To battle moldy barracks, Fort Stewart soldiers built their own mold detectors | Hacker News Reader

To battle moldy barracks, Fort Stewart soldiers built their own mold detectors

taskandpurpose.com

65 pointsPaulHoule46 comments

> The problem of mold in barracks flared into the news again last week with a Government Accountability Office report that found barracks at 10 installations posed “serious health and safety risks,” with black mold infestations, broken doors and locks and non-military people sleeping in the barracks. In some cases, troops were even left to clean up “biological waste” left by their peers who committed suicide.

Maybe that last one is worth investment as well. Not just having an outside party clean it up, but prevention?

There's a whole list of news articles on this[0] site related to the U.S. military's efforts to prevent suicide. Not saying it's "enough" or anything. Just saying there's clearly an investment being made.

0: https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/Suicide-Prevention/

>Maybe that last one is worth investment as well. Not just having an outside party clean it up, but prevention?

The military has two readily available levers: money and mandated training. Only the latter is applicable, so we spend hours each year sitting in training full of trigger warnings and trying to destigmatize Discussion about suicide.

Young men have a fairly high rate of completed suicide, and removing them from their social fabric must exacerbate the problem. There may be correlated socio-economic factors between completed suicides and the men who go into the military.

The powerful factors are the work environment and leadership, which the military works desperately to improve by any means they can contrive, and culture, which the military would be powerless to fix, even if underlying society could agree on how to stop funneling people into suicide.

So, if you ever recommend more suicide prevention around servicemen, know that that is why you'll likely earn a rousing, "fuck off."

How is money not applicable? Money can be used to pay for training, interventions, research, etc. 400k would be much better used here than on a custom humidity sensor.

First, you are wrong to say that 400k would be better spent on more suicide prevention than on humidity sensors (no matter how expensively implemented, like here.) By all accounts, that's the only money being spent on humidity sensing; with suicide prevention you're very far down the curve of diminishing returns.

Do you have any examples of suicide training or intervention services that need more funding? Are the 24 hour hotlines over-utilized? Do you propose to move the needle by hiring some consultants for flashier training powerpoints? As to the research part, I'm a little curious which aspects of the DoD's suicide research you think need to be enhanced. For my part, I'd like to see base rate data alongside demographic and other statistics in the annual report.

> If the relative humidity is above 65% and the temperature is above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, that sets the conditions for mold growth

May be this is a typo and they meant below 85? I know black mold grows at around 60F and likely lower temperatures too.

> If the relative humidity is above 65% and the temperature is above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, that sets the conditions for mold growth

That's 10-15% higher than humidity levels needed for mold growth. And it'll grow at almost any temp above freezing, it's just slower.

Also, "black mold" isn't a thing. Mold can be black and be totally benign. It's the species that counts

You can ozonate (use an ozone generator) and drivenout all sorts of undeaireables: rodents, bedbugs, virus particles. Every home should have one. And a reverse osmosis water filter. But nm me.

Hasn't the epa said that it doesn't make a difference[0] and can be create ozone levels higher than the current health standard?

0: https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/ozone-generators-...

It depends. It's not a silver bullet, but sometimes ozonating a little smelly house does wonders (I've tried and it helped immensely for a smell which I couldn't get rid of). If you don't remove the reason why mold started, it will return. As for health standard - you need to ozonate when no one is around and then refresh the air. Breathing in ozone will destroy your lungs. If you need to ozonate more than twice a year, something's wrong and you need to alleviate primary reason for mold first.

OK, so it kills the mold? I was under the impression from some videos that it didn't do much. So I assume it's dying because ozone is actually toxic to it?

It does kill mold pretty effectively at larger concentrations, but if you have a lot and thick layers of mold, some small amount can survive and starts regrowing back in days if you still have wet conditions (and uses that thick film of dead mold as fertilizer). Using ozone is common to de-mold car air conditioners, but if you have too much, you also need mechanical scrubbing to have lasting effect. Best way - dry, then remove mechanically as much as you can and then ozonate.

So the solution was to install internet-connected IoT devices into all the barracks? What could go wrong?

If these are really just temperature and hydrogen sensors, then not that much can actually go wrong. Also, internet connection is not required for this to work. According to the linked press release, it is only connected to WiFi.

So it's just a connected humidity and temperature sensor...?

> The MCAT is a 3D-printed device that uses remote sensors to monitor temperature and humidity levels within barracks to identify conditions that lead to mold.

This isn’t a mold detector, but rather a predictive system to detect likelihood of mold. It would be really cool if it was actually a mold sensor or one of those neuromorphic solutions like Intel Loihi which could maybe detect mold directly.

This is just a basic hygrometer. It's not a mold detector at all. Is this really the level of innovation the army considers impressive? They are taking at least $400k to build 5500 hygrometers. This is something that already exists off the shelf for even less than that.

My thoughts as well, just measuring temperature and humidity.

