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Sunday, March 9, 2003

Everything's Just Ducty on the Tape Security Front

By Leanne Potts
Of the Journal
    The security alert has been downgraded from orange to yellow. For those of you unfamiliar with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's 2003 terror palette, this means you probably won't need that stash of duct tape to seal yourself in a bedroom while poisonous gas swirls outside.
    At least not this week.
    Duct tape. You're probably laughing or rolling your eyes as you read those words.
    Ever since Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge earnestly advised us to stockpile duct tape and plastic sheeting to prepare for a possible biological attack, duct tape has taken on a whole new meaning.
    Understand, duct tape had loads of cultural meaning before. The waterproof tape — made of polyethylene-coated cloth backed by adhesive — is the all-American tool of choice for the busy, the lazy and the desperate.
    "I'll just duct-tape the damn thing back on," says the guy who knocked the rear-view mirror off his car.
    "Thank God we had some duct tape with us," says the cross-country skier who taped his broken pole back together and made it down the mountain.
    "Houston, we have a problem," said the astronauts of the 1971 Apollo 13 mission who saved their mission and their lives by making a carbon dioxide filter out of duct tape.
    Duct tape is a pardon, a miracle cure, a way to avoid solving a problem 'til later, if at all.
   
Quick fix
    "Duct tape is the universal panacea," says Tim Nyberg, co-author of "The Jumbo Book of Duct Tape," which offers ideas both useful and silly for employing duct tape. (A sample suggestion: "To protect yourself from the heat and any stray lava splashes (from a volcanic eruption), make sure you are covered with at least 10 layers of duct tape.")
    "Duct tape lets you fix it quick — but not necessarily right — so you get back to the important things in life: like sitting on the sofa and watching TV," Nyberg says.
    Though sold around the world, duct tape has never become a staple in other countries. Perhaps they don't share our optimisic belief that a roll of tape can deliver us from evil — and the inconvenience of a complicated repair.
    Now duct tape has become the symbol of our government's half-cocked attempt at protecting us from terror attacks. We can't find Osama bin Laden, says the government, but don't worry, citizens: Duct tape will get us out of this jam.
    If we put some duct tape on our vents along with that other American article of faith, plastic wrap, the government assures us, we will be safe from those sneaky terrorists and their biochemical weapons and we can get back to watching "The Bachelor 2."
    Duct tape has become the punch line to a zillion jokes drifting around the Internet (Duct and cover! is a popular one.)
   
Yankee ingenuity
    That some Americans would feel comforted by the notion of duct tape as savior is understandable. Duct tape was born during the so-called good war, World War II, when Yankee ingenuity beat that era's axis of evil. If duct tape helped us bring down Hitler and Hirohito 60 years ago, surely it can deliver us from Saddam and Osama now.
    Duct tape has also become an erstaz symbol of manhood, a tool that can be used by white-collar office workers who wouldn't know how to turn on a power saw. As trade skills slip from the national memory, duct tape hearkens to an age when a man was measured by the size of his tool box and his ability to fix anything.
    Duct tape was invented in the same wave of patriotic ingenuity that gave us other icons of American pragmatism: the Jeep, oleo margarine and nylon stockings. Yep, seemingly domestic duct tape was created for war, which makes its current role in national defense downright retro.
    Back in World War II, water seeping into ammunition boxes was a huge problem for the armed forces. Wet bullets don't work.
    The inventors for Permacell, a division of Johnson & Johnson, got to work. Using the company's medical bandage tape as a starting point, they came up with "duck cloth tape," a durable waterproof tape that could be easily torn by soldiers on the line.
    It was, like everything else Army-issue, olive green, and instantly became a military staple. The Air Force used it on planes to reduce friction and the Navy used it to cover gun ports on ships.
    Civilians used duct tape (then called duck tape, for the cotton duck from which it was made) to cover windows during World War II blackouts, in which city residents were urged to darken their homes as a defense against air raids.
    After the war, surplus duct tape followed ex-GIs to the booming suburbs where it was used for a gaggle of household purposes, including taping heating ducts.
    It was at this point that the tape began to be manufactured in silver, the better to match ducts. Duct tape now comes in 17 colors, including hot pink and camouflage.
    By the 1990s duct tape was in everyone's kitchen utility drawer, and duct tape sales averaged $150 million a year.
    About 616,000 miles of duct tape was made in the United States last year, according to numbers provided by Henkel Consumer Adhesives, the Ohio-based company that makes 46 percent of the duct tape sold in this country.
   
Surge in demand
    After Tom Ridge told Americans to stock up, duct tape demand skyrocketed.
    "For a short period of time demand for our product went up by 5,000 percent," says Ken Olender, national sales manager for Shurtape Technologies, a duct tape manufacturer in Hickory, N.C.
    Henkel publicists are quick to point out that the company doesn't guarantee its duct tape will keep out poison gas. "Our duct tape is for do-it-yourself purposes," says Heather Sefcik. "We haven't tested it for the uses the government has suggested."
    Olender says the duct tape boomlet's end is in sight. The sales rush created by the government's Feb. 11 terror warning has subsided; tape makers are working to restock shelves emptied in the rush.
    Nyberg says the publisher of "The Jumbo Book of Duct Tape" has printed an extra 45,000 copies of the book since the DHS warning. Which makes him wonder if President Bush has discovered another use for duct tape: as engine of economic revival.
    "Maybe this whole thing is a diabolically clever plan by George W. to bolster our economy one industry at a time," Nyberg says. He predicts the duct tape boom will be followed by a painting contractor boom because Americans will need help repainting and patching all that duct tape-damaged sheetrock.
    Maybe President Bush is the ultimate contemporary handyman, fixing something as complicated as the U.S. economy the simple, painless way — with duct tape.