The real dirt on moon soil

Finally it has come to pass. The Regina engineer who designed and built the bridge in the rural municipality of Clayton, Sask., that collapsed a few hours after it opened is facing a disciplinary hearing.

The Dyck Memorial Bridge fell into the Swan River back in 2018. The story has long fascinated me. It encompasses everything from rural idiocy to false economies to a misunderstanding of how dirt and water combine to make fools of piledriving engineers and a town council too cheap to take underwater dirt samples.

The bridge was infrastructure, the kind of thing governments neglect in a fractious era where money goes to the interest groups that yell the loudest. Admit it, do you regularly show up at city hall demanding prudent engineering in building projects? No, you demand the right to drink beer in Toronto parks. Prudence doesn’t enter into it.

At any rate, as the CBC reports, the provincial engineers’ association believes Scott Gullacher designed the bridge without care or diligence, and that his companies did building work far beyond his competence.

Gullacher, now being sued by four other rural municipalities worried about their bridges — Scott, Caledonia, Purdue and Mervin, which sounds like a local family — says it’s not his fault. Clayton didn’t spring for dirt and water research, and it put too much gravel on top of the bridge because as everyone knows, bridges can’t support anything heavy.

I don’t know if he’ll be disciplined. Will his future work be limited to dry land, i.e. sandboxes? Will his licence be revoked for all things watery?

Gullacher doesn’t seem grateful that the town wasn’t actually holding a ribbon-cutting ceremony on the morning the bridge collapsed. He might have been there, grinning away. Anyway, last year the town put out a tender for a replacement bridge. It accepted the lowest bidder. I wait agog.

Hold on, there’s more dirt news. But why? The Star just sent out a note saying it likes innovative, thought-provoking columnists who “write on a breadth of topics with different perspectives” with a distinctive voice. It’s like they know me.

Who else would write a column about soil science and engineering that manages to link Canadian bridge failure and dirt taken from the moon itself? Because as it turns out, you can grow plants in the stuff Neil Armstrong first brought back from the moon in 1969.

Or so they say. (Despite the conspiracy theories that plague this era, the 1969 moon landing was not faked on TV. It was a glorious moment and it was all downhill from there.)

Courtesy of NASA, the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences managed to get its hands on 10 grams of moon soil, planted some seeds and grew thale cress — a shy little plant, but edible.

“Holy cow. Plants actually grow in lunar stuff. Are you kidding me?” said scientist Robert Ferl, a quote that made me think it was an Onion story but apparently not. Ferl is a real scientist, albeit from Florida. Scott Gullacher is an engineer, though perhaps not for long.

As the Guardian reports, they found the moon soil was not at its best after billions of years of cosmic radiation and solar wind, as well as contamination from meteoric glass. Strangely, the cress grew better in fake moon soil created in the lab.

Here is where I have doubts. It was only 10 grams. What if the moon soil had gone missing in the mail? Or what if you worked in the lab, the test tubes slipped and broke, your job was on the line, and you had a handy pot of geraniums on a windowsill?

All I’m saying is that now that the eyes of the world are upon them, they might want to replicate this experiment. Given the exciting results in a drought-stricken nation running short of all sorts of crops, NASA might give them a whole jug of moon dirt this time. People mess up. It’s part of their charm, you see.