If the army buys 5500 hygrometers from aliexpress to install in a military base, they won't just be reading moisture

Surely there are defense contractors already building hygrometers for other defense purposes that could extend their contracts/runs.

Sure but then it would be several hundred per device. The military industrial complex is going to do what it’s going to do.

There’s certainly truth to that, but when you add in all the requirements for those approved sensors (supply chain, certification, utilization of American workers, etc, etc) they may be that expensive to produce.

Then your government client may cancel the deal and you’re left with a warehouse full of $200 parts that should cost $5 that no one else wants.

For the big companies that get their hooks into military and civilian leadership, they’re on the gravy train. But even then, that is on average, many of those projects will likely be big losses.

As opposed to the 750 they’re spending now.

Does the army have strict controls over what troops can bring in the barracks? I get that there are some security implications, but not really. These are super basic devices and there are some very simple controls that can be put in place to mitigate any real concerns.

True. And Google says basic digital ones are cheap, I just bought a six pack from Amazon for $9.99.

That said it does have an alerting capability…but even then Amazon shows products for $15 that have wireless alerting.

So yeah, $72 per unit indeed looks to be a waste of money.

Even if they weren’t creating their own devices, they also need to pay the developer(s) that are going to write the backend and fleet management software.

$400k in the context of custom development, testing, and administration? That's cheap. And frankly this approach is much more appropriate than the alternatives of defense contractor pork, defective-by-design consumer "cloud", or having people manually do rounds and record numbers.

Also if you want to claim some high ground about not "wasting money", I don't know why you'd use an example of buying Chineseum from overpriced Amazon rather than getting it drop shipped.

I got the sense from the article the software was already done, the $400k seemed to be just for the devices. I could be wrong, the article was difficult to follow in places.

There’s not really anything super innovative but if you have something that is alerting when there are conditions for mold growth it’s much more likely to get addressed in a timely manner. I have a thermometer and hygrometer in my crawl space with a digital readout on my refrigerator to prompt me when the dehu isn’t working or if there’s a water or duct leak, etc.

If you want to understand why we've been losing wars for 70+ years, look no farther than this perfect microcosm of the U.S. military's approach to leadership.

Field grades denying it's a problem, gaslighting those who say it's a problem, doing everything they can to suppress discussion about the problem – and then a bunch of lower enlisted dudes having to FFIO on their own.

FFIO - Freakin' Figure It Out (polite form) for those like me who weren't sure :D

The military as an institution has its flaws, sometimes serious ones. And one could make a serious argument that an up-or-out stack-ranked promotion system is toxic, inefficient, and ineffective at promoting true talent.

But the US military has also not been "losing wars for 70+ years," and the overall tone of this post screams "disgruntled junior enlisted who thinks they have all the answers." It's something I'd frankly expect to see on Reddit.

And with 20 years of active and reserve service, if I had to put one group of military leadership under the microscope as most in need of an institutional course correction, it wouldn't be the O-4s and O-5s. It'd be the E-7+.

> the US military has also not been "losing wars for 70+ years,"

Maybe you don't consider Korea a loss (many do, and not just on Reddit), but Vietnam is a lot less debatable.

And then in recent years you have the 8 trillion dollars (so far) spent in the ME. It's a staggering, unfathomable loss.

The military ultimately executes the policies of the Presidential administration which commands it and the Congress that funds it, under the laws the latter put in place. Especially in the Middle East and Vietnam, while there is blame to be put on theater commanders, the US military was also hamstrung by incoherent policy decisions of the civilian leadership.

And frankly I don't care whether or not "many" armchair generals and admirals do or don't consider Korea a "loss." War is not a sports game. The details of the geopolitical and economic fallout of a stalemate like that matter a whole hell of a lot more than who "won."

Sounds a lot like "Just following orders" and "You weren't there".

> And frankly I don't care

That's just it though. This isn't about you.

Sports game or not, there are losers in war; and it's been us, a lot, for decades. Whoever you try to blame, whatever you call people who point this out, that fact remains true.

You are very much missing the point. If you read the one thousand page postmortem on the invasion of Iraq - lots of blame to be placed on civilian leadership and intelligence.

A few: The core reasoning (WMD) was the CIA misinterpreting Saddam grandstanding to his generals as a serious WMD program. This was due to the CIA having an insufficient grasp of the local situation, largely due to the fact that we had only infiltrated isolated parts of the regime and couldn't corroborate.

Slightly before Obama's election, the US forces were effectively ordered to stop patrolling and attempting to take and hold territory in order to reduce the American bodycount for political reasons - this allowed forces outside the green zone to maintain continuity of operations and simply wait for us to get bored and leave.

Similarly, lack of a clear set of objectives, and lack of frank expectations setting with the US population lowered the ability of the DoD to prosecute the war in a winnable fashion.

These aren't small nitpicks, these are core reasons why the GWOT didn't go so well - and almost none of them have anything to do with defense procurement or military mismanagement.

