Sky Climbing in the Dark with Power Plant Boiler Rats — Repost

Originally Posted July 26, 2013:

I suppose everyone at some point in their life wishes they could work at Disney World or some other place where there is one wonder after another throughout their day.  Working in the Power Plant was a lot like that…. sometimes…..  I have mentioned a few times that when you drove through the gate to the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma each morning, you never knew what was in store for that day.  It was often a surprise.  Sometimes the surprise was a wonder.  Sometimes it was well…. surreal.

This is a story about one day in October 1986 during an overhaul while I was a plant electrician, where I entered a world totally foreign to just about anything I had encountered before.  You may think this is an odd statement if you have read some of my other posts where I have found myself in oddly dangerous situations and my life was in the balance.  Well…. this is one of those stories, with a new twist.

As I said, we were on overhaul.  This meant that one of the two units was offline and major repairs were taking place to fix things that can only be done when the unit isn’t running.  The two major areas of repair are the Turbine Generator and the Boiler.  People come from the other plants to help out and get paid a lot of overtime working long hours to complete this feat.

At this time I was working on motors in the electric shop.  I had been removing the fan motors from the large General Electric Transformer for Unit 1.  Changing their bearings and testing them.  Then putting them back in place.  The transformer had 24 of these motors, so after the first few, the work was becoming pretty routine.

A Main Power Transformer

Somewhere between the 11th or 12th motor David McClure came into the shop.  I think he may have been on the labor crew at the time.  He had only been working at the plant for about 8 months.  He was a welder, so I think if he had been on labor crew, they had quickly moved him into the welding shop because anybody with welding skills were always in high demand.

David told me that Bill Bennett had told him to ask me to help out with a problem in the boiler.  Now.  when i was on the labor crew, I had been in the boiler during an overhaul.  I had worked on shaking tubes in the reheat section and cleaning the clinkers out of the economizer section.  You can read about these moments of mania in the posts:  “Bob Lillibridge Meets the Boiler Ghost” and “Cracking a Boiled Egg in the Boiler and Other Days You Wish You Could Take Back“.

During those times I knew that something was taking place in the superheat section of the boiler, but I wasn’t exactly sure what it was.  You see, even when I was in the bottom ash hopper when it was being sandblasted, there was a wooden floor that had been put in above the hopper so that you couldn’t see the boiler overhead.  This was the first time I was going to go into the boiler to actually work on something other than laying down the floor (which I had been lucky enough to do once when I was working on the labor crew).

Diagram of a boiler

So, I grabbed my tool bucket and David took me up to the main entrance into the boiler which was next to the door where Chuck Ross and Cleve Smith had been blown off of the landing by the Boiler Dragon six years earlier when I was a summer help (see the post:  “Where Do Knights of the Past go to Fight Dragons Today?“).  About 40 feet up from the concrete floor we climbed into the boiler.

This is where I first came face to face with Boiler Rats.  These rats live in a boiler when it is taken offline.  Shortly after the boiler is cooled down, these “boiler rats” move in and they spend the next 4 or 10 weeks (depending on the length of the overhaul), roaming around the boiler sniffing out boiler tubes that are in need of repair.

Some lights had been placed around the bottom of the boiler to shine up the 200 feet to the top of the boiler.  That is the height of a 20 story building.  Yes.  That’s right.  The inside of the boiler is as tall as a 20 story building.  I couldn’t really see what was going on up there toward the top, but there was a boiler rat standing right there in the middle of the wooden floor staring at me with the grin (or snarl) that is typical of a rat.  Not a cute rat like this:

Rat from the Movie Ratatouille

Or even a normal rat like this:

Normal looking rat

No.  These rats looked like Ron Hunt wearing his hillbilly teeth.  More like this:

rat picture taken from kootation.com

Yep.  Red eyes and all, only the whiskers were longer.  I would go into how the boiler rats smelled, but I didn’t want to get too personal….

Anyway, this one boiler rat that had been waiting for me said that he had just finished rigging up this sky climber so that he could take me up into the upper reaches of the dark to work on a sky climber that was stuck.  He had rigged this sky climber up so that it would pull up next to the one that was hung up by the bottom of the high pressure boiler tubes that were hanging out over the top of the boiler.

If you have ever seen Window washers going up and down the side of a building washing windows, then you know what a sky climber is.

A sky climber

You see, the boiler rats would ride these sky climbers up from the wooden floor to the boiler tubes hanging down from the ceiling of the boiler.  One had stopped working and they needed an electrician to go up and fix it so that they could continue working.  That was my job…. I carry a badge…. oh… wait… that’s Sergeant Friday on Dragnet…  I carry a tool bucket that doubles as a trash can and triples as a stool.

