Rivers and the Rose in the Power Plant Palace

When is the appropriate time to call 911?  Calling 911 in the Power Plant is when you call the Shift Supervisor to report something important.  As Randy Dailey, our Safety Trainer extraordinaire, always taught us, first tap the person on the shoulder and say, “Are you all right?”  Then you point you finger at someone and say, “Call 911!”  That’s called “Activating the EMS”  (Emergency Medical System).  Besides medical emergencies, there are other reasons to call the Shift Supervisor.

I learned early on to ‘fess up when you have done something wrong.”  People appreciate it when you tell them up front that you goofed.  That way the problem can be dealt with directly.  Dee Ball was that way.  Any time he wrecked a truck, he didn’t hesitate to tell his boss.  So, even as a summer help I had developed this philosophy.  Never be afraid to expose your blunders.  It works out better in the long run.

One example of someone not following this philosoply was Curtis Love.  As I mentioned in the post Power Plant Spider Wars and Bugs in the Basement, Curtis didn’t want to tell anyone that he had been bitten by a brown recluse for the third time because he was afraid of losing his job.

The Oklahoma house spider — The Brown Recluse

His philosophy came back to bite him a year and a half later when he was on the labor crew when he was the designated truck driver.  I had moved on to the electric shop by this time.

A red crew cab like this only the bed of the truck was longer

He was backing up the crew cab around a corner under the Fly Ash hoppers up at the coalyard when the side of the crew cab came into contact with one of those yellow poles designed to protect the structure from rogue vehicles.  Unfortunately.  This created a dent in the side of the truck.

An example of yellow poles protecting an area

Curtis, already on probation. worried that he would be fired if he told anyone about this mishap, failed to tell Larry Riley about this incident.  Larry, on the other hand, was standing in front of the Coalyard Maintenance shop (the labor crew home), and saw the entire incident.  At that moment, he turned to one of the labor crew hands and said, “I hope Curtis comes over here and tells me about that.”  Unfortunately, Curtis decided to act as if nothing had happened.  This resulted in his termination.  As much as I cared about Curtis, I must admit that the Power Plant scene was probably not the best location for his vocation.

I had seen Dee Ball do the same thing over and over again, and he always reported his accidents immediately.  He was never punished for an accident, though, for a number of years, he was banned from driving a truck.  You can read more about this in the post:  Experiencing Maggots, Mud and Motor Vehicles with Dee Ball.

One day during the summer of 1984 just after lunch, 1A PA fan tripped (PA stands for Primary Air).  When this happened, number one unit had to lower it’s output from over 500 Megawatts down to around 200.  The trip indicator on the 6900 volt breaker said that it had been grounded.  Being grounded means that one of the three phases of the motor or cable had made a circuit with the ground (or something that was grounded).  The trip circuits shut the fan down so fast that it prevents an explosion and saves the fan from being destroyed.

Diana Lucas (later Diana Brien), Andy Tubbs and I were given the task of finding the ground and seeing what we could do to fix it.  We unwired the motor, which was no easy task, because the motor is about the size of a large van, and about 10 times heavier.

This is about 1/2 the size of the PA fan motor which is 1000  horsepower

So, we spent the rest of the day unwiring the motor (in the rain), and unwiring the cable to the motor from the breaker in the main switchgear and testing both the motor and the cable with various instruments looking for the grounded wire or coil that caused the motor to trip.  We used a large “Megger” on the motor.   It’s called a Megger because it measures Mega-Ohms.  So, it’s technically called a Mega-Ohm meter.  Ohms is a measurement of resistance in an electrical circuit.  We usually use a small hand cranked megger, that is similar to an old hand crank telephone that generates a high voltage (good for shocking fish in a lake to make them rise to the surface).  In the case of the hand cranked Megger, it would generate 1,000 volts.

A Hand cranked Megger made by the same company, only newer than the ones we had

The Megger this size would have been useless with this large motor.  Instead we used one that was electric, and you ran the voltage up over 10,000 volts and watched the mega-ohms over a period of 1/2 hour or so.

