99% Invisible - 432- The Batman and the Bridge Builder

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

Mark Bloschock is an engineer from Texas, and in the late 1970s he got a job with the Texas Department of Transportation renovating the Congress Avenue Bridge. The bridge was a simple concrete arch bridge that spans Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin. It needed to be rebuilt with more contemporary beams called “box beams.” The box beams sit below the road’s surface, and they needed to be spaced a certain distance apart. Bloschock and the other engineers decided that the gap should be somewhere between ¾ of an inch and an inch and a half, which didn’t seem like a particularly meaningful decision… until the bats moved in. A tale of bats and bridges and how the built environment and the natural environment don’t need to be at odds with one another. The Batman and the Bridge Builder Plus, we talk with Simon Doble, CEO of Solar Buddy. Light access (both day and night) is a basic need many people take for granted. SolarBuddy is an Australian charity uniting a global community with a big dream to gift six million solar lights to children living in energy poverty by 2030, to help them to study after dusk and improve their education outcomes. 99% Invisible’s Impact Design coverage is supported by Autodesk. The Autodesk Foundation supports the design and creation of innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges. Learn more about these efforts on Autodesk’s Redshift, which tells stories about the future of making across architecture, engineering, infrastructure and manufacturing.

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. We talk to a lot of architects on the show, but this week we're talking to an engineer. My name is Mark Blaschock, and I am a professional engineer in the state of Texas. He's like, really from Texas? Yes, yes.

I'm a fourth or fifth generation Texan. I've forgotten which one. But I've been raised in other parts of the country too, so I can talk to talk because I have been raised in the East Coast, you know. We talked to Mark about one of the first projects that he ever worked on. That's producer Emmett Pisterald. He had just graduated from college at the University of Houston, and he'd gotten a job in Austin with the Texas Department of Transportation.

I was in my mid-twenties at the time, so 40 years ago. Actually, I like to say four decades, it sounds like less. I was assigned to a number of things, but I ended up on the Congress Avenue Bridge that is the reconstruction of the Congress Avenue Bridge. The Anne Richards Congress Avenue Bridge is just a simple concrete arch bridge that spans Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin. The bridge was completed in 1910, but by the late 1970s it was in need of a tune-up. It was structurally deficient, and so it rebuilt, and more conventional, more modern, more

contemporary beams were put in called box beams. The box beams sit below the road surface, and they need to be spaced a certain distance apart. Mark and the other engineers decided that the gap should be somewhere between three quarters of an inch and an inch and a half. And the size of that gap didn't seem like a particularly meaningful decision until the bats moved in. Every year in the spring, Mexican-free-tailed bats migrate from Mexico to central Texas,

and they're looking for caves or old barns or some other protected spot where they can safely hang upside down during the day. And shortly after the bridge renovation, a bunch of bats came across the new design and were like, hey, this has got perfectly sized, cozy crevices now. It accidentally created this perfect environment for the bats to move into. And they did. In the years that followed the renovation,

hundreds of thousands of free-tailed bats started roosting inside the bridge. And of thousands of free-tailed bats started roosting inside the bridge. And the people of Austin lost it. There was quite a bit of hysteria in Austin back then about bats and rabies. The local newspaper, the Austin American Statesman published headlines like, bats sink teeth into Austin. The New York Daily News went with mass fear in the air as bats invade Austin.

And as the colony continued to grow, so did the fear. Folks were starting to come up with plans to exterminate the bats, to get them out of the bridge because they were everybody knew that they were, uh, or dangerous in a threat to human health and safety. The bats had just moved into their new home and right away it looked like they were about to get evicted or even wiped out altogether. But someone was about to arrive in Austin to stick up for these bats, an advocate of sorts

and the court of public opinion. He was an ambitious young ecologist who was looking for a chance to show the world not only that bats weren't as scary and dangerous as they were cracked up to be, but that we could live harmoniously alongside them right in the middle of a city. Enter the batman. Hi, I'm Merlin Tuttle and I've studied bats for the last nearly 65 years. Merlin Tuttle is one of the world's most prominent bat scientists.

