Power Plant Conspiracy Theory
Favorites Post #74
Originally posted September 20, 2014.
I remember the moment when it dawned on me that I may be witnessing an incredible Coal-fired Power Plant Conspiracy! I had just walked into the Control Room one morning in 1990 at the plant in North Central Oklahoma and saw the Shift Supervisor Jack Maloy and Merl Wright in a state of high concentration.
I always knew something was up when Jack Maloy was standing behind the large blue monitors near the Unit 1 Main Electric Board watching the big picture while the Control Room Operator Merl Wright was at the Main Control Panel turning knobs, tapping indicators to make sure they had the correct readings, twisting switches, holding them until red lights turned green…
I love this picture! — not our plant but may be part of the conspiracy
Where had I seen this before? Something was telling me that everything wasn’t as it seemed. Sure… there was an emergency going on. There was no doubt about that. I knew that between Jack Maloy and Merl Wright, the current problem of the main boiler drum losing water was quickly going to be solved. I knew that Oklahoma City wasn’t going to experience any blackouts that day. This was a Cracker Jack (Maloy) team! But I couldn’t help thinking I had seen this somewhere before, and it was gnawing at my common sense.
Here is a picture of Jack Maloy’s team at the time:
Jack Maloy is standing on the far right with the vertically striped shirt (like bars in a jail) directly behind Merl Wright kneeling before him – Coincidence? I think not.
I backed off in a corner to observe the situation while a crowd of operators began to grow to watch the master Shift Supervisor and his faithful Control Room Operator divert a disaster. Merl picked up the walkie talkie from the desk and called Larry Tapp ( Larry is the man in the light blue shirt in the front row in the middle. He’s the only one in the front row that is actually standing, while the rest are down on their knees while the picture is being taken).
Larry was on the boiler opening and closing valves. John Belusko, the Unit Supervisor was out there with him. I can’t tell you what magic they were performing, since I think that’s top secret. I figured that, because the operators seemed to be talking in code. Merl would key the microphone on the walkie talkie and say something like, “Larry, 45”. Larry would reply with something like “Quarter Turn”. “Position?”, “18 as far as I can tell”.
A Motorola Walkie Talkie like this
I translated the coded words to say: “….crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it around the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped and all was safe.” (Something I had read in Moby Dick, by Herman Melville).
Jack paced back and forth behind the counter with the monitors. Then he stopped and read the paper that was streaming out of the alarm printer as it continued humming as the paper piled up on the floor in front of him. Jack was a heavy smoker, and I could tell that right then he would rather be standing out on the T-G floor having a smoke at that moment. Before cigarettes were banned in the control room, Jack would have been pointing at that board with the cigarette.
When the water level began rising in the Boiler Drum, I could see the relieve on everyone’s face. I supposed it meant that a major catastrophe had been avoided due to the intricate knowledge that each operator possessed and their ability to quickly respond to any situation. This made the uneasy feeling I was having even worse. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had seen this before. Just like Deja Vu.
It wasn’t till about a week later when my mom asked me if I knew someone at work named Jack Maloy. She had been talking to a friend of hers from Church named Louise and she mentioned that her husband worked at the Power Plant north of town. I replied by saying that I knew Jack Maloy well. He is a Shift Supervisor. She said that his wife Louise told her that Jack was a real nice person, but she wished that he would go to Church more. She hoped he would come around to that some day.
Then my mom mentioned something that brought back that feeling of uneasiness again. She said that the Maloys had moved to Oklahoma in 1979 from California. I thought that was odd that Jack had only arrived in Oklahoma in 1979, as he was a Shift Supervisor for as long as I could remember. Maybe even as far back as 1979 when I first worked at the plant as a summer help.
In that case, he would have been hired as a Shift Supervisor straight from California. — That seemed odd, since the majority of Shift Supervisors had worked their way up from Auxiliary Operator to Control Room Operator to Unit Supervisor, then finally to Shift Supervisor. Why would Jack be hired fresh from California? And how did Jack know so much about being a Shift Supervisor at our plant so quickly?
Then it dawned on me. You see…. It all went back to a lunch break about a year earlier when Charles Foster, an Electric Foreman and I were eating lunch in the Electric Shop office. When we didn’t know what to talk about, our favorite past time was to talk about movies and TV shows we had watched. We would describe the movie in detail to each other. On this particular day, Charles was doing the talking, and he was telling me about a movie that had to do with a Power Plant in California (yeah. California).
Charles Foster
As Charles described the story, he told me that there was this Shift Supervisor named Jack (yeah… like our Shift Supervisor… Jack Maloy), and he was such a good Shift Supervisor that he could tell that there was something wrong with the Boiler Feed Pumps just by the way the coffee in his coffee cup would vibrate. Yeah. He was that good.
Charles went on to tell me about how at one part of the movie the water level was dropping in a tank and it was imperative that they raise the water level or some big disaster was going to happen. — Now you see where I’m going with this? Yeah. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? At that time, the incident in the Control Room hadn’t happened yet with Jack Maloy.
The movie sounded interesting so, when I had the opportunity, we rented the VHS tape from the video store and I watched it. Sure enough. This is what I saw….
Here is Jack the Shift Supervisor in California working with his Control Room operator trying to divert a disaster
Here is Jack Maloy and Merl Wright from the team picture above:
Jack Maloy and Merl Wright
Very similar don’t you think? Two Shift Supervisors named Jack from California with the exact same hairstyle. Two Control Room Operators that look like Wilford Brimley. Coincidence?
Wilford Brimley in the movie playing the same job as Merl Wright
Even Wilford Brimley’s hairline is the same as Merl Wright’s hairline!
For those of you who don’t know yet. The name of the movie is: The China Syndrome. It is about a nuclear Power Plant that has a near meltdown:
The China Syndrome
Need more? Ok. — hey this is fun….. So…. This movie came out in 1979. The same year that Jack Maloy shows up in Oklahoma from California. Obviously an experienced Power Plant Shift Supervisor. Merl Wright went to work 10 months earlier in 1978 at an older power plant just down the road (The old Osage plant), and then shortly after, was transferred to the same plant with Jack Maloy, only to end up working for Jack.
Need more? The China Syndrome Movie came out on March 16, 1979. Jack Maloy began working at the Coal-Fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma February 26, 1979, just two and a half weeks earlier.
I mentioned this coincidence to Charles Foster one day, but as far as I know, I never mentioned it again to anyone else… Maybe Scott Hubbard, since he was my best friend as well…
Scott Hubbard – See how he smiled when I told him?
So, here are my thoughts about this….
What if Jack Maloy was the Shift Supervisor being portrayed in the movie “The China Syndrome”? He needed to move out of California just before the movie came out just in case someone found out his true identity. Being a Shift Supervisor at a Nuclear Power Plant, he would surely be in high demand at any Electric Company. Our particular Power Plant was in an out-of-the-way location. Sort of like a “witness protection program”.
I don’t know Merl’s earlier background, so I can still think that he moved to Oklahoma from California and began working for the Electric Company on April 24, 1978 just two weeks before I moved to Oklahoma from Columbia, Missouri. Since I don’t know any better, I can continue thinking this. It makes it more fun that way. — Of course, Merl, who may on occasion read this blog, may correct me in the comment section below…
So, what was it that I was experiencing that morning when I walked in the control room? I mean… What was I “really” experiencing? If, suppose, Jack and Merl really are the two that were in the control room when the “China Syndrome” almost occurred? Was it just an innocent crisis where the water level somehow decided to drop to a dangerously low level all by itself because of a faulty valve that was supposed to be closed, but was really open?
Or…
Was Jack and Merl trying to relive the excitement they had felt years earlier when they worked in a nuclear plant and they almost melted a hole all the way from there to China? Was this what experienced bored Power Plant Heroes do during downtime? I suppose it’s possible. It could have been a drill drummed up to test the acuity of the operators. To keep them on their toes. All “Shipshape and Bristol Fashion” just like on the Pequod in Moby Dick.
Something to think about.
Today Merl still lives in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Jack Maloy has moved to Cape Carol, Florida with his wife Louise. I suppose now that he has more time on his hand, hopefully he has given up smoking and is now making his wife happy by attending Church regularly. We can only hope he is at peace, on the opposite side of the United States from California so he doesn’t accidentally run into his old cohorts.
We are all glad that on his way to Florida from California that Jack decided to stop for 25 or so years in Oklahoma to Supervise the Coal-fired Power Plant out in the middle of the countryside…. As Charles Champlin from the Los Angeles Times said of the movie “The China Syndrome” — “Stunning and Skillfully Executed!” — Yeah. That describes Merl and Jack. Either way… Conspiracy or not. These two men are my heroes!
I wish Merl and Jack the best rest of their lives!
Comments from the original post: (one of my most commented posts)
Power Plant Security Guard Finds Fame Amid Mass Murder
Favorites Post #30
Originally posted April 18, 2015
I stayed home from work one Wednesday because I was going to be a guinea pig at the Stillwater Medical Center that morning while some nurses were being certified to give PICC lines. That is, when they insert a catheter in a vein in your arm and thread it all the way up to your heart. In order to be certified, you had to actually perform this procedure 2 or 3 times on a live vict…. um…. subject. My wife Kelly had coaxed me into this position with promises of Chicken Cacciatore.
PICC Catheter
Anyway. I was able to sleep in that morning. So, I had just risen from bed a few minutes before 9:00am in time to say goodbye to my daughter Elizabeth, who was on her way to Kindergarten. Kelly was taking her. I didn’t have to be ready to go to the hospital until 10:00.
I watched from our front atrium as my wife drove down the gravel driveway to the dirt road and turn right out of sight. As I walked back to our bedroom to take my shower, I heard and felt a rumble. To me it sounded like a semi truck had just pulled into our driveway. This was not too impossible, as our country neighbors would use our drive sometimes if a big truck needed to reach their barn.