For the cables, we hooked up a Hypot (or Hipot).  This stands for High Potential.  Potential in this case is another word for “Voltage”.  It would charge up and then you pressed a button and it would send a high voltage pulse down the cable, and if there is a weak spot in the insulation,The Hypot will find it.  So, we hooked a Hypot up to the cable and tried to find the grounded wire.  No luck.

After spending 4 hours looking for the grounded cable or motor, we found nothing.  We spent another hour and a half putting the motor and the breaker back in service.  The Fan was put back into operation and we went home.  As I was walking out to the car with Bill Rivers, he told me, “I knew they weren’t going to find anything wrong with that fan.” He had a big grin on his face.

At first I thought he was just making an educated guess as Rivers was apt to do on many occasions (daily).  It was raining and I could see where water may have been sucked into the motor or something and had momentarily grounded the motor.  Just because we didn’t find anything didn’t mean that the breaker didn’t trip for no reason.

When we were in the car and on our way to Stillwater, Oklahoma with Yvonne Taylor and Rich Litzer, Bill explained that he knew why the motor tripped.  He had been walking through the main switchgear with Mike Rose, and Mike, for no apparent reason other  than curiosity, had opened up the bottom door to the breaker for 1A PA fan.  He looked at it for a moment and then slammed the door shut.  When he did this, the breaker tripped.

So, the ground relay happened to be the one that tripped.  It might as well been an over-current or a low voltage trip.  It just happened to trip the ground trip.  Bill said that he told Mike that he should call the Shift Supervisor and let him know so they could restart the motor.  Mike on the other hand told Bill that he was already on probation and was afraid of losing his job if he reported that he had slammed the door on the breaker and tripped the fan.

If there was ever a reason to call 911, it was then.  All he had to do was tell them, “I accidentally tripped the PA fan when I bumped the breaker cabinet.”  They would have told him to reset the flag, and they would have started the fan right back up.  No questions asked… I’m sure of it.  And they wouldn’t have lost their generating capacity for the remainder of the afternoon and we wouldn’t have spent 4 hours unwiring, testing and rewiring the motor in the rain with a plastic umbrella over our head.

Bill wasn’t about to tell on Mike.  If Mike didn’t want to report it, Bill wasn’t going to say anything, and I understand that.  I probably would have kept it to myself at the time if I was in Bill’s shoes (I’m just glad I wasn’t because I probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep soundly for the next year).  But 30 years later, I might write about it in a Blog.  Even though I wouldn’t have looked to Mike to teach me much about being an electrician (he was more of an Air Condition man anyway), I still loved the guy.

Mike died almost two years ago on May 29, 2011.  He was from England and had lived in Canada for a time.  He used to work on trains.  Trains, even though they are diesel, are really electric.  The Diesel engine really runs a generator that generates electricity that runs the train.  I know that Mike was a good man at heart.  He loved his family with all his heart.  Here is a picture of the Limey:

Mike Rose. A fair plant electrician, but a great family man!

Ok.  So I know what you are thinking….  There must be a story about myself in here somewhere.  Well, you would be right.  First of all.  I always ‘fessed up to my mistakes, as my current manager at Dell knows well (yes.   I still mess up after all these years).  I told my current manager the other day that CLM was my middle name.  (CLM means “Career Limiting Move”).  So here is my power plant “mess up” story (well one of them):

In January 1986, I returned from my Honeymoon with my new wife Kelly when I found that we had hired a new electrician.  Gsry Wehunt was replacing Jim Stephenson who had left the plant on February 15, 1985, which is a story all it’s own.  We had just started an overhaul on Unit 1.

I remember the first Monday I spent with Gary.  It was January 6, 1986 and we were working on cleaning out the exciter house on the end of the main power generator with Diana Brien (formerly Diana Lucas).   We were discussing salaries and Gary was surprised to find out that I was making more than he was.  Well… I had been an electrician for over 2 years and had been promoted regularly…. so I didn’t think there was anything strange about it, except that I still looked like I was only about 18 years old (even though I was 25) and Gary was about 34.  I had already been promoted 4 times and my salary had gone from $7.15 to over $12 an hour.