And unlike a lot of people, he loves bats. He's been obsessed with them since he was a teenager growing up in Tennessee. I lived just a couple miles from a bat cave and became very fascinated with the bats. Maybe a little too fascinated. I got so excited about bats that I forgot to go to school sometimes. But he managed to get through high school in college and eventually made it to graduate school. During his PhD research, he used the share bat caves with Tennessee moon shiners. They even gave him his nickname.

The moon shiners would actually yell across each other, the Batman's are coming. They always had lookouts to make sure it wasn't the revenues. Merlin finished up his doctorate, and in 1975, he took a job in Wisconsin as the curator of mammals at the Milwaukee Public Museum. But it was kind of a tough time to be a bat scientist. A public opinion poll had just shown that bats ranked just below rattlesnakes and cockroaches

on public opinion. Nearly everybody knew that most of not all bats were rabid and would attack you. Bats were seen as terrifying creatures of the night, little furry monsters that would suck your blood and get tangled in your hair. And Roland says he would regularly read articles in mainstream magazines about swarms of rabid bats attacking people. A lot of these stories bore no resemblance to reality. They were just complete fiction.

It is a fact that bats are involved in the majority of rabies cases in the United States, and that rabies is an extremely deadly disease, but they're only one or two rabies cases a year in the U.S. And it's not like those people were die bombed out of the blue by some bloodthirsty bat. In all likelihood, they tried to pick up a bat, and they got bitten in self-defense. If they hadn't handled the bat, they'd have been perfectly safe. Merlin insists that if we don't bother bats, they won't bother us.

And I mean, why would we bother bats? Bats are amazing. They have social systems that are strikingly similar to those of higher primates. They share information. They form long-term friendships, and they even adopt orphans. They're really incredible. And they're also really important for humans. They pollinate plants like mangoes and bananas. And all those agave plants from which the entire tequila and miscal production comes are dependent on bats for

pollination. Without bats you could lose a more than a billion dollar industry. bats also eat tons of bugs including a lot of agricultural pests. By some estimates, bats save us farmers billions of dollars every year in pest control. But in the 70s and 80s as Merlin traveled the world doing his research everywhere he went he saw that bats were in trouble. In that research I couldn't help but notice that bat populations were decline in alarming rates. Bats were losing habitat to logging and agriculture and being driven from their homes by cave explorers. And in some places, people were just slaughtering them. And as I saw that, I became more and more concerned at the rate at which

people were killing these animals needlessly. And so at a certain point, Merlin had an epiphany. He could spend his whole life studying bats, doing great science. But what good would it do if the animals that he loved were despised by everybody else? He decided that he needed to get out of academia and devote himself to protecting these misunderstood creatures. Which a lot of smart people thought was a dumb idea. Oh, my colleagues and even my best friends thought it's dark or even mad. Back conservation was viewed as a hopeless issue. Even the world's biggest traditional conservation organizations,

one, nothing to do with bats. They were just deemed far too hopelessly unpopular to be helped. But Merlin pressed on. In 1982, he launched an organization called Bat Conservation International based in Milwaukee. And he began touring the country, preaching the bat gospel to anyone who would listen, including David Letterman. He has spent 20 years studying bats and feels that they don't get the respect they rightfully

deserve. Please welcome Dr. Merlin Tuttle. Merlin did his best, but you can hear the audience squirming in their chairs when he starts pulling out live bats. And at times, it doesn't feel like Letterman is taking Merlin and his bats very seriously. What have you done to that Chihuahua? Merlin was facing an uphill battle, but in the mid-1980s, a major opportunity fell in his lap. First time I heard about it, it was hundreds of thousands already. Merlin got word that a giant colony of free-tailed bats

had moved into a bridge in Austin, Texas. And we're causing a collective city-wide freak out. We could send you a copy of a poster from the time that really tells the story. Depicts everybody fleeing in terror and the bats coming out of the bridge. People were really frightened and they were sign petitions to have the bats eradicated. And I knew perfectly well that that was going to be the end of my efforts if I didn't do something about it. And so in that moment Merlin made a decision that would

change the direction of his life and the fate of the Austin colony. He decided to pack up his things and move to Texas. Austin would be the new home of bat conservation international and ground zero in Merlin Tuttle's public relations war on behalf of bats. One of the prettiest sites in Austin, Texas is the Congress Street Bridge just before dusk. What you would probably rather not see is underneath the bridge, three-quarters of a million bats heading out for the night.