I thought I would see what was going on, so I returned to the living room and looked out of the window. There was no truck. Then I thought that the rumble felt more like an earthquake than a truck. I used to live on the main highway through Stillwater (Highway 53, also known as 6th street) before moving out to the country, and I knew the difference between an earthquake and a semi truck.
I returned to bedroom and continued on my way to the shower. When I was finished, I walked into the bedroom and flipped on the TV. I thought I would see if there was any news about the earthquake on the news. Instead, for the next two hours I sat on the edge of the bed glued to the television as tears ran down my face.
At the time that I felt the earthquake, one of the Instrument and Controls Technicians at our Power Plant was talking to someone in our Corporate Headquarters in Oklahoma City. There was the sound of a large explosion and the person on the other end said there had been an explosion and they had to go, and the phone went dead. The Corporate Headquarters building is one block south of the Federal Murrah Building.
This was the morning of April 19, 1995. Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the bombing. I lived about 50 miles as the crow flies from the Federal Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. At 9:02 a.m. the earthquake I had felt was from the Murrah Building Bombing at the time when 168 people were killed by the blast.
Murrah Building before the bombing in 1995
As I sat watching the events unfold a yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis was driving north on I-35 toward Kansas. There was one anomaly about this car. The license plate on the back was not properly attached. As the car passed exit 186, the driver could see the Charles Machine Works off to the east manufacturing Ditch Witch trenchers in Perry, Oklahoma.
Ditch Witch Trencher
A Power Plant Security Guard at our plant, who as his second job (because working at a Power Plant would of course be the first and foremost job), was also a member of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol was on duty that day keeping the public safe. As he watched the flow of traffic the crooked license plate on the yellow car caught his attention. As was customary for officer Charlie Hanger, he proceeded to pull the car over.
Oklahoma State Trooper Charlie Hanger
The man that stepped out of the car was Timothy McVeigh, the person that left a truck bomb in a Ryder truck parked in front of the Murrah Building 90 minutes earlier:
Timothy McVeigh
After informing Officer Charlie that he had a weapon in the car, Charlie Hanger arrested him for carrying a concealed weapon. The rest of that part of the story is history.
Timothy McVeigh’s Getaway Car
At the Power Plant, some referred to the Security Guard Charlie Hanger as “Deputy Fife”.
Barney Fife played by Don Knotts in the Andy Griffith Show
It was said that he was the type of law enforcement officer that would arrest his own mother for jaywalking. What are the odds that Charlie was in the right place at the right time and had decided to pull this one car over?
Charlie Hanger said that the main reason that he pulled over Timothy McVeigh that day was because of Divine Intervention. God had placed him in the right place at the right time. This is a common occurrence for those who worked at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma. God had placed them at the right place at the right time.
If you lived anywhere around Central Oklahoma that day, then you know as well as I, that there was a lot more that went on, than Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols setting off a truck bomb. For those who watched the story unfold, we remember perfectly well that other unexploded bombs were found as the rescue effort began. Everyone was pulled off of the site several times while bombs were diffused, and the Whitewater files pertaining to the investigation into Hilary Clinton (which just happened to be stored in the Murrah Building) were quickly removed from the scene never to be seen again.
Oklahomans would tell you that the Conspiracy theory that makes the least sense is that the truck bomb is what brought the Murrah building down. Survivors that worked in the Murrah building had seen men doing things to the pillars in the parking garage below the building days before.
Aerial view of the Murrah Building after the bombing
If the truck bomb had destroyed that much of one of the most reinforced building in Oklahoma City, then it was the biggest and strangest truck bomb in history. When was the last time a truck bomb caused an earthquake that could be easily felt 50 miles away? It was interesting to watch how much effort was put into stopping investigations into the Murrah Building bombing. Even going so far as having a company from the Main Stream Media buy out KFOR TV station and quickly shut down the Murrah Building Bombing investigation by Jayna Davis.
Anyway… if you are interested in what I was watching during those first few hours, before the media rewrote the story, watch this documentary. I encourage you to watch these all the way through:
Here is a video from KFOR News about the Ryder truck bombing:
Here is a video about Jayna Davis’s investigation and Timothy McVeigh’s connection with Al Qaeda:
—- Well, I would show you this video, only YouTube has decided to take that video down.
Another video about the Murrah Building Bombing Conspiracy:
Just about everyone that lived around Oklahoma City at the time of the bombing was affected by the Oklahoma City Bombing. Here are some of my stories:
When Kelly came home, she told me that she had heard what happened on the radio. She called the hospital and some of the nurses had headed to Oklahoma City to help out with any medical needs. The PICC Line certification had been cancelled because the nurses and other medical professionals were all going to go help out. Kelly went to the hospital to fill in, because they were shorthanded. I told her that I would pick up Elizabeth from Kindergarten at noon.
After I picked up Elizabeth, I took her to the police station. We had been planning on going there that day, since I was taking the day off work and she said she would like to see the Police station just to see what it looked like. So, I figured we would go down there and ask for a tour.
When we arrived at the Stillwater Police Station, the front door was locked. I thought this was odd because it was the middle of the day. I could see people inside, so I knocked on the door. Someone came and opened the door and asked what we needed. I told them that I was wondering if it was possible for my daughter to have a tour of the police station. They were glad to show her all around.
Because of the way the person answered the door, I realized right away that they were in “lock down” mode because of the Murrah Building bombing.
My brother, who today is a U.S. Marine Colonel worked as the Executive Officer for the Marine Corps Recruiting office in the Murrah building in 1994. I had visited his office a year earlier. He left the previous June. Greg’s replacement, who was a father of four children, just like my brother was killed that day. The officer who first recruited my brother happened to be visiting that morning from Stillwater, was left blind. My brother felt responsible for the officer’s death because he had encouraged him to take his place when he moved on.
Colonel Gregory T. Breazile
One of the first two friends I had when I went to College was Kirby Davis. He worked as a journalist in the Journal Record building across the way from the Murrah Building. I met him one day by accident in September 1996 when I was working in Oklahoma City for the electric company. He was walking down the street during lunch. I had just visited the memorial fence at the Murrah Building site. I was still choked up by my visit to the fence when I saw him walking from across the street. I told my friend Mike Gibbs that I would see him later, I just saw an old friend of mine, and I wanted to go talk to him.
Memorial Fence at the site of the Murrah Building
I was surprised when I asked Kirby how he was doing and he replied that he was devastated. I asked him what had happened and he told me that the day the Murrah Building was bombed, his entire life had been ruined. At that point, I decided that even though my lunch hour was just about over Kirby needed to talk. So, we found a bench in a small park by his office and for the next hour he explained to me what had happened.
Even though the Journal Record building had been damaged in the bombing, that wasn’t what had destroyed Kirby. It was what happened in the aftermath. Here is the short story of what he said to me.
After the bombing occurred, rescue teams came from all over the country to help clear the debris. Kirby’s wife went to work at the Convention Center where they were housing the rescue workers to help serving them. While she was there serving the rescue workers, she became romantically involved with one of the workers. The result of this was that she divorced Kirby and moved away.
I walked with Kirby back to his office at the Journal Record and said goodbye to him and returned to work. I continue to pray for Kirby and his family. I ask that those of you who read my blog and are so inclined, please say a prayer for him as well.
As I mentioned, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. I think we should all take a moment to reflect on how in times of trouble like this, when evil seems to be having its way and tragedy is all around, God sends men like the trooper and Power Plant Guard Charlie Hangar.
Runaway Fire Hydrant Leaves Power Plant in the Dark
Favorites Post #13 (posted in no particular order)
Originally posted May 17, 2014:
Don’t believe it when the Electric Company tells you that the reason your town lost electricity for an hour was because a squirrel climbed onto a transformer and shorted it out. The real reason just may be more bizarre than that and the company doesn’t want you to know all the different creative ways that power can be shut off. This is a tale of just one of those ways. So, get out your pencil and paper and take notes.
Power Plant Notepad
One spring day in 1993 while sitting at the Precipitator computer for Unit one at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, while I was checking the controls to make sure all the cabinets were operating correctly, suddenly there was a distant boom, and the lights in the control room went out. The computer stayed on because it was connected to an electric panel called the VSP or Vital Services Panel, which in turn was supplied by the UPS system (Uninterruptible Power Supply). That was one of those moments where you may pause for a moment to make sure you aren’t still at home dreaming before you fly into a panic.
The Precipitator cabinets all indicated on the computer that they had just shutdown. I rose from the chair and walked around to the front of the Alarm Panel for Unit one, and found that the fluorescent lights were only out on Unit 1. The lights were still on for Unit 2. The Control Panel was lit up like a Christmas Tree with Green, Red, Blue and Yellow Lights. The Alarm Printer was spewing out paper at high speed. As the large sheets of paper were pouring out onto the floor, I watched as Pat Quiring and other brave Power Plant Control Room operators were scurrying back and forth turning switch handles, pushing buttons, and checking pressure gauges.
Just this site alone gave me confidence that everything was going to be all right. These Control Room operators were all well trained for emergencies just like this, and each person knew what their job was. No one was panicking. Everyone was concentrating on the task at hand.
Someone told me that we lost Unit 1, and the Auxiliary Power to Unit 1 at the same time. So, Unit 1 was dead in the water. This meant, no fans, no pumps, no lights, no vending machines, no cold water at the water fountain and most importantly, no hot coffee!!! I could hear steam valves on the T-G floor banging open and the loud sound of steam escaping.
I turned quickly to go to the electric shop to see what I could do there in case I was needed. I bolted out the door and down the six flights of stairs to the Turbine-Generator (T-G) basement. Exiting the stairway, and entering the T-G basement the sound was deafening. I grabbed the earplugs that were dangling around my neck and crammed them into my ears. Steam was pouring out of various pop-off valves. I ducked into the electric shop where across the room Andy Tubbs, one of the electric foreman was pulling large sheets of electric blueprints from the print cabinet and laying them across the work table that doubled as the lunch table.