Anyway, when that first Friday rolled around, Gary and I were assigned to Substation Inspection.  Some later time I may go into the details of what “Substation Inspection” entails,  but for now, let’s just stick with my “911 call.”  It is enough to say that we were in the main plant substation relay house on Friday January 10, 1986 at 9:00 am.  One of our jobs was to call other substations and perform a test called a “Transfer Trip and Carrier Test”.  We had called Woodring Substation (Woodring is a town in Oklahoma and we had a 345 KV line going there), and I was talking to the man in the substation on the other end of the phone line.

At the same time I was showing Gary just how experienced I was at being an electrician.  People had told me that you had to be a plant electrician for 5 years before you really became a “first class” electrician.  Well.  Here I was at 2 years, and I thought I was so good that I could do anything by now….  — Yeah… right.  I told the guy on the other end of the line as I turned a switch…. Amber light… Back to Blue…. and I wrote down the value on the meter (paperwork… oh yes…. it’s that important.  Like A-1 sauce).

Then I reached for the second switch.  I said, “Carrier test”, then turned the switch.  The lights in the relay house went out and we were in the dark.  I told the guy on the other end of the line….. “Well.  That’s not supposed to happen.”  Then as I let go of the switch and it returned to it’s normal position, the lights turned back on.  Okay……

I wrote the numbers down from the meter and said goodbye to the other faceless substation man on the other end of the line that I talked to over 100 times, but never met in person.  He sounded like a nice guy.  Then I headed for the gray phone.  I heard the Shift Supervisor paging Leroy Godfrey (The Electrical Supervisor) on line 2 (we had 5 Gray phone lines.  The Gray Phone was our PA system).

When I picked up the line I heard Leroy pick up the phone and the Shift Supervisor tell Leroy that we just lost station power in the main substation and it had switched over to Auxiliary power.  I immediately jumped in and said, “Jim (for Jim Padgett, the Shift Supervisor), I did that.  I was performing a Carrier test with Woodring and the moment I performed the carrier test the lights went out.”  Leroy chimed in by saying, “That wouldn’t cause you to lose station power.”

Well, in my ‘inexperienced’ plant electrician way, I responded, “Well.  All I know is that when I turned the switch to perform the carrier test, the lights went out, and when I let go of the switch, the lights came back on.”  Leroy reiterated, “That wouldn’t cause you to lose station power.”  I replied with, “I’m just saying….” and left it at that.  I had done my job.  They knew I was out here.  They knew I had called 911 right away.  I explained what I was doing…. they could take it from there.

I had hoped that I had showed Gary upfront that it doesn’t hurt to report your mistakes (even though I hadn’t made one as far as I could tell), but I was 100% sure I had done something to cause the relay house to lose power.  Though, I couldn’t figure out why.

After lunch, Bill Bennett, our A foreman came down to the shop to tell me that they figured out how the substation lost station power.  He said that a road grader had been grating  the road down by the Otoe-Missouri reservation (which is actually called “Windmill road”  I guess because there is a windmill down that road somewhere), and had hit an electric pole and knocked it over and had killed the power to the substation.

Substation Power Interrupting Road Grader

It turned out that the substation relay house was fed by a substation down that road where we have a radio tower.  So, think about this.  The exact time that I turned that switch in the substation, a road grater 2 1/2 miles away hits a telephone pole accidentally and knocks it to the ground and kills the power to the substation at the exact same time that I am performing a transfer-trip and Carrier test with Woodring Substation, and the time it takes to switch to auxiliary power is the exact time it took me to let go of the switch.

Don’t tell me that was by accident.  I will never believe it.  I think it was for the soul purpose of teaching me a useful lesson or two.  First….. don’t be afraid to tell someone when you do something wrong.  Second…. If you think you have control over the things that happen to you in your life… well, think again…… Third….. God watches you every moment, and if you let him, he will guide you to do the right thing when the time comes.

God bless you all.