This newscast is from the late 80s, just after Merlin was found. For most of us, the mere thought of a bat conjures up notions of disease and disgust. But that's wrong, according to Austin-based bad conservation international. Merlin Tuttle and his staff claimed bats have been getting a bad rap for centuries. They're vastly understudied, vastly underappreciated and overly persecuted. But at first, Merlin's pro-bat message didn't go over too well in Austin. The magazine Texas Monthly gave Merlin their infamous Bums Steer Award, a tongue-and-cheek

honor, typically reserved for corrupt politicians and other dubious figures. And to be fair, at the time, the idea of saving bats did seem highly dubious. You know bats, as you know, have had a bad wrap. This is Linda Moore, one of the first people Marlon hired after moving to Austin, and one of his very first converts to team bat. Linda responded to an ad for a bookkeeping job at a, quote, conservation organization. I didn't know what thing about bats because he had mentioned that in the ad. But it really didn't take Marlon very long to get her on board. I mean, he had me at the first sentence about bats, you know, and I was just mesmerized

and he explained, you know, part of the mission of the organization was to dispel those myths and educate people, I thought, well, I'm all for that. So she started keeping the books for the organization. And Linda says that despite everything working against him, the negative publicity, the false rumors, the fear of rabies, Merlin began having the same effect on other people that he'd had on her. At first, people were constantly calling the office terrified. You know, people were afraid and they would call and they wouldn't scream on the phone

and, you know, all kinds of things as you can all imagine. People were like, Oh, I went out to see those bats because they were on the news the other night. And, you know, one of those, I think I got peed on. Do you think I have rabies? Linda says that Merlin would always calmly talk these people down. Merlin had such a way of talking to them that by the end of the conversation, they were wanting to know how they could, you know, kind of save these bats.

Everyone that I spoke with for this story mentioned Merlin's almost preter natural patience. He didn't lecture anyone about how their fears were backwards or misplaced. He just listened and then explained how important bats were. Yes, a key to my success has been that I'm not a person who's a bleeding heart animal lover who just thinks that animals have more rights than humans. The basis of all my conservation work has been this is what's good for you. all my conservation work has been, this is what's good for you. These animals will leave you alone if you return the favor. And once you do that, you'll benefit greatly from them. Merlin's main argument was that bats were benefiting Texans by providing free pest control. He estimated

that on any given summer night, the Congress Avenue bats were eating 20,000 pounds of insects. Many of them, agricultural pests, and the farmland outside of town. With his calm, matter-of-fact style, Merlin won over farmers and teachers and public health officials. And then the media coverage started to shift. The statesmen published article's reassuring readers that the bridge colony was perfectly safe as long as people didn't touch any bats. There was even an article celebrating Austin's bats in National Geographic.

And that article actually featured pictures that Merlin had taken himself. He had picked up photography because he was tired of seeing photos that had been shot to make the bats look menacing. The straight-on shots, the bat has these mouth wide open sending out echolocation pulses and he can look like he's attacking, but I'll take a three-quarter angle shot where he actually looks like he may be smiling and it makes a huge difference to public perception. And my pictures, the bats are all smiling and just as cute as any other animal.

Merlin was convinced that people fear things they don't know. So we wanted to make sure people in Austin got the chance to know real bats up close. One bat in particular, actually. A very cute bat called a flying fox that was brought back from a trip to Kenya. Its name was Erie. If you've ever seen one of those really big-eyed bats that looks like a puppy, maybe it was munching on a banana and a YouTube video, yeah, Zuri was one of those. He was our media star. He was, Merlin would take him everywhere, you know, he was on television programs and

everything else. And I must give Zuri credit because he was just adorable. And you take that guy around and show him at talks and everything and you've won people over. This is Zuri. And his name in Swahili means beautiful. In this clip, someone from Bat Conservation International is holding Zuri in front of a classroom of elementary school children.