Andy Tubbs – True Power Plant Electrician
When I asked Andy what happened, I learned that somehow when a crew was flushing out a fire hydrant the water somehow shot up and into the bus work in the Auxiliary Substation (that supplies backup power to the Power Plant) and it shorted out the 189,000 volt substation directly to ground. When that happened it tripped unit 1 and the auxiliary substation at the same time leaving it without power.
An example of part of an Auxiliary Substation
I will explain how a fire hydrant could possibly spray the bus work in a substation in a little while, but first let me tell you what this meant at the moment to not have any power for a Power Plant Boiler and Turbine Generator that has just tripped when it was at full load which was around 515 Megawatts of power at the time.
Normally when a unit trips, the boiler cools down as the large Force Draft (FD) Fans blow air through the boiler while the even larger Induced Draft (ID) fans suck the air from the boiler on the other end and blow the hot air up the smoke stack. This causes the steam in the boiler tubes to condense back into water. Steam valves open on the boiler that allow excessive steam to escape.
When the boiler is running there is a large orange fireball hovering in space in the middle of the boiler. The boiler water is being circulated through the boiler and the Boiler Feed Pump Turbines are pumping steam back and forth between the turbine generator and the boiler reheating the steam until every bit of heat from the boiler that can be safely harnessed is used.
When all this stop suddenly, then it is important that the large fans keep running to cool down the steam, since it is no longer losing energy in the generator as it was when it was busy supplying electricity to 1/2 million people in Oklahoma City. The power is fed to the fans from the Auxiliary substation located right outside the Main Switchgear where all the breakers reside that supply the power to the fans. Unfortunately, in this case, the Auxiliary substation was shutdown as well, leaving the boiler without any fans.
Without fans for cooling, and pumps to circulate the water, the walls of the boiler began heating up to dangerous temperatures. Steam was whistling out of pop off valves, but if the steam drum on the top of the boiler were to run dry, then the entire boiler structure could be compromised and begin melting down. — So, this was serious. Something had to be done right away. It wouldn’t be as bad as the China Syndrome since we were burning coal instead of nuclear power, but it would have caused a lot of damage nonetheless.
From the movie “The China Syndrome” where a similar emergency existed only in the movie, it was a Nuclear Plant
I have a side story about this picture, but I think I’ll save it for another post because I don’t want to digress from the main story at this point (Ok. Let me just say “Jack Maloy and Merl Wright” for those who can’t wait. See the post: “Power Plant Conspiracy Theory“).
With the prospect that the boiler might melt to the ground in a pile of rubble, it would seem that the main priority was to turn the Auxiliary Substation back on so the fans could be turned back on and prevent the boiler from collapsing. So, we walked out to the substation and looked at the switches that would have to be operated in order to first power up the main bus and then to close to supply power to the two big transformers and the six smaller transformers that supplied the Unit 1 Main Switchgear.
While inspecting the switches where the electricity had gone to ground we found that one of the main insulators was cracked.
A High Voltage Insulator like this
Since this insulator was cracked, we didn’t really want to operate the switch to test if another 189,000 volts would go straight to ground again, especially since one of us would be standing right underneath it cranking the switch. So, we went back to the shop to find an alternative.
By this time the Plant Manager, Ron Kilman arrived in the shop, and understanding the urgency to find a solution asked us what were the alternatives. He was relying on our expertise to make the decision.
Ron Kilman is the one on the left in the plaid shirt
The other solution would be to cut the power over from Unit 2 which was still humming away pushing electricity to Oklahoma City out of the 345,000 volt substation. The cut over would be very simple because the switchgear was designed with this in mind. We analyzed the power rating on the auxiliary transformers on Unit 2 and thought that we might be cutting it close to have them running both sets of fans at the same time, especially since the full load amps of a huge fan starting up was about 10 times the normal rate.
The transformer was rated to handle the load, but consider this. What if this caused Unit 2 to trip as well. With the Auxiliary substation offline, if Unit 2 tripped, we would be in twice the amount of trouble we were currently in. What a day it would have been if that had happened and two 250 foot boilers had come crashing to the ground in a pile of rubble. After reading the power ratings on the auxiliary transformers I was thinking, “Yeah, let’s do it! These transformers can handle it.” Andy was not so eager.
So, we were left with one alternative. That was to shut the switch in the Auxiliary substation that had the cracked insulator and take our chances that it wasn’t going to short to ground and blow up over our heads. I think I was eager to close the switch for Andy, but if I remember correctly, he didn’t want me to be the one to suffer the consequences and decided to close the switch himself. Needless to say. Andy closed the switch, and nothing blew up.
High Voltage Switch similar to the one we were closing
As soon as the power was restored to the switchgear, the fans were powered up and the temperature in the boiler was quickly reduced. The coffee pot in the Electric Shop began heating the coffee again. The power plant was saved from a major catastrophe. That was delayed for another day… of which I will talk about later (see the post “Destruction of a Power Plant God).”
So, how exactly does a fire hydrant shoot water up into the bus work of a substation like the picture of the switch directly above? The culprit fire hydrant wasn’t in the substation, it sat alongside it outside the fence a good 50 feet from the high voltage switch. No hose was attached to the fire hydrant. It was only being flushed out as part of a yearly activity to go around and make sure the fire hydrants are all operating correctly.
Here is the story about how the squirrel climbed into the transformer this time….
George Alley, Dale Mitchell and Mickey Postman were going around to the 30,000 fire hydrants on the plant ground (ok. maybe not that many, but we did have a lot of them), and they were opening up the valves and flushing them out. That means, they were letting them run for a while to clear them out from any contaminates that may have built up over the year of not being used.
Throughout their adventure they had opened a multitude of Hydrants situated out in the fields along the long belt conveyor from the coalyard and around the two one-million gallon #2 Diesel tanks.
Large Oil Tank about the size of the two that are at the Power Plant
The brave Power Plant Men, learned that when opening a fire hydrant wide open in the middle of field had unintended consequences. It tended to wash out the ground in front of the flow of the water shooting out of the hydrant. So the team of experts devised a plan to place a board in front of the hydrant when it would be in danger of tearing a hole in the terrain. The board would divert the water into the air where it would fan out and not cause damage to the surrounding area.
This was working fine, and when they arrived at the fire hydrant next to the substation, since the stream from the hydrant was pointing directly into the substation (hmm. a design flaw, I think), they decided to prop the board up against the fence to keep from washing away the gravel in the substation. Well. When a fire hydrant is opened that hasn’t been used for a year, the first flow of water to shoot out is dark brown.
You may think that this is because the water has somehow become dirty over the past year, but that isn’t quite the case. What has happened is that the pipe has been rusting little by little and the water has become saturated with the rust. So, the water shooting out of the hydrant was full of rust (hence the need to flush them out).
Well. Rust is made of metal. Metal is conductive, especially when it is mixed with water. When the water hit the board, it was deflected into the air and happened to direct itself directly into the high voltage switch in the substation. This caused a circuit to the ground which, once it created an arc pumped all the electricity directly into the ground.
Normally when something like this happens it doesn’t trip the Main Power Transformer to a Power Plant.
A Main Power Transformer
This time it did. I know there was a few heads scratching trying to figure it out. I think I figured out what happened a little while later. You see… here is the rest of the story….
Once the unit was back online and the emergency was over, someone finally noticed that the telephone system couldn’t call outside of the plant. Well. I was the main telephone person at the time, so the control room called me and asked me to look into the problem.
I checked the telephone computer and it was up and running just fine. Internal calls could be made. Only any call outside just concluded with a funny humming sound. After checking the circuit in the Logic Room next to the Rolm Telephone Computer I headed for…. guess where….. the Main Switchgear….
A ROLM Phone Computer
In the middle of the main switchgear in the back of the room right next to the Auxiliary Substation beyond the back wall, the outside telephone line came into the plant. The first thing it did was go through a special Telephone Surge Protector.
Telephone Grounding Panel
In this picture above, the silver circular buttons on the left side are really an old style surge protector. whenever there was a power surge, the carbon connection in the surge protector would quickly melt causing the circuit to go straight to ground. Thus protecting the rest of the telephone circuit. So, if some kid in their house decides to connect the 120 volts circuit to the telephone for fun to see what would happen, this circuit would protect the rest of the phone circuits. Keep in mind that this was during the early 1990 when “Surge Protection” still was basically all “mechanical”.
Anyway, when I arrived at this panel and I checked the surge protector to the main line going out of the plant, guess what I found…. Yep. Shorted to ground. Luckily there were some spares that were not wired to anything in the panel and I was able to swap them out for the ones that had been destroyed. — These were a one time use. Which meant, if they ever had to short to ground, they had to be replaced.
Ok. Fine. After a little while, we were able to call back out of the plant, though there was still some residual noise on the line. It was like this… when you called out of the plant, the person on the other end sounded like they were buried in a grave somewhere and they were trying to talk to someone living just like in an episode of the Twilight Episode where a phone line landed on a grave and the dead person tried to call his long lost love from the past.
Gladys Cooper in the Twilight Zone Episode “Night Call”
I didn’t give it much thought other than that I figured the 189,000 volt arc to ground must have shorted out the telephone line since the phone line ran directly under the auxiliary substation ground grid.
It wasn’t until the next morning when the Southwestern Bell repairman showed up at the plant. I knew him well, since he had been working on our phone lines since before the AT&T breakup in 1984. When I met him in the front of the electric shop, he said that he needed to check our telephone circuits. I told him that I knew that we had a problem because we had a high voltage short to ground yesterday and I found our surge protectors melted away.
He explained to me that not only was our circuit affected, but that every relay house from here to Ponca City was blown out. That’s when I realized that the problem was the reverse of the usual situation. What had happened was that the Ground Grid in the substation and the surrounding area (including the Unit 1 Main Power Transformer) had become hot. What do you do when the ground grid becomes charged?