So, I climbed into the sky climber and up we went.  I could see faint lights up above me where boiler rats were working away cutting and welding boiler tubes.  As we took off, one of the boiler rats said that a little while just before I had arrived, someone from above had dropped a tool that came flying down and stuck right into the wooden plank floor.  It had landed about 10 feet from another boiler rat.  This answered a question that I had for some time…. it turned out to be true… Boiler Rats do have Guardian Angels too.

Anyway, Up into the darkness we went.  The boiler rat (I believe this one was called Rodney… as in Rodney Meeks) operated the sky climber as I just enjoyed the ride.  Looking down, I saw the spot lights getting smaller and dimmer.  Looking up, I saw us approaching a group of hanging boiler rats, all doing their stuff.  Some were resting.  Some were welding.  Some were looking off into space in a daze after having been in the boiler for so long they had forgotten their name.

There were names for these rats.  One was called T-Bone.  Another was called ET.  There was a guy there called Goosman.  Another boiler rat was called Frazier.  I think it was John Brien that was staring off into space at the time, or was it Butch Ellis.  Oh.  Now I remember.  Butch was on one sky climber staring off into space at the other sky climber where john Brien was staring back at him.

There were many other boiler rats there from other plants.  They were all hanging down from the top of the boiler on these sky climbers like fruit hanging from a tree in the dark.  Most of them paid no attention to my arrival.

We pulled up to the sky climber that was broken.  I swung over the couple of feet from the one climber to the other, with a straight drop of about 160 feet down to the floor.  I looked below so that I could calculate that in case I slipped and fell, how I would try to swing my body just as i fell so as to miss any boiler rats below.  I wouldn’t have wanted to upset any boiler rat families by falling on their boiler rat breadwinners.

By Swinging my tool bucket toward the other sky climber, I followed the momentum so that it carried me over to the other platform, where I swung my bucket over the railing and climbed in.  Once settled, I took out my flashlight so that I could look around my new six or eight foot world.

I tried the controls, and sure enough… nothing happened.  Remembering my dropped flashlight almost exactly three years earlier that had almost cost me my life (see post:  “Angel of Death Passes By The Precipitator Door“), I took extra care not to drop any tools on some unsuspecting souls below.

I took out my multimeter and checked the voltage coming into the main junction box and found that the problem was in the connect where the cable came into the box.  So, this turned out to be a fairly easy fix.  The cord had been pulled by something (geez.  It was only hanging down 200 feet.  I don’t know what might have been pulling on it) and had worked its way out of the connections.

I told Rod that I would be able to fix this quickly and went to work removing the connector from the cable, cutting off the end and preparing it to be reconnected to the connector.  It was about that time that I became aware of something that had been going on since I had arrived, I just hadn’t noticed it.  Maybe it was a remark one of the boiler rats had said.  I think it was Goosman talking to Opal.  He said something like “That George Jones can sure sing.”

That was it.  That was the extra amount of strangeness that I had been experiencing since I had arrived.  Someone had a radio that was playing country music.  The music was echoing throughout the boiler so that all the hanging boiler rats could listen to it.  I realized that Butch and Brien weren’t just staring off into space at each other.  They were experiencing a moment of country music meditational bliss.  The moment the current song was over someone off in the distance that I couldn’t see in the dark or because they were stuck up inside a rack of boiler tubes, let out a hoot of satisfaction.  Butch and Brien rose and went back to work.

I have heard that it takes a village to raise a child…. Hillary Clinton even wrote a children’s book with that title once.  I experienced something similar but strangely different that day in October 1986.  A village of raised boiler rats, who for a moment, it seemed, some had stopped to sit by the welder’s campfire to listen to the tales being woven by the country music singer on the radio.

There was a sincere camaraderie between these individual boiler rats.  A culture had grown inside this boiler that was completely foreign to me.  I suppose the same thing happens to soldiers who put their lives on the line to protect our country.  When you are in a position where one wrong step and someone dies.  You bond to those around you in a unique way.

I am grateful for my brief encounter with the boiler rats that day.  They had invited me into their lair because they needed my help.  I was glad to have been able to fix there problem and be quickly on my way.

Though I never had a desire to become a boiler rat myself, during the many years where I walked alone throughout the inside of the precipitator I would sometimes hear the sounds coming down through the economizer from the Superheat section of the boiler.  Maybe a faint hint of country music.  I  knew that the boiler rat village had come together again like a group of nomads that meet every winter to share stories.  Sometimes I would take the plate straightening tool I carried and banged on the plates wondering if any of them would hear me way back up in the boiler.  I doubt anyone ever did.