The kids initially seem pretty hesitant. Do bats bite hard? Well, some bats have sharp teeth because they need sharp teeth. Has anyone seen him try and bite? No, he's very gentle. And this is the way most bats are naturally. What do they feed their babies? And blood? No, they feed their babies milk. Over time the school children of Austin

bought in. They even started forming little bat conservation clubs and little by little Austin's relationship to its bats shifted from fear to acceptance and eventually even to enthusiasm. People realized that they had been ignoring this natural spectacle that was playing out every night. A million bats flying off against the backdrop of a Texas summer sunset. They stream out and kind of bingle with the clouds and these waves and it's a pretty thing to watch. This is Ed Crowell.

He was a reporter for the Austin American Statesman for many years. The paper's offices are right next to the bridge, and Ed says that at a certain point a few brave animal lovers started showing up at dusk to watch the bats emerge. Others joined in and by the 90s there was a crowd on the bridge every night. Every evening for six, eight months of the year that the bats were here, they just, you know, people would just stand four or five deep on both sides of the sidewalk to see the bats. Wow. In the city started to embrace it. Wow.

In the city started to embrace it. Businesses cropped up offering sunset back cruises. At a certain point the newspaper of the statesmen decided to build a bat viewing area next to their office. People started booking hotel rooms from out of town to come see the bats. It's one of the things they could do in Austin. And so then the city and the mayor at the time just paid, this is almost like a tourist attraction. Against all odds, Merlin Tuttle had successfully

rebranded the city's bats. In 1990, four years after Merlin moved to town, the mayor declared Austin the bat capital of America. Mark Blaschock, the Bat Capital of America. Mark Blaschock, the engineer who built the bridge, didn't mean for any of this to happen. But he watched with interest as his very practical piece of infrastructure became home to the world's largest urban bat colony, and one of Austin's biggest attractions.

Mark gives Merlin a lot of the credit for the way the city eventually embraced its bats. It really took somebody like Merlin Tuttle with his unique style of non-confrontationalism to be able to start to change the tide on how people felt about bats. He's the type of person that makes you want to help. In the years that followed, Mark started thinking about ways that he could help the bats. He wondered what about all the other bridges in Texas. There must be more bat colonies out there.

And so with the help of another bat scientist named Brian Keely and funding from the state of Texas, Mark started traveling the back roads in search of bat bridges. We have a number of bridges in Texas that have bat colonies. In some cases, there are fairly large congresses, the one that is the, you know, that's the hallmark. That's the one that everybody thinks of. But Mark and Brian found that at least 11 million bats in Texas were relying on bridges and culverts

for daytime shelter. And then they expanded that study nationally and figured out that bridges and culverts for daytime shelter. And then they expanded that study nationally and figured out that bridges and culverts were providing important habitat for bats across the country. And so they came up with guidelines for the Texas Department of Transportation to start intentionally designing bridges to attract bats.

Now, if they're building a bridge in a place where a bat colony makes sense, they will space the box beams the way they did at Congress Avenue between three quarters of an inch and an inch and a half apart, just how the baths like it. If they find it and they will and they get a colony going in it, they'll do us a good service. And conversely, if they're building a bridge in a place where

baths and humans might get a little too close to one another, we specifically will have the crevice between those two boxbeams will specifically have that be greater than two inches. Guess what? We're not going to get any bats. Mark ended up spending much of his career working to make infrastructure more bat friendly. A while back, he won an award from the Federal Highway Administration for a covert design. And he says that the feds couldn't believe that a bunch of engineers and biologists

had worked together on the project voluntarily. Biologists and engineers are not seen as natural collaborators. We're almost, we could be perceived on opposite sides of a spectrum with regard to this issue. Engineers on the side of people, biologists on the side of wildlife.

But Mark's whole thing was like, what if we're all on the same team here? The two things can go together. It doesn't have to just be about concrete and steel and advanced materials and stress and strain and durability and cost. There can be other things that we do that affect positively or negatively the natural environment. Very in the width of the gaps between a few box beams might not seem like an important act. But in a way, Mark is shifting what it means to be an engineer. He's saying the built environment and the natural environment don't need to be at odds with one another.