The Ground Grid is what is supposed to protect you when a surge happens, but what happens when the ground grid itself is the problem? In this case, when the high voltage line about 60 feet from the telephone cable surge protector, arced to ground, it fed a tremendous amount of power back through the ground grid. when equipment detected the surge in voltage, they automatically defaulted their circuits to ground. That’s why the telephone circuit died. That’s what tripped the Main Power Transformer.
When the telephone circuit detected the high voltage surge, it shorted to ground (which was the problem), causing the high voltage to feed directly into the phone line and down the line to the next Southwestern Bell relay switch, which also defaulted to ground, trying to bleed off the surge as it went from relay switch to switch until enough of the power was able to be diverted to ground.
That day sure turned out to be a learning experience. I learned that when all the lights go out in the control room, that it is almost assured that the coffee pot in the electric shop is going to stop working. I also learned that in order to coax the plant manager to the electric shop, a major electrical tragedy is one good way. I learned that when shooting rusty water into the air don’t point it at a high voltage auxiliary substation switch. — I’m sure Mickey Postman learned that lesson too. I also learned that just like in Star Trek… whenever there is a dangerous job to do, the Captain is always the one that wants to do it. Does that make sense? Send a Peon like me in there…
I also learned something else about Power Plant Men…. You see…. People like Dale Mitchell, George Alley and Mickey Postman all are examples of incredibly wonderful Power Plant Men. When they were out there doing their duty and something tragic like this, all the Power Plant Men felt their pain. They knew that they all felt guilty for tripping the unit. It didn’t matter that a million dollars every so many minutes was walking out the door in revenue. The only thing that mattered was that these three men were safe.
Mickey Postman
Since I have left the Power Plant, I have found that the idea that the employee is the greatest asset that a company can possess is not a universal idea. You see, there was never the thought that any of these people should be fired for their mistake. On the contrary. The true Power Plant Men did whatever they could to let them know that they knew exactly how they felt. It could have happened to any of them.
Besides the friendship between Power Plant Men, one of the things I miss most about working at the Power Plant is that the employees are held in high esteem as a real asset to the company. Many could learn from their example.
Comments from the Original post
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That was an exciting day! Another great story. Thanks for the memories.
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I like the mix of storytelling and information sharing you deliver here. Thanks again
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Aug 8, 2011 I lost all reserve in and lost both units in 2 separate storms and A1 would not start for a few minutes and A2 was leaking antifreeze terribly not a scratch and back online in 34 hours both units and no one ever asked me one question even with a Safety Dept not one question asked of me the SS on duty. Not many men on the planet have ever experienced an uncontrolled total plant outage- you would of thought a learning opportunity would of took place. Feb 2011 worst winter temps in years 50 Units or more tripped in Texas let alone the trusty units of Redbud and McClain were fighting Sooner rolled right along with storm warnings for two weeks ahead – the ICS still went to Detroit for just tours of other facilities once again the fall guy Tarver McArthur stood alone. I had authored a Freeze Protection Plan for the plant and that seemed to save the day and explain to the regulatory bodies how we were online and everyone else in Texas was off and enjoying rolling blackouts in a terrible winter weather situation not to mention our powers that be were all stranded in Detroit and very few people could get to the plant without getting stuck trying to get there as well – but a few health heart issues later I am still here to tell about it all you would think folks would want to take advantage of someone that had went through the fire and Ice but thats ok I want them someday distant to get all the credit they deserve when the trumpets sound as that is truly what matters most. DT
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Great story, and yes, you took exactly the proper lesson from it, and it is too bad that many of our bosses haven’t learned it.
And yup, I’ve buried a lot of electrocuted squirrels over the years.
Runaway Fire Hydrant Leaves Power Plant in the Dark
Originally posted May 17, 2014:
Don’t believe it when the Electric Company tells you that the reason your town lost electricity for an hour was because a squirrel climbed onto a transformer and shorted it out. The real reason just may be more bizarre than that and the company doesn’t want you to know all the different creative ways that power can be shut off. This is a tale of just one of those ways. So, get out your pencil and paper and take notes.
Power Plant Notepad
One spring day in 1993 while sitting at the Precipitator computer for Unit one at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, while I was checking the controls to make sure all the cabinets were operating correctly, suddenly there was a distant boom, and the lights in the control room went out. The computer stayed on because it was connected to an electric panel called the VSP or Vital Services Panel, which in turn was supplied by the UPS system (Uninterruptible Power Supply). That was one of those moments where you may pause for a moment to make sure you aren’t still at home dreaming before you fly into a panic.
The Precipitator cabinets all indicated on the computer that they had just shutdown. I rose from the chair and walked around to the front of the Alarm Panel for Unit one, and found that the fluorescent lights were only out on Unit 1. The lights were still on for Unit 2. The Control Panel was lit up like a Christmas Tree with Green, Red, Blue and Yellow Lights. The Alarm Printer was spewing out paper at high speed. As the large sheets of paper were pouring out onto the floor, I watched as Pat Quiring and other brave Power Plant Control Room operators were scurrying back and forth turning switch handles, pushing buttons, and checking pressure gauges.
Just this site alone gave me confidence that everything was going to be all right. These Control Room operators were all well trained for emergencies just like this, and each person knew what their job was. No one was panicking. Everyone was concentrating on the task at hand.
Someone told me that we lost Unit 1, and the Auxiliary Power to Unit 1 at the same time. So, Unit 1 was dead in the water. This meant, no fans, no pumps, no lights, no vending machines, no cold water at the water fountain and most importantly, no hot coffee!!! I could hear steam valves on the T-G floor banging open and the loud sound of steam escaping.
I turned quickly to go to the electric shop to see what I could do there in case I was needed. I bolted out the door and down the six flights of stairs to the Turbine-Generator (T-G) basement. Exiting the stairway, and entering the T-G basement the sound was deafening. I grabbed the earplugs that were dangling around my neck and crammed them into my ears. Steam was pouring out of various pop-off valves. I ducked into the electric shop where across the room Andy Tubbs, one of the electric foreman was pulling large sheets of electric blueprints from the print cabinet and laying them across the work table that doubled as the lunch table.
Andy Tubbs – True Power Plant Electrician
When I asked Andy what happened, I learned that somehow when a crew was flushing out a fire hydrant the water somehow shot up and into the bus work in the Auxiliary Substation (that supplies backup power to the Power Plant) and it shorted out the 189,000 volt substation directly to ground. When that happened it tripped unit 1 and the auxiliary substation at the same time leaving it without power.
An example of part of an Auxiliary Substation
I will explain how a fire hydrant could possibly spray the bus work in a substation in a little while, but first let me tell you what this meant at the moment to not have any power for a Power Plant Boiler and Turbine Generator that has just tripped when it was at full load which was around 515 Megawatts of power at the time.
Normally when a unit trips, the boiler cools down as the large Force Draft (FD) Fans blow air through the boiler while the even larger Induced Draft (ID) fans suck the air from the boiler on the other end and blow the hot air up the smoke stack. This causes the steam in the boiler tubes to condense back into water. Steam valves open on the boiler that allow excessive steam to escape.
When the boiler is running there is a large orange fireball hovering in space in the middle of the boiler. The boiler water is being circulated through the boiler and the Boiler Feed Pump Turbines are pumping steam back and forth between the turbine generator and the boiler reheating the steam until every bit of heat from the boiler that can be safely harnessed is used.
When all this stop suddenly, then it is important that the large fans keep running to cool down the steam, since it is no longer losing energy in the generator as it was when it was busy supplying electricity to 1/2 million people in Oklahoma City. The power is fed to the fans from the Auxiliary substation located right outside the Main Switchgear where all the breakers reside that supply the power to the fans. Unfortunately, in this case, the Auxiliary substation was shutdown as well, leaving the boiler without any fans.
Without fans for cooling, and pumps to circulate the water, the walls of the boiler began heating up to dangerous temperatures. Steam was whistling out of pop off valves, but if the steam drum on the top of the boiler were to run dry, then the entire boiler structure could be compromised and begin melting down. — So, this was serious. Something had to be done right away. It wouldn’t be as bad as the China Syndrome since we were burning coal instead of nuclear power, but it would have caused a lot of damage nonetheless.
From the movie “The China Syndrome” where a similar emergency existed only in the movie, it was a Nuclear Plant
I have a side story about this picture, but I think I’ll save it for another post because I don’t want to digress from the main story at this point (Ok. Let me just say “Jack Maloy and Merl Wright” for those who can’t wait) See the post: “Power Plant Conspiracy Theory“.
With the prospect that the boiler might melt to the ground in a pile of rubble, it would seem that the main priority was to turn the Auxiliary Substation back on so the fans could be turned back on and prevent the boiler from collapsing. So, we walked out to the substation and looked at the switches that would have to be operated in order to first power up the main bus and then to close to supply power to the two big transformers and the six smaller transformers that supplied the Unit 1 Main Switchgear.
While inspecting the switches where the electricity had gone to ground we found that one of the main insulators was cracked.
A High Voltage Insulator like this
Since this insulator was cracked, we didn’t really want to operate the switch to test if another 189,000 volts would go straight to ground again, especially since one of us would be standing right underneath it cranking the switch. So, we went back to the shop to find an alternative.
By this time the Plant Manager, Ron Kilman arrived in the shop, and understanding the urgency to find a solution asked us what were the alternatives. He was relying on our expertise to make the decision.
Ron Kilman is the one on the left in the plaid shirt
The other solution would be to cut the power over from Unit 2 which was still humming away pushing electricity to Oklahoma City out of the 345,000 volt substation. The cut over would be very simple because the switchgear was designed with this in mind. We analyzed the power rating on the auxiliary transformers on Unit 2 and thought that we might be cutting it close to have them running both sets of fans at the same time, especially since the full load amps of a huge fan starting up was about 10 times the normal rate.
The transformer was rated to handle the load, but consider this. What if this caused Unit 2 to trip as well. With the Auxiliary substation offline, if Unit 2 tripped, we would be in twice the amount of trouble we were currently in. What a day it would have been if that had happened and two 250 foot boilers had come crashing to the ground in a pile of rubble. After reading the power ratings on the auxiliary transformers I was thinking, “Yeah, let’s do it! These transformers can handle it.” Andy was not so eager.
