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DisasterMan
buildings were all in one area, all residential apartment
buildings in another area, all shops in a special area, all
sports fi elds and a giant swimming pool with a wave making
machine in another area, all embassies in an area. The poor
people who were servants, clerks, cooks, mechanics. etc
lived in "satellite" towns 13 miles away just out of sight.
All areas were connected by ten lane highways. The cement
and construction materials were fl own in by aircraft because
initially there were no roads from nowhere down to Rio. The
United Nations folks all hated being there.
I had an interesting professional year in Rio. The fi rst two
frigates, Defensora and Niteroi were being used to train the
offi cers and enlisted men who would man the six frigates.
However, they were having a variety of maintenance problems.
In retrospect, it would have been prudent to take the money
given to the Navy and buy fi ve ships and 20 years worth of
spare parts instead of what they did which was to buy six ships
and thus had no money for spare parts. I wrote 19 research
memoranda (in English) to Commander Braga. All of his
dozen analysts were mathematicians, physicists, statisticians,
or engineers. They had graduated from Brazilian universities
but most of their textbooks had been in English. With help
from my tutor, I had learned enough technical Portuguese to
understand the memos they would write back to me. One of
my projects was to analyze why there were so many failures
of the 1-kilowatt ship-to-shore radio transmitter. I found that
their preventive maintenance routines were actually causing
most of the failures. They would turn the transmitter on for two
hours each day to warm the components and prevent tropical
mold, etc. However this on-off procedure was apparently
causing thermal shock which caused components to fail. I
recommended that they adopt US Navy policies turn the
equipment on the day before going to sea for ten days and
leave it on all the time until the ship is back in port.