Upon learning of the unforgettable and haunting events that occurred last month at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, many from the ASME community reached out to friends and colleagues at the university. On the evening of Tuesday, April 17, before all the details of the tragedy were clear, Richard Benson, the dean of engineering at Virginia Tech, replied with the following heartfelt letter.

Dear Friends: So many of you have written to me in the last two days, that I must resort to a blanket statement on what the last two days have been like at Virginia Tech and in my life. I beg your understanding at the lack of a personal reply. I want to say at the outset that the outpouring of kindness and support is having an enormously beneficial effect at Virginia Tech. We have all shed tears of grief these last two days, but we have also shed tears of emotion at the many, many kind acts that have been shown to us.

Monday and Tuesday have been very different days for me. On Monday, I started the day at the Engineering Deans Institute meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was glad to be there. I was in the company of many friends, including some very close friends with whom I had worked at Penn State and the University of Rochester. At the first coffee break, I, like everyone else, checked my e-mail. I was startled to see an e-mail message sent to all Virginia Tech employees warning them that there was a gunman on campus and that they should lock their doors and stay away from windows.

I tried to call various Deans Office staff members in Norris Hall, and nobody answered! To put it mildly, I was alarmed. My alarm grew when I turned on the television in my hotel room and saw images from outside Norris Hall of SWAT teams and sounds of many gunshots. By cell phone, I soon came in contact with my assistant, Linda Perkins, and chief-of-staff, Ed Nelson. They had been evacuated to a neighboring building, Randolph Hall, but only after a harrowing escape from the gunman, who had chained shut the main doors of the Norris Building.

I realized that there were likely to be casualties in the VT engineering family, and I knew then that I had to return home as quickly as possible. The people in the hotel were wonderful and helped arrange for a new set of flights home. The trip was agonizingly slow. It wasn't until after midnight that I walked through the door of my house. Along the way, I had to get my information through sporadic phone calls, e-mail messages, Web site updates, and occasional glimpses of television sets. Words cannot describe my despair at the growing escalation of the carnage, maybe four dead, maybe 20 dead, maybe 30 dead. Even now I don't know the final tally. Another hospitalized student died this afternoon in a local hospital.

We lost five faculty members, three of them engineers. G.V. Loganathan, while teaching a graduate class in hydrology, was gunned down along with most of his students. Kevin Granata, a biomechanics expert who had recently been promoted to full professor and the father of three young children, was killed when he left the relative safety of the third floor of Norris to investigate the sounds of gunshots on the second floor. Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor and a giant of a scholar in structural mechanics, was shot through the door of his classroom. He was barring the door so his students could jump out of windows to safety. Heroes! Never forget their names!

There were many other acts of extreme courage, including the faculty members who raced through the halls of Norris Hall while shots were being fired to warn people to lock their doors. They saved many lives. There were many other acts of decency, including the faculty members who traveled to local hospitals to console the grieving.

Tuesday brought new challenges. All of the members of my office want desperately to come to the aid of the victims and their families. Compounding the problem is that there are so many of them. A further point of cruelty is that we have no access to our offices. Norris Hall is closed until the end of the semester as the police make a thorough investigation of the 30 killings that took place there. Today, the entire Deans Office staff operated out of a single conference room in a neighboring building.

Several of my associate deans and staff assistants fled Norris on Monday, leaving behind their purses and wallets. It will be a while before they have access to their credit cards, keys, etc. Nearly the whole of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics must also be moved to temporary quarters. I hasten to add that we have been swamped with offers from all corners of the university to provide us with temporary space. The generosity overwhelms me.

At 2 o'clock today there was a convocation on campus attended by President George W. Bush, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, VT President Charles Steger, and many others. All were inspiring. VT professor and poet Nikki Giovanni provided an especially rousing finish to the ceremony. I continue to get e-mail messages from around the country about the VT tributes that are occurring on other campuses, including the wearing of VT colors, playing of the VT alma mater on the campus carillon, holding a candlelight vigil, etc.

I'll finish as I began; this has an enormously beneficial effect on us all.

Thank you, friends.

Richard Benson
Dean of Engineering, Virginia Tech

Warming Arguments
Merwin Jones, P.E.
Fairfax, Va.

To the Editor: I was disappointed to read several articles in the April issue regarding global warming, each of which linked global warming to manmade CO₂ emissions. The most notable was "Power Window: Carbon Loaded" by Associate Editor Jeffrey Winters.

In that article, Winters suggested that the debate on global warming has been concluded because oil companies Duke Energy, PG&E, and others have asked for congressional action on this issue. No one noted that virtually every company that espouses some action on CO₂ reduction has a vested interest in this issue. Oil, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear power would be more competitive than coal under CO₂ regulations. Manufacturers of equipment that uses lower CO₂ fuels would also benefit.

As professionals in a field of science we have a duty to carefully examine the scientific basis for and against global warming. As engineers, we have the skills to analyze graphs and data, and draw conclusions for ourselves.

There is a lot of data available over the Internet or other sources that contain facts—facts that engineers can digest.

I suggest doing a simple search for sunspot correlations with weather, for example. Or, read papers written by such people as Fred Singer, former head of the National Weather Satellite Service, and John Christy, who first used the satellite data, or look at the CO₂ Science Web site. Granted, the pro-warming community considers these people "skeptics," but we need to understand both sides of an issue before we accept a premise that could cause us to make huge changes and investments in our way of life.

To the Editor: Your April issue addressed in four articles—"The Road Not Yet Taken," "Coal Without Combustion," "Fahrenheit 3,600," and "Carbon Loaded"—the need for improving the use of our available fuels and the need to minimize CO₂ discharge. Unfortunately, the fossil fuel domestically available is mostly coal, with a high CO₂ discharge rate.

Using nuclear power was mentioned in the third article with reference to the development of the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) in South Africa. A prototype of such a reactor was already in operation since 1975 at Juelich, Germany.

About 20 years ago, a system was also developed to use an HTGR plant for the conversion of coal to gasoline. This system has the great advantage of using the high-temperature helium output heat from the reactor for the conversion process, whereas other coal gasification processes use the energy of the coal for the process. Therefore, the specific coal consumption of the combined HTGR reactor and coal-to-gasoline conversion system is roughly half with an absoluteÊminimum of CO₂ discharge.

To the Editor: My 19-year-old son just declared mechanical engineering as his major. He's a freshman at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond.

Thanks for your online magazine. I know nothing about this field, but now I have a very good resource to go to.

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