So, we were left with one alternative. That was to shut the switch in the Auxiliary substation that had the cracked insulator and take our chances that it wasn’t going to short to ground and blow up over our heads. I think I was eager to close the switch for Andy, but if I remember correctly, he didn’t want me to be the one to suffer the consequences and decided to close the switch himself. Needless to say. Andy closed the switch, and nothing blew up.
High Voltage Switch similar to the one we were closing
As soon as the power was restored to the switchgear, the fans were powered up and the temperature in the boiler was quickly reduced. The coffee pot in the Electric Shop began heating the coffee again. The power plant was saved from a major catastrophe. That was delayed for another day… of which I will talk about later (see the post “Destruction of a Power Plant God).”
So, how exactly does a fire hydrant shoot water up into the bus work of a substation like the picture of the switch directly above? The culprit fire hydrant wasn’t in the substation, it sat alongside it outside the fence a good 50 feet from the high voltage switch. No hose was attached to the fire hydrant. It was only being flushed out as part of a yearly activity to go around and make sure the fire hydrants are all operating correctly.
Here is the story about how the squirrel climbed into the transformer this time….
George Alley, Dale Mitchell and Mickey Postman were going around to the 30,000 fire hydrants on the plant ground (ok. maybe not that many, but we did have a lot of them), and they were opening up the valves and flushing them out. That means, they were letting them run for a while to clear them out from any contaminates that may have built up over the year of not being used.
Throughout their adventure they had opened a multitude of Hydrants situated out in the fields along the long belt conveyor from the coalyard and around the two one-million gallon #2 Diesel tanks.
Large Oil Tank about the size of the two that are at the Power Plant
The brave Power Plant Men, learned that when opening a fire hydrant wide open in the middle of field had unintended consequences. It tended to wash out the ground in front of the flow of the water shooting out of the hydrant. So the team of experts devised a plan to place a board in front of the hydrant when it would be in danger of tearing a hole in the terrain. The board would divert the water into the air where it would fan out and not cause damage to the surrounding area.
This was working fine, and when they arrived at the fire hydrant next to the substation, since the stream from the hydrant was pointing directly into the substation (hmm. a design flaw, I think), they decided to prop the board up against the fence to keep from washing away the gravel in the substation. Well. When a fire hydrant is opened that hasn’t been used for a year, the first flow of water to shoot out is dark brown.
You may think that this is because the water has somehow become dirty over the past year, but that isn’t quite the case. What has happened is that the pipe has been rusting little by little and the water has become saturated with the rust. So, the water shooting out of the hydrant was full of rust (hence the need to flush them out).
Well. Rust is made of metal. Metal is conductive, especially when it is mixed with water. When the water hit the board, it was deflected into the air and happened to direct itself directly into the high voltage switch in the substation. This caused a circuit to the ground which, once it created an arc pumped all the electricity directly into the ground.
Normally when something like this happens it doesn’t trip the Main Power Transformer to a Power Plant.
A Main Power Transformer
This time it did. I know there was a few heads scratching trying to figure it out. I think I figured out what happened a little while later. You see… here is the rest of the story….
Once the unit was back online and the emergency was over, someone finally noticed that the telephone system couldn’t call outside of the plant. Well. I was the main telephone person at the time, so the control room called me and asked me to look into the problem.
I checked the telephone computer and it was up and running just fine. Internal calls could be made. Only any call outside just concluded with a funny humming sound. After checking the circuit in the Logic Room next to the Rolm Telephone Computer I headed for…. guess where….. the Main Switchgear….
A ROLM Phone Computer
In the middle of the main switchgear in the back of the room right next to the Auxiliary Substation beyond the back wall, the outside telephone line came into the plant. The first thing it did was go through a special Telephone Surge Protector.
Telephone Grounding Panel
In this picture above, the silver circular buttons on the left side are really an old style surge protector. whenever there was a power surge, the carbon connection in the surge protector would quickly melt causing the circuit to go straight to ground. Thus protecting the rest of the telephone circuit. So, if some kid in their house decides to connect the 120 volts circuit to the telephone for fun to see what would happen, this circuit would protect the rest of the phone circuits. Keep in mind that this was during the early 1990 when “Surge Protection” still was basically all “mechanical”.
Anyway, when I arrived at this panel and I checked the surge protector to the main line going out of the plant, guess what I found…. Yep. Shorted to ground. Luckily there were some spares that were not wired to anything in the panel and I was able to swap them out for the ones that had been destroyed. — These were a one time use. Which meant, if they ever had to short to ground, they had to be replaced.
Ok. Fine. After a little while, we were able to call back out of the plant, though there was still some residual noise on the line. It was like this… when you called out of the plant, the person on the other end sounded like they were buried in a grave somewhere and they were trying to talk to someone living just like in an episode of the Twilight Episode where a phone line landed on a grave and the dead person tried to call his long lost love from the past.
Gladys Cooper in the Twilight Zone Episode “Night Call”
I didn’t give it much thought other than that I figured the 189,000 volt arc to ground must have shorted out the telephone line since the phone line ran directly under the auxiliary substation ground grid.
It wasn’t until the next morning when the Southwestern Bell repairman showed up at the plant. I knew him well, since he had been working on our phone lines since before the AT&T breakup in 1984. When I met him in the front of the electric shop, he said that he needed to check our telephone circuits. I told him that I knew that we had a problem because we had a high voltage short to ground yesterday and I found our surge protectors melted away.
He explained to me that not only was our circuit affected, but that every relay house from here to Ponca City was blown out. That’s when I realized that the problem was the reverse of the usual situation. What had happened was that the Ground Grid in the substation and the surrounding area (including the Unit 1 Main Power Transformer) had become hot. What do you do when the ground grid becomes charged?
The Ground Grid is what is supposed to protect you when a surge happens, but what happens when the ground grid itself is the problem? In this case, when the high voltage line about 60 feet from the telephone cable surge protector, arced to ground, it fed a tremendous amount of power back through the ground grid. when equipment detected the surge in voltage, they automatically defaulted their circuits to ground. That’s why the telephone circuit died. That’s what tripped the Main Power Transformer.
When the telephone circuit detected the high voltage surge, it shorted to ground (which was the problem), causing the high voltage to feed directly into the phone line and down the line to the next Southwestern Bell relay switch, which also defaulted to ground, trying to bleed off the surge as it went from relay switch to switch until enough of the power was able to be diverted to ground.
That day sure turned out to be a learning experience. I learned that when all the lights go out in the control room, that it is almost assured that the coffee pot in the electric shop is going to stop working. I also learned that in order to coax the plant manager to the electric shop, a major electrical tragedy is one good way. I learned that when shooting rusty water into the air don’t point it at a high voltage auxiliary substation switch. — I’m sure Mickey Postman learned that lesson too. I also learned that just like in Star Trek… whenever there is a dangerous job to do, the Captain is always the one that wants to do it. Does that make sense? Send a Peon like me in there…
I also learned something else about Power Plant Men…. You see…. People like Dale Mitchell, George Alley and Mickey Postman all are examples of incredibly wonderful Power Plant Men. When they were out there doing their duty and something tragic like this, all the Power Plant Men felt their pain. They knew that they all felt guilty for tripping the unit. It didn’t matter that a million dollars every so many minutes was walking out the door in revenue. The only thing that mattered was that these three men were safe.
Mickey Postman
Since I have left the Power Plant, I have found that the idea that the employee is the greatest asset that a company can possess is not a universal idea. You see, there was never the thought that any of these people should be fired for their mistake. On the contrary. The true Power Plant Men did whatever they could to let them know that they knew exactly how they felt. It could have happened to any of them.
Besides the friendship between Power Plant Men, one of the things I miss most about working at the Power Plant is that the employees are held in high esteem as a real asset to the company. Many could learn from their example.
Comments from the Original post
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That was an exciting day! Another great story. Thanks for the memories.
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-
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I like the mix of storytelling and information sharing you deliver here. Thanks again
-
-
-
Aug 8, 2011 I lost all reserve in and lost both units in 2 separate storms and A1 would not start for a few minutes and A2 was leaking antifreeze terribly not a scratch and back online in 34 hours both units and no one ever asked me one question even with a Safety Dept not one question asked of me the SS on duty. Not many men on the planet have ever experienced an uncontrolled total plant outage- you would of thought a learning opportunity would of took place. Feb 2011 worst winter temps in years 50 Units or more tripped in Texas let alone the trusty units of Redbud and McClain were fighting Sooner rolled right along with storm warnings for two weeks ahead – the ICS still went to Detroit for just tours of other facilities once again the fall guy Tarver McArthur stood alone. I had authored a Freeze Protection Plan for the plant and that seemed to save the day and explain to the regulatory bodies how we were online and everyone else in Texas was off and enjoying rolling blackouts in a terrible winter weather situation not to mention our powers that be were all stranded in Detroit and very few people could get to the plant without getting stuck trying to get there as well – but a few health heart issues later I am still here to tell about it all you would think folks would want to take advantage of someone that had went through the fire and Ice but thats ok I want them someday distant to get all the credit they deserve when the trumpets sound as that is truly what matters most. DT
-
-
Great story, and yes, you took exactly the proper lesson from it, and it is too bad that many of our bosses haven’t learned it.
And yup, I’ve buried a lot of electrocuted squirrels over the years.
Power Plant Conspiracy Theory
Originally posted September 20, 2014.
I remember the moment when it dawned on me that I may be witnessing an incredible Coal-fired Power Plant Conspiracy! I had just walked into the Control Room one morning in 1990 at the plant in North Central Oklahoma and saw the Shift Supervisor Jack Maloy and Merl Wright in a state of high concentration.
I always knew something was up when Jack Maloy was standing behind the large blue monitors near the Unit 1 Main Electric Board watching the big picture while the Control Room Operator Merl Wright was at the Main Control Panel turning knobs, tapping indicators to make sure they had the correct readings, twisting switches, holding them until red lights turned green…
I love this picture! — not our plant but may be part of the conspiracy
Where had I seen this before? Something was telling me that everything wasn’t as it seemed. Sure… there was an emergency going on. There was no doubt about that. I knew that between Jack Maloy and Merl Wright, the current problem of the main boiler drum losing water was quickly going to be solved. I knew that Oklahoma City wasn’t going to experience any blackouts that day. This was a Cracker Jack team! But I couldn’t help thinking I had seen this somewhere before, and it was gnawing at my common sense.
Here is a picture of Jack Maloy’s team at the time:
Jack Maloy is standing on the far right with the vertically striped shirt (like bars in a jail) directly behind Merl Wright kneeling before him – Coincidence? I think not.
I backed off in a corner to observe the situation while a crowd of operators began to grow to watch the master Shift Supervisor and his faithful Control Room Operator divert a disaster. Merl picked up the walkie talkie from the desk and called Larry Tapp ( Larry is the man in the light blue shirt in the front row in the middle. He’s the only one in the front row that is actually standing, while the rest are down on their knees while the picture is being taken).
Larry was on the boiler opening and closing valves. John Belusko, the Unit Supervisor was out there with him. I can’t tell you what magic they were performing, since I think that’s top secret. I figured that, because the operators seemed to be talking in code. Merl would key the microphone on the walkie talkie and say something like, “Larry, 45”. Larry would reply with something like “Quarter Turn”. “Position?”, “18 as far as I can tell”.
A Motorola Walkie Talkie like this
I translated the coded words to say: “….crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it around the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped and all was safe.” (Something I had read in Moby Dick, by Herman Melville).
Jack paced back and forth behind the counter with the monitors. Then he stopped and read the paper that was streaming out of the alarm printer as it continued humming as the paper piled up on the floor in front of him. Jack was a heavy smoker, and I could tell that right then he would rather be standing out on the T-G floor having a smoke at that moment. Before cigarettes were banned in the control room, Jack would have been pointing at that board with the cigarette.
When the water level began rising in the Boiler Drum, I could see the relieve on everyone’s face. I supposed it meant that a major catastrophe had been avoided due to the intricate knowledge that each operator possessed and their ability to quickly respond to any situation. This made the uneasy feeling I was having even worse. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had seen this before. Just like Deja Vu.
It wasn’t till about a week later when my mom asked me if I knew someone at work named Jack Maloy. She had been talking to a friend of hers from Church named Louise and she mentioned that her husband worked at the Power Plant north of town. I replied by saying that I knew Jack Maloy well. He is a Shift Supervisor. She said that his wife Louise told her that Jack was a real nice person, but she wished that he would go to Church more. She hoped he would come around to that some day.
Then my mom mentioned something that brought back that feeling of uneasiness again. She said that the Maloys had moved to Oklahoma in 1979 from California. I thought that was odd that Jack had only arrived in Oklahoma in 1979, as he was a Shift Supervisor for as long as I could remember. Maybe even as far back as 1979 when I first worked at the plant as a summer help.
In that case, he would have been hired as a Shift Supervisor straight from California. — That seemed odd, since the majority of Shift Supervisors had worked their way up from Auxiliary Operator to Control Room Operator to Unit Supervisor, then finally to Shift Supervisor. Why would Jack be hired fresh from California? And how did Jack know so much about being a Shift Supervisor at our plant so quickly?
Then it dawned on me. You see…. It all went back to a lunch break about a year earlier when Charles Foster, an Electric Foreman and I were eating lunch in the Electric Shop office. When we didn’t know what to talk about, our favorite past time was to talk about movies and TV shows we had watched. We would describe the movie in detail to each other. On this particular day, Charles was doing the talking, and he was telling me about a movie that had to do with a Power Plant in California (yeah. California).
Charles Foster
As Charles described the story, he told me that there was this Shift Supervisor named Jack (yeah… like our Shift Supervisor… Jack Maloy), and he was such a good Shift Supervisor that he could tell that there was something wrong with the Boiler Feed Pumps just by the way the coffee in his coffee cup would vibrate. Yeah. He was that good.
Charles went on to tell me about how at one part of the movie the water level was dropping in a tank and it was imperative that they raise the water level or some big disaster was going to happen. — Now you see where I’m going with this? Yeah. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? At that time, the incident in the Control Room hadn’t happened yet with Jack Maloy.
The movie sounded interesting so, when I had the opportunity, we rented the VHS tape from the video store and I watched it. Sure enough. This is what I saw….
Here is Jack the Shift Supervisor in California working with his Control Room operator trying to divert a disaster
Here is Jack Maloy and Merl Wright from the team picture above:
Jack Maloy and Merl Wright
Very similar don’t you think? Two Shift Supervisors named Jack from California with the exact same hairstyle. Two Control Room Operators that look like Wilford Brimley. Coincidence?
Wilford Brimley in the movie playing the same job as Merl Wright
Even Wilford Brimley’s hairline is the same as Merl Wright’s hairline!
For those of you who don’t know yet. The name of the movie is: The China Syndrome. It is about a nuclear Power Plant that has a near meltdown:
The China Syndrome
Need more? Ok. — hey this is fun….. So…. This movie came out in 1979. The same year that Jack Maloy shows up in Oklahoma from California. Obviously an experienced Power Plant Shift Supervisor. Merl Wright went to work 10 months earlier in 1978 at an older power plant just down the road (The old Osage plant), and then shortly after, was transferred to the same plant with Jack Maloy, only to end up working for Jack.
Need more? The China Syndrome Movie came out on March 16, 1979. Jack Maloy began working at the Coal-Fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma February 26, 1979, just two and a half weeks earlier.
I mentioned this coincidence to Charles Foster one day, but as far as I know, I never mentioned it again to anyone else… Maybe Scott Hubbard, since he was my best friend as well…
Scott Hubbard – See how he smiled when I told him?
So, here are my thoughts about this….
What if Jack Maloy was the Shift Supervisor being portrayed in the movie “The China Syndrome”? He needed to move out of California just before the movie came out just in case someone found out his true identity. Being a Shift Supervisor at a Nuclear Power Plant, he would surely be in high demand at any Electric Company. Our particular Power Plant was in an out-of-the-way location. Sort of like a “witness protection program”.
I don’t know Merl’s earlier background, so I can still think that he moved to Oklahoma from California and began working for the Electric Company on April 24, 1978 just two weeks before I moved to Oklahoma from Columbia, Missouri. Since I don’t know any better, I can continue thinking this. It makes it more fun that way. — Of course, Merl, who may on occasion read this blog, may correct me in the comment section below…
So, what was it that I was experiencing that morning when I walked in the control room? I mean… What was I “really” experiencing? If, suppose, Jack and Merl really are the two that were in the control room when the “China Syndrome” almost occurred? Was it just an innocent crisis where the water level somehow decided to drop to a dangerously low level all by itself because of a faulty valve that was supposed to be closed, but was really open?
Or…
Was Jack and Merl trying to relive the excitement they had felt years earlier when they worked in a nuclear plant and they almost melted a hole all the way from there to China? Was this what experienced bored Power Plant Heroes do during downtime? I suppose it’s possible. It could have been a drill drummed up to test the acuity of the operators. To keep them on their toes. All “Shipshape and Bristol Fashion” just like on the Pequod in Moby Dick.
Something to think about.
Today Merl still lives in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Jack Maloy has moved to Cape Carol, Florida with his wife Louise. I suppose now that he has more time on his hand, hopefully he has given up smoking and is now making his wife happy by attending Church regularly. We can only hope he is at peace, on the opposite side of the United States from California so he doesn’t accidentally run into his old cohorts.
We are all glad that on his way to Florida from California that Jack decided to stop for 25 or so years in Oklahoma to Supervise the Coal-fired Power Plant out in the middle of the countryside…. As Charles Champlin from the Los Angeles Times said of the movie “The China Syndrome” — “Stunning and Skillfully Executed!” — Yeah. That describes Merl and Jack. Either way… Conspiracy or not. These two men are my heroes!
I wish Merl and Jack the best rest of their lives!
Comments from the original post: (one of my most commented posts)
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I remember in the 1980’s when someone had taken one of the spare annunciator windows out and placed a hand written paper in it that said ” China Syndrome”. It was there for a while.
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Thanks Fred for reminding me of that. Um… I didn’t do it!
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Jack was from Byng, Oklahoma- a Byng graduate he had attended Okmulgee Tech as well- He worked at Barstow, CA awhile at a plant there- and there training was far different than ours is who he learned so much- he even did some lineman training for them as well as other stuff- I don’t know all his capacity while he was there- he had a lot of experience with combined cycle unit they had but, I know one thing he was a heck of an operator- seen him do some things know one else could ever do- he had the best power plant knowledge of any of the operators ever other than Joe , he, Joe Gallahar, and Padgett were all really good ones. learned a lot from everyone.
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LOL You hooked me in early on this one, but as soon as you said “by the way the coffee in his coffee cup would vibrate” I knew which track we were on an enjoyed the rest of the ride. Reminded me of the movie and also the very real stress of Three Mile Island. Funny how your “conspiracy theory” brought those feelings of terror back more than 35 years after I was sitting glued to the TV every day when I came home from high school!
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Great story! And 2 great men. Thanks for the memories.
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awesome conspiracy story…maybe Jack knew just how to mess with the system, just so he could save it, all in hopes that they would make another movie out of his job.
So anyway, I really enjoyed that. Thanks for sharing. -
We got The China Syndrome from the library based on this post! Good movie, it does seem very coincidental the way Jack just sort of appeared at your plant right before the movie came out. I love a good conspiracy theory 😉
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God, I must be old. China Syndrome came to mind as soon as you said near tragedy in California plant! I saw this in the theater fresh out of high school. Jane and Jack were incredible by the way. Interesting theories. Anything is possible. And probable. Nice post.