You are missing the point; none of what you said refutes what you were replying to. While the civilian leadership does have the authority to order the military to stand around, get shot for a while, and go home having achieved nothing, presumably that's not what they actually asked for or wanted. Getting into the situation where you go to war that you're not going to be able to win absolutely represents a failure on the part of the military; perhaps not a failure of procurement or management, but very much a failure of leadership, which is exactly what OP originally said.

> Getting into the situation where you go to war that you're not going to be able to win absolutely represents a failure on the part of the military; perhaps not a failure of procurement or management, but very much a failure of leadership, which is exactly what OP originally said.

Good God, what are you on? The military literally does not get to make these decisions. Only the civilian leadership in the form of the President and Congress gets to decide when and where the military goes to war. And as much as US military officers learn from Day 1 that it's their duty to refuse illegal orders (and it is), the day a combatant commander or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs tells the President or Secretary of Defense "no, this war is illegal" is the day we have ourselves a constitutional crisis, for good or ill.

> The military literally does not get to make these decisions. Only the civilian leadership in the form of the President and Congress gets to decide when and where the military goes to war.

Sure, but it's the responsibility of the military to be clear to them about what they can and can't do (or, more likely, what it's going to cost, in money and casualties, to achieve x). Obviously yes if the President actually orders you to fart around and get shot then you do it. But if the President thinks sending three brigades to $country is going to keep the civilians there safe in the current crisis, it's the responsibility of the military leadership to know and advise whether that's a three-brigade job or not.

Right. A recurring theme in successful military campaigns (though by no means enough to ensure success) is a very clear objective. Civilian politicians decide those objectives. If the objectives are vague that's their fault. If the objectives are unachievable, that's their fault. Only when there were clear, achievable objectives is there any opportunity for it to matter whether military leadership, tactics, training, equipment etc. were adequate.

After all, if we don't know what success even looks like, what chance do we have?

Compare "Corporate" (the British operation to re-take control of the Falkland Islands) with "Iraqi Freedom" (US invading Iraq for nebulous reasons)

Even if you're not sure that Corporate was a good idea, or that the UK "should" own these islands, the objective was very simple and easy to understand. If we kill a whole bunch of Argentinians but have to retreat and they keep the islands, that's a failure. If they just walk away without a (further) shot fired and we get the islands back, that's a success. Easy.

But what chance did US troops have for "Iraqi Freedom" ? Can they find the imaginary Weapons Of Mass Destruction in Iraq? No. Hopeless.

Spoken like an officer indeed (inferring here, could be wrong).

1. Ignores the core subject of the post and the GP's response claiming it is indicative of continued failure of leadership.

2. Generically tries to seem like there is some level of agreement without being concrete in admitting problems in any way.

3. Tries to defend Wilsonionism foreign policy (a root cause evil) by ad-homineming GP as a "disgruntled junior enlisted", and in a later post using the old-faithful "civilian leadership" excuse.

4. Defends officers generally while attacking senior enlisted (who are subject to said officers).

I think you just about made the GP's point.

We have billions for Ukraine and Israel and the military industrial complex (or the better put MICIMATT, by Ray McGovern), but when it comes to taking care of our junior enlisted leadership can't be bothered. Despite your generic denials it is indeed indicative of a repeated failure of leadership pattern. There is a reason recruiting is suffering massively right now... the internet makes it much harder to cover up these sort of things that got swept under the rug in the past, and a completely disconnected from the constitution foreign policy that is plain for all to see exacerbates the problem.

How about we remove the plank from our own eye before we move to take the splinter out of our brothers?

You just saved me a ton of retort'ing, TYFYS!

I'd say Korea counts as a US win or stalemate, but Vietnam ended with the US achieving none of its objectives, having wasted tons of lives and leaving in a humiliating fashion. Is it so weird to call that a defeat? In that case it's 50 years, given that Afghanistan ended in '21 in similar fashion.

Are you just taking issue with 70 years being hyperbole? If not, I have to say this idea that the US didn't lose a lot starting with Vietnam is weird. In fact, it seems like exactly the kind of delusional self-talk among the leadership that would lead to such situations reoccurring. I mean, suppose I get in a fistfight and get knocked down then don't get up. Can I really say I chose not to get up because I didn't want to hurt the guy too badly and I therefore didn't lose? Even if it's true, it just means I lost on purpose.

Fuckin' get 'em! Agreed with your general sentiment. The navy probably does have a bigger problem with the cult of the chiefs, but the Army less so with its senior enlisted. But the problem is the JBSA post commander LTG Jones told Vice literally on Friday that "I don't have a mold problem, I have a discipline problem." And it's just a gross lie at this point.

https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vice.com%2Fen%2Fa...

Well that's a public faceplant on line with the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy telling the GW Sailors "at least you're not in a foxhole" after a rash of suicides during a yard period.

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