And probably one of the best examples that nobody could miss is the Congress of the New Bridge, how we all work together to take it from a place of fear and loathing, if you will, to a place that's definitely an entrenched part of the Austin culture. Every night in the summer, people line up on the Congress Avenue bridge. Lady Bird Lake is filled with kayaks and canoes and pontoon boats, and then right at sundown 1.5 million bats start to trickle out of the bridge as the crowd ooze and oz. They fly off downstream to begin their nightly feast, and over the course of an hour or Look at that. Look at your eyes. Look at your eyes. Yeah, there you go. That's cool. They fly off downstream to begin their nightly feast, and over the course of an hour or so,

the flow of bats increases until they form this sneaking river in the sky that stretches for what seems like miles. Merlin Tuttle has traveled the world to see bats in incredible wild places, but he never gets tired of a good night at the bridge. I mean, it's just truly spectacular. It's one of these spectacular natural events in the world. And it's right in the middle of a city. Special thanks to Teresa Nicta, who helped coordinate our interview with Merlin. Also to know that Merlin no longer works for Bat Conservation International,

the organization that he founded back in the 1980s. He stepped down from his role there a few years back and founded another organization, Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation. Both these great organizations are doing important work, including taking on one of the biggest threats facing bats today, White Nose Syndrome. White Nose is a disease that has killed so many bats across North America in recent years. It is a massive issue, and we couldn't get into it for this story, but we'll have links to where you can read more about it on our website, notinipi.org. And now for something completely different. Regularly with the help of the Autodesk Foundation, we like to cover impact design.

That's designed that's focused on making the world a better place. And to that end, I'm talking with Simon Dobel, the CEO of Solar Buddy, a charity based in Australia that designs and gives away solar powered devices to children who are living with extreme energy poverty, which affects their ability to study and do things after the sunsets in a toxic free environment. To put it another way, Solar Buddy gives kids solar powered light so they don't have to burn

kerosene to read after dark. When I talked to Simon last week, I started by asking him to describe energy poverty to me because I'd never really heard the term before. Yeah, that's a very common statement that I received. I got into energy poverty after reading a time magazine article in 2011 that described energy energy poverty as the worst form of poverty and it literally just stopped me in my tracks because I was back then I was a lot like you. I was familiar with multiple forms of poverty but energy poverty, what's this? I didn't know anything about it. The article stated that 1.4 billion people, about one in five people on the planet, live in extreme energy poverty, which essentially is there's no form of electricity. So they're still burning basic fire, oil or charcoal to cook,

they're burning, caressing oil and lanterns to see for light and very, very primitive toxic forms of fuel to see and cook and eat their homes. Since 2011, that number of 1.4 billion has come down to about 850 million. So there's been huge strides in that problem, but there's still a huge issue, 850 million people. And it's predominantly across sub-Sahara Africa, remote India, and a succumbent of India in Southeast Asia, where people are literally walking for kilometers a day to get firewere or paying premium prices for really toxic fuels like kerosene. Just to be able to function it, it's very simple. That's what we do. Energy poverty in extreme cases. There is energy poverty in inner city, New York, in inner city Los Angeles, and inner city Sydney where I am today, because there's people that have very low incomes in their energy bill was one of the first that goes from their

priority list. So there's energy probably all across the world, but that's the one that we work in as an extreme energy poverty. What accounts for the reduction from 1.4 billion to 800 million. Was it just infrastructure or was it interventions like the things that you do? Interventions, 100% interventions, the cost in performance of solar panels and the ability to make very small, very high performing and very cost effective. That was the biggest leap. Right. Those 1.4 billion are no more likely to have a wire delivering electricity to their house,

but they're much more likely to have an efficient small solar panel that does a lot of things they need to do. Exactly. Exactly right. Yeah. Can you describe the solar body gadgets to people? What is the object of the baking picture? We're very specific in any area that we work in.