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Good post. Did you ever talk to Jack about California?
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No. I didn’t want to open that can of worms. 🙂
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Power Plant Security Guard Finds Fame Amid Mass Murder
I stayed home one Wednesday morning because I was going to be a guinea pig at the Stillwater Medical Center that morning while some nurses were being certified to give PICC lines. That is, when they insert a catheter in a vein in your arm and thread it all the way up to your heart. In order to be certified, you had to actually perform this procedure 2 or 3 times on a live vict…. uh…. subject. My wife Kelly had coaxed me into this position with promises of Chicken Cacciatore.
PICC Catheter
Anyway. I was able to sleep in that morning. So, I had just risen from bed a few minutes before 9:00am in time to say goodbye to my daughter Elizabeth, who was on her way to Kindergarten. Kelly was taking her. I didn’t have to be ready to go to the hospital until 10:00.
I watched from our front atrium as my wife drove down the gravel driveway to the dirt road and turn right out of sight. As I walked back to our bedroom to take my shower, I heard and felt a rumble. To me it sounded like a semi truck had just pulled into our driveway. This was not too impossible, as our country neighbors would use our drive sometimes if a big truck needed to reach their barn.
I thought I would see what was going on, so I returned to the living room and looked out of the window. There was no truck. Then I thought that the rumble felt more like an earthquake than a truck. I used to live on the main highway through Stillwater (Highway 53, also known as 6th street) before moving out to the country, and I knew the difference between an earthquake and a semi truck.
I returned to bedroom and continued on my way to the shower. When I was finished, I walked into the bedroom and flipped on the TV. I thought I would see if there was any news about the earthquake on the news. Instead, for the next two hours I sat on the edge of the bed glued to the television as tears ran down my face.
At the time that I felt the earthquake, one of the Instrument and Controls Technicians at our Power Plant was talking to someone in our Corporate Headquarters in Oklahoma City. There was the sound of a large explosion and the person on the other end said there had been an explosion and they had to go, and the phone went dead. The Corporate Headquarters building is one block south of the Federal Murrah Building.
This was the morning of April 15, 1995. Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the bombing. I lived about 50 miles as the crow flies from the Federal Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. At 9:02 a.m. the earthquake I had felt was from the Murrah Building Bombing at the time when 168 people were killed by the blast.
Murrah Building before the bombing in 1995
As I sat watching the events unfold a yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis was driving north on I-35 toward Kansas. There was one anomaly about this car. The license plate on the back was not properly attached. As the car passed exit 186, the driver could see the Charles Machine Works off to the east manufacturing Ditch Witch trenchers in Perry, Oklahoma.
Ditch Witch Trencher
A Power Plant Security Guard at our plant, who as his second job (because working at a Power Plant would of course be the first and foremost job), was also a member of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol was on duty that day keeping the public safe. As he watched the flow of traffic the crooked license plate on the yellow car caught his attention. As was customary for officer Charlie Hanger, he proceeded to pull the car over.
Oklahoma State Trooper Charlie Hanger
The man that stepped out of the car was Timothy McVeigh, the person that left a truck bomb in a Ryder truck parked in front of the Murrah Building 90 minutes earlier:
Timothy McVeigh
After informing Officer Charlie that he had a weapon in the car, Charlie Hanger arrested him for carrying a concealed weapon. The rest of that part of the story is history.
Timothy McVeigh’s Getaway Car
At the Power Plant, some referred to the Security Guard Charlie Hanger as “Deputy Fife”.
Barney Fife played by Don Knotts in the Andy Griffith Show
It was said that he was the type of law enforcement officer that would arrest his own mother for jaywalking. What are the odds that Charlie was in the right place at the right time and had decided to pull this one car over?
Charlie Hanger said that the main reason that he pulled over Timothy McVeigh that day was because of Divine Intervention. God had placed him in the right place at the right time. This is a common occurence for those who worked at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma. God had placed them at the right place at the right time.
If you lived anywhere around Central Oklahoma that day, then you know as well as I, that there was a lot more that went on, than Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols setting off a truck bomb. For those who watched the story unfold, we remember perfectly well that other unexploded bombs were found as the rescue effort began. Everyone was pulled off of the site several times while bombs were diffused, and the Whitewater files pertaining to the investigation into Hilary Clinton (which just happened to be stored in the Murrah Building) were quickly removed from the scene never to be seen again.
Oklahomans would tell you that the Conspiracy theory that makes the least sense is that the truck bomb is what brought the Murrah building down. Survivors that worked in the Murrah building had seen men doing things to the pillars in the parking garage below the building days before.
Aerial view of the Murrah Building after the bombing
If the truck bomb had destroyed that much of one of the most reinforced building in Oklahoma City, then it was the biggest and strangest truck bomb in history. It was interesting to watch how much effort was put into stopping investigations into the Murrah Building bombing. Even going so far as having a company from the Main Stream Media buy out KFOR TV station and quickly shut down the Murrah Building Bombing investigation by Jayna Davis.
Anyway… if you are interested in what I was watching during those first few hours, before the media rewrote the story, watch this documentary. I encourage you to watch these all the way through:
Here is a video from KFOR News about the Ryder truck bombing:
Here is a video about Jayna Davis’s investigation and Timothy McVeigh’s connection with Al Qaeda:
Another video about the Murrah Building Bombing Conspiracy:
Just about everyone that lived around Oklahoma City at the time of the bombing was affected by the Oklahoma City Bombing. Here are some of my stories:
When Kelly came home, she told me that she had heard what happened on the radio. She called the hospital and some of the nurses had headed to Oklahoma City to help out with any medical needs. The PICC Line certification had been cancelled because the nurses and other medical professionals were all going to go help out. Kelly went to the hospital to fill in, because they were shorthanded. I told her that I would pick up Elizabeth from Kindergarten at noon.
After I picked up Elizabeth, I took her to the police station. We had been planning on going there that day, since I was taking the day off work and she said she would like to see the Police station just to see what it looked like. So, I figured we would go down there and ask for a tour.
When we arrived at the Stillwater Police Station, the front door was locked. I thought this was odd because it was the middle of the day. I could see people inside, so I knocked on the door. Someone came and opened the door and asked what we needed. I told them that I was wondering if it was possible for my daughter to have a tour of the police station. They were glad to show her all around.
Because of the way the person answered the door, I realized right away that they were in “lock down” mode because of the Murrah Building bombing.
My brother, who today is a U.S. Marine Colonel worked as the Executive Officer for the Marine Corps Recruiting office in the Murrah building in 1994. I had visited his office a year earlier. He left the previous June. Greg’s replacement, who was a father of four children, just like my brother was killed that day. The officer who first recruited my brother happened to be visiting that morning from Stillwater, was left blind. My brother felt responsible for the officer’s death because he had encouraged him to take his place when he moved on.
Colonel Gregory T. Breazile
One of the first two friends I had when I went to College was Kirby Davis. He worked as a journalist in the Journal Record building across the way from the Murrah Building. I met him one day by accident in September 1996 when I was working in Oklahoma City for the electric company. He was walking down the street during lunch. I had just visited the memorial fence at the Murrah Building site. I was still choked up by my visit to the fence when I saw him walking from across the street. I told my friend Mike Gibbs that I would see him later, I just saw an old friend of mine, and I wanted to go talk to him.
Memorial Fence at the site of the Murrah Building
I was surprised when I asked Kirby how he was doing and he replied that he was devastated. I asked him what had happened and he told me that the day the Murrah Building was bombed, his entire life had been ruined. At that point, I decided that even though my lunch hour was just about over Kirby needed to talk. So, we found a bench in a small park by his office and for the next hour he explained to me what had happened.
Even though the Journal Record building had been damaged in the bombing, that wasn’t what had destroyed Kirby. It was what happened in the aftermath. Here is the short story of what he said to me.
After the bombing occurred, rescue teams came from all over the country to help clear the debris. Kirby’s wife went to work at the Convention Center where they were housing the rescue workers to help serving them. While she was there serving the rescue workers, she became romantically involved with one of the workers. The result of this was that she divorced Kirby and moved away.
I walked with Kirby back to his office at the Journal Record and said goodbye to him and returned to work. I continue to pray for Kirby and his family. I ask that those of you who read my blog and are so inclined, please say a prayer for him as well.
As I mentiioned, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. I think we should all take a moment to reflect on how in times of trouble like this, when evil seems to be having its way and tragedy is all around, God sends men like the trooper and Power Plant Guard Charlie Hangar.
Runaway Fire Hydrant Leaves Power Plant in the Dark
Originally posted May 17, 2014:
Don’t believe it when the Electric Company tells you that the reason your town lost electricity for an hour was because a squirrel climbed onto a transformer and shorted it out. The real reason just may be more bizarre than that and the company doesn’t want you to know all the different creative ways that power can be shut off. This is a tale of just one of those ways. So, get out your pencil and paper and take notes.
Power Plant Notepad
One spring day in 1993 while sitting at the Precipitator computer for Unit one at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma, while I was checking the controls to make sure all the cabinets were operating correctly, suddenly there was a distant boom, and the lights in the control room went out. The computer stayed on because it was connected to an electric panel called the VSP or Vital Services Panel, which in turn was supplied by the UPS system (Uninterruptible Power Supply). That was one of those moments where you may pause for a moment to make sure you aren’t still at home dreaming before you fly into a panic.
The Precipitator cabinets all indicated on the computer that they had just shutdown. I rose from the chair and walked around to the front of the Alarm Panel for Unit one, and found that the fluorescent lights were only out on Unit 1. The lights were still on for Unit 2. The Control Panel was lit up like a Christmas Tree with Green, Red, Blue and Yellow Lights. The Alarm Printer was spewing out paper at high speed. As the large sheets of paper were pouring out onto the floor, I watched as Pat Quiring and other brave Power Plant Control Room operators were scurrying back and forth turning switch handles, pushing buttons, and checking pressure gauges.
Just this site alone gave me confidence that everything was going to be all right. These Control Room operators were all well trained for emergencies just like this, and each person knew what their job was. No one was panicking. Everyone was concentrating on the task at hand.
Someone told me that we lost Unit 1, and the Auxiliary Power to Unit 1 at the same time. So, Unit 1 was dead in the water. This meant, no fans, no pumps, no lights, no vending machines, no cold water at the water fountain and most importantly, no hot coffee!!! I could hear steam valves on the T-G floor banging open and the loud sound of steam escaping.
I turned quickly to go to the electric shop to see what I could do there in case I was needed. I bolted out the door and down the six flights of stairs to the Turbine-Generator (T-G) basement. Exiting the stairway, and entering the T-G basement the sound was deafening. I grabbed the earplugs that were dangling around my neck and crammed them into my ears. Steam was pouring out of various pop-off valves. I ducked into the electric shop where across the room Andy Tubbs, one of the electric foreman was pulling large sheets of electric blueprints from the print cabinet and laying them across the work table that doubled as the lunch table.
Andy Tubbs – True Power Plant Electrician
When I asked Andy what happened, I learned that somehow when a crew was flushing out a fire hydrant the water somehow shot up and into the bus work in the Auxiliary Substation (that supplies backup power to the Power Plant) and it shorted out the 189,000 volt substation directly to ground. When that happened it tripped unit 1 and the auxiliary substation at the same time leaving it without power.
An example of part of an Auxiliary Substation
I will explain how a fire hydrant could possibly spray the bus work in a substation in a little while, but first let me tell you what this meant at the moment to not have any power for a Power Plant Boiler and Turbine Generator that has just tripped when it was at full load which was around 515 Megawatts of power at the time.
Normally when a unit trips, the boiler cools down as the large Force Draft (FD) Fans blow air through the boiler while the even larger Induced Draft (ID) fans suck the air from the boiler on the other end and blow the hot air up the smoke stack. This causes the steam in the boiler tubes to condense back into water. Steam valves open on the boiler that allow excessive steam to escape.
When the boiler is running there is a large orange fireball hovering in space in the middle of the boiler. The boiler water is being circulated through the boiler and the Boiler Feed Pump Turbines are pumping steam back and forth between the turbine generator and the boiler reheating the steam until every bit of heat from the boiler that can be safely harnessed is used.
When all this stop suddenly, then it is important that the large fans keep running to cool down the steam, since it is no longer losing energy in the generator as it was when it was busy supplying electricity to 1/2 million people in Oklahoma City. The power is fed to the fans from the Auxiliary substation located right outside the Main Switchgear where all the breakers reside that supply the power to the fans. Unfortunately, in this case, the Auxiliary substation was shutdown as well, leaving the boiler without any fans.
Without fans for cooling, and pumps to circulate the water, the walls of the boiler began heating up to dangerous temperatures. Steam was whistling out of pop off valves, but if the steam drum on the top of the boiler were to run dry, then the entire boiler structure could be compromised and begin melting down. — So, this was serious. Something had to be done right away. It wouldn’t be as bad as the China Syndrome since we were burning coal instead of nuclear power, but it would have caused a lot of damage nonetheless.
From the movie “The China Syndrome” where a similar emergency existed only in the movie, it was a Nuclear Plant
I have a side story about this picture, but I think I’ll save it for another post because I don’t want to digress from the main story at this point (Ok. Let me just say “Jack Maloy and Merl Wright” for those who can’t wait) See the post: “Power Plant Conspiracy Theory“.
With the prospect that the boiler might melt to the ground in a pile of rubble, it would seem that the main priority was to turn the Auxiliary Substation back on so the fans could be turned back on and prevent the boiler from collapsing. So, we walked out to the substation and looked at the switches that would have to be operated in order to first power up the main bus and then to close to supply power to the two big transformers and the six smaller transformers that supplied the Unit 1 Main Switchgear.
While inspecting the switches where the electricity had gone to ground we found that one of the main insulators was cracked.
A High Voltage Insulator like this
Since this insulator was cracked, we didn’t really want to operate the switch to test if another 189,000 volts would go straight to ground again, especially since one of us would be standing right underneath it cranking the switch. So, we went back to the shop to find an alternative.
By this time the Plant Manager, Ron Kilman arrived in the shop, and understanding the urgency to find a solution asked us what were the alternatives. He was relying on our expertise to make the decision.
Ron Kilman is the one on the left in the plaid shirt
The other solution would be to cut the power over from Unit 2 which was still humming away pushing electricity to Oklahoma City out of the 345,000 volt substation. The cut over would be very simple because the switchgear was designed with this in mind. We analyzed the power rating on the auxiliary transformers on Unit 2 and thought that we might be cutting it close to have them running both sets of fans at the same time, especially since the full load amps of a huge fan starting up was about 10 times the normal rate.
The transformer was rated to handle the load, but consider this. What if this caused Unit 2 to trip as well. With the Auxiliary substation offline, if Unit 2 tripped, we would be in twice the amount of trouble we were currently in. What a day it would have been if that had happened and two 250 foot boilers had come crashing to the ground in a pile of rubble. After reading the power ratings on the auxiliary transformers I was thinking, “Yeah, let’s do it! These transformers can handle it.” Andy was not so eager.
So, we were left with one alternative. That was to shut the switch in the Auxiliary substation that had the cracked insulator and take our chances that it wasn’t going to short to ground and blow up over our heads. I think I was eager to close the switch for Andy, but if I remember correctly, he didn’t want me to be the one to suffer the consequences and decided to close the switch himself. Needless to say. Andy closed the switch, and nothing blew up.
High Voltage Switch similar to the one we were closing
As soon as the power was restored to the switchgear, the fans were powered up and the temperature in the boiler was quickly reduced. The coffee pot in the Electric Shop began heating the coffee again. The power plant was saved from a major catastrophe. That was delayed for another day… of which I will talk about later (see the post “Destruction of a Power Plant God).”
So, how exactly does a fire hydrant shoot water up into the bus work of a substation like the picture of the switch directly above? The culprit fire hydrant wasn’t in the substation, it sat alongside it outside the fence a good 50 feet from the high voltage switch. No hose was attached to the fire hydrant. It was only being flushed out as part of a yearly activity to go around and make sure the fire hydrants are all operating correctly.
Here is the story about how the squirrel climbed into the transformer this time….
George Alley, Dale Mitchell and Mickey Postman were going around to the 30,000 fire hydrants on the plant ground (ok. maybe not that many, but we did have a lot of them), and they were opening up the valves and flushing them out. That means, they were letting them run for a while to clear them out from any contaminates that may have built up over the year of not being used.
Throughout their adventure they had opened a multitude of Hydrants situated out in the fields along the long belt conveyor from the coalyard and around the two one-million gallon #2 Diesel tanks.
Large Oil Tank about the size of the two that are at the Power Plant
The brave Power Plant Men, learned that when opening a fire hydrant wide open in the middle of field had unintended consequences. It tended to wash out the ground in front of the flow of the water shooting out of the hydrant. So the team of experts devised a plan to place a board in front of the hydrant when it would be in danger of tearing a hole in the terrain. The board would divert the water into the air where it would fan out and not cause damage to the surrounding area.
This was working fine, and when they arrived at the fire hydrant next to the substation, since the stream from the hydrant was pointing directly into the substation (hmm. a design flaw, I think), they decided to prop the board up against the fence to keep from washing away the gravel in the substation. Well. When a fire hydrant is opened that hasn’t been used for a year, the first flow of water to shoot out is dark brown.
You may think that this is because the water has somehow become dirty over the past year, but that isn’t quite the case. What has happened is that the pipe has been rusting little by little and the water has become saturated with the rust. So, the water shooting out of the hydrant was full of rust (hence the need to flush them out).
Well. Rust is made of metal. Metal is conductive, especially when it is mixed with water. When the water hit the board, it was deflected into the air and happened to direct itself directly into the high voltage switch in the substation. This caused a circuit to the ground which, once it created an arc pumped all the electricity directly into the ground.
Normally when something like this happens it doesn’t trip the Main Power Transformer to a Power Plant.
A Main Power Transformer
This time it did. I know there was a few heads scratching trying to figure it out. I think I figured out what happened a little while later. You see… here is the rest of the story….
Once the unit was back online and the emergency was over, someone finally noticed that the telephone system couldn’t call outside of the plant. Well. I was the main telephone person at the time, so the control room called me and asked me to look into the problem.
I checked the telephone computer and it was up and running just fine. Internal calls could be made. Only any call outside just concluded with a funny humming sound. After checking the circuit in the Logic Room next to the Rolm Telephone Computer I headed for…. guess where….. the Main Switchgear….
A ROLM Phone Computer
In the middle of the main switchgear in the back of the room right next to the Auxiliary Substation beyond the back wall, the outside telephone line came into the plant. The first thing it did was go through a special Telephone Surge Protector.
Telephone Grounding Panel
In this picture above, the silver circular buttons on the left side are really an old style surge protector. whenever there was a power surge, the carbon connection in the surge protector would quickly melt causing the circuit to go straight to ground. Thus protecting the rest of the telephone circuit. So, if some kid in their house decides to connect the 120 volts circuit to the telephone for fun to see what would happen, this circuit would protect the rest of the phone circuits. Keep in mind that this was during the early 1990 when “Surge Protection” still was basically all “mechanical”.
Anyway, when I arrived at this panel and I checked the surge protector to the main line going out of the plant, guess what I found…. Yep. Shorted to ground. Luckily there were some spares that were not wired to anything in the panel and I was able to swap them out for the ones that had been destroyed. — These were a one time use. Which meant, if they ever had to short to ground, they had to be replaced.
Ok. Fine. After a little while, we were able to call back out of the plant, though there was still some residual noise on the line. It was like this… when you called out of the plant, the person on the other end sounded like they were buried in a grave somewhere and they were trying to talk to someone living just like in an episode of the Twilight Episode where a phone line landed on a grