and the vegetables wouldn't really get steamed.

• So the plastics people came up with a pretty ingenious invention: the vent.  The Ziploc bags have a vent across the top, other types of bags have vents that appear across one side of the bag, and still others have the vent set up differently.  But they mostly use the same general idea.

• The clever thing is, the vent doesn't open up until the package is being microwaved.  Exactly how the vent works depends on the manufacturer and the patent, but here's a description of how one company does it.  This isn't from the patent for Ziploc's bag, so how theirs works might be a little different than this.  But it's probably close.

• The plastic in this steamer bag has two layers, and outer, protective layer, and an inner, heat-friendly and sealable layer.  The inner layer is doubled up and sealed to itself, so the inner layer now has two layers.  The outer, protective layer is on top of the inner, doubled-up layer.

• The vent is made by making an opening in the seal of the doubled-up layer.  That could be done either by not sealing it in one spot when they double it up, or by cutting a slit in it after it's been sealed.  Either way, there's a slit in the doubled-up inner layer.  The outer, protective layer is still on top of the inner layer.

• When the bag gets put in the microwave and heated up, the inner, doubled-up layer is not bothered by the heat because the plastic was made to withstand high temperatures.  But the pressure that builds up inside the package pushes the plastic from the inside so that it bulges, which, in turn, makes the vents in the inner layer open up.  Because the outer protective layer is not as good at holding up to the heat,  the outer layer opens and, voila, the steam escapes.

Ziploc steam bag after cooking. The thing has bulged and filled with steam, only some of which has escaped. The rest has stayed in the package and steamed the vegetables.
(Photo from Cyber Shape Up)

• That's why it's important to put the bag in the microwave with one side in particular facing up.  That's the side with the vent in it.  You put the vent-side facing down, you might block the vent, and then you'd get pulverized broccoli.

• That vent-in-the-inner-layer method is not how everybody does it.  Some people cut slits through all the layers from the get-go, and they make the slits small and spaced far enough apart that they think they can keep too much moisture from escaping.

• There's still another method of using a breathable patch in the plastic.  The patch is, itself, made of plastic, and it lets the steam out, but it's not porous enough to let water or anything else out.  In that case, you would peel away a protective sticking covering over the patch before microwaving.

• But as far as I can tell, the inner layer with a slit in it might be the more popular method.

• Now, I can't resist saying this: these steamer bags are made of plastic, which is made from petroleum.  You use the bag once and you have to throw it away.  I suppose you could try to use it again, but the plastic might degrade with the increased use and heat, and the vent system might not work properly, and nobody's tested these things for multiple uses to determine if you'd get toxins in your food, so it's just a bad idea to use them several times.  They're meant to be disposed of after one use, so if you use them, that's what you should do.  

That plastic steam bag came from petroleum.
(Image from Highlights)

• I use a steamer basket to steam vegetables.  You might say, Aw, but that takes time!  Dude.  You cut up the broccoli while you boil the water.  You put the broccoli in the steamer basket, put that in the pot of water, put the lid on top.  Two minutes later, it's done.  Same amount of time's passed.  And you haven't used any plastic!  You've saved that petroleum for your car!

Steamer basket. You can buy one like this for $4.95 from Amazon, or you can find them hanging around in any grocery store, or at any store like Target or Wal-Mart, or any store that sells any kitchen stuff.

• If you don't like the environmentally friendly argument in favor of using a steamer basket, how about this one: the food and plastics companies are ripping you off.

• I used to research the agriculture and food manufacturing industry, and I can tell you that food processors are always looking for a way to get you to spend more money on food.  There's no margin of profit on a bunch of asparagus.  But if they can cut up the asparagus for you, freeze it or can it, and put it in a pretty package, they can get you to pay a lot of extra money for that asparagus. 

• You might say, But I'm not buying the Birds Eye pre-packaged stuff, I'm just buying the bags and freezing and steaming my vegetables myself!  To that I say, Ziploc is just trying to get in on the action.  You have to buy the steamer bags every time you want to steam something.  You buy the steamer basket once and you're done.

• You might say, But I don't know how to use a steamer basket! Dude.  It's easy. It's so easy, about 15 people have written how-to pages about it. Here's one such page of instructions.  The only question is, how long do you steam different kinds of vegetables?  After a couple minutes, lift the lid and poke 'em with a fork.  If they give, they're done.  If they still feel crunchy, they're not. Put the lid back and wait a couple minutes more. When you can smell the vegetables, lift the lid and poke 'em again.  They're probably done.

• I'm all in favor of convenience.  I think this vent invention is really pretty dang clever, and I applaud whoever came up with it.  But it seems to me, in this case, the convenience isn't that much of a time savings, and it's certainly not a financial savings.  I think we as a country have bought this steamer bag scam, hook, line, and sinker.

• That's just my opinion.

 
 =
 
The people who make these things look at this steamer bag trend and think, "Cha-ching! What an easy way to make some extra bucks!"
(Green Giant vegetables, Red skin potatoes with free microwave steam bag! photo from Packaging Digest, Birds Eye vegetables and rice, Kashi's entire meal in a steam bag photo from Supermarket News, Ziplog steam bag photo from The Nibble)


Sources
Dr. Weil, Plastic Steaming Bag Danger? February 26, 2009
Florence Williams, Is It Safe to Heat Food in Plastic? Good Housekeeping
Lauren Keith, Two Microwave Steam Bags--Which is Better? KFVS
Joe Terrell, Ziploc Zip 'N Steam: "Does It Work?" KLTV, July 31, 2007
Steaming Splendor: Easy, Convenient, Tasty Steamed Vegetables, The Nibble
Su, Jau-Ming and Wolak, Paul Z., Freezable/microwavable packaging films and venting package, US PAT 7,812,293, October 12, 2010
Mita, Kozo et al., Sealable package for heating in a microwave oven, US PAT 6,596,355, July 22, 2003
Bemis Introduces Hermetic, Steam-in-Bag Package Technology for Meals that Include Proteins and Sauces, Bemis Company, October 10, 2008