And that's children. We know very clearly that children suffer terribly by reading and doing their homework of an evening around a carousine lantern. And that's the basic source of the lighting that they have. We've all seen the images of the University students in Lagos and Nigeria sitting underneath the street lies studying because they have no power in their homes. the University students in Lagos and Nigeria, sit and underneath the street lights studying

because they have no power in their homes. Well, solar body provides lights for children to study with and to feel safe in their villages. That's the primary focus of what we do. And we do that through a little solar body light, which we call the junior body light, which is a little personal light that children have donated to them

by other children around the world. And we know that children, once they receive one of our lights, they study enough to 78% longer than what they were previously, which has a huge impact on their educational outcomes. That's the essence of what we do. However, we're very aware that there's a bigger problem, and high school students have greater needs and different circumstances to fulfill. So we have a product called Student Buddy which is a more technical, more powerful solar product, solar lighting system that also charges mobile phones. And we donate these systems to teenage students in high school, to keep them in school, and to power those devices that they are now using.

Even if they're in remote Ethiopia or in Mount Magasca, teenage children still have very basic mobile phones. However, they have no ability to charge them. So they take days off school and walk a tremendous amount of time, distance to go to a local village or remote village to power their funded high cost, create these generators. So we're providing systems so the students can actually charge their own phones at home, which saves them time and keeps them studying. You mentioned this in sort of like your thesis statement and it's sort of like in Greenton and what you're doing,

the avoidance of toxic chemicals in an environment. Could you describe that a little bit more about what the condition, what it means to have a, what burning stove in a small location or a coal burning stove or a carousine burning lamp. Next, what is the situation that you're trying to avoid? This isn't really hard for so many people that haven't experienced it to comprehend.

I've traveled the world, I've worked in energy poverty for many years now, and I go to communities across Sub-Sahara Africa, and so often we work in Huts and little communities, but at least have no windows at all, they have no chimneys. So imagine burning of highly toxic carotene lanterns, it gives up black carbon, which is one of the worst forms of carbon. Imagine burning that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because there's no natural light coming in, so you need this light. And almost every time I go into some of these hearts, I'm talking one minute, maybe two minute max before my nose is streaming. My eyes are streaming, I'm coughing. The tickle on your throat is unbearable and I have

to get outside and I have to take a fresh air. And I've been doing this for many, many years and even after so long, I'm still not used to it. Yet the families and the children that we support, it's completely normal for them to just sit there for hours on end. And this is the problem that the toxic fumes that they're breathing in on a daily basis and a nightly basis. They don't even notice it. It doesn't, it doesn't, because they can't see it. It doesn't create burns on their arms or or anything like that. There isn't this notion that it's actually really,

really bad for them. And then so our job is to raise awareness about that and the fact that the fumes that children are breathing in killed more children than AIDS and malaria combined every year by 2.6 million children died just from the fumes that they're breathing it just by living, not by doing anything extravagant purely by living and being in their homes is truly awful and until you actually experience it first hand you can't comprehend how quickly the fumes affect you and that's really important. I mean, one of the things about it that is I'm getting from you and maybe if I'm getting the wrong impression, let me know that it seems doable.

In a kind of a refreshing way, unlike most problems that I see that think about in a global scale, does it feel that I see that think about in a global scale. Does it feel that way to you? 100%, 100%. There's some really big goals out there. And in energy poverty by 2030 is one of them. And I'm proud to drive an organization that is part of getting towards that goal.

And I absolutely historically believe it's very, very possible. Sun and Doble is the CEO of SolarBuddy. They are a charity I felt very compelled to support after I spoke with Simon. $30 it sends a lighter child somewhere in the world that will illuminate their lives in the next 12 years. You can find out more and support them yourself at solarbuddy.org.

99% of visible impact design coverage is supported by Autodesk. Autodesk enables the design and creation of innovative solutions to the world's most pressing social and environmental challenges. Learn more about these efforts on Autodesk Redshift at autodesk.com slash Redshift, a site that tells stories about the future of making things across architecture, engineering, infrastructure, construction, and manufacturing. 99% of visible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Bryson Barnes, music by our director of sound, Sean Riel. Delaney Hall is our senior producer, Kurt Colstad is the digital director, the resident team.

Is Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Chris Barube, Joe Rosenberg, Katie Mangle, Abby Madon, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7K, a.l.w. in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered about the North American continent right now, but is centered in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely

independent collective of the most innovative listener supported podcasts in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find a show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI or work. We're on Instagram and read it too. But for pictures of bats and bridges and links to everything we talked about on the show, look no further than 99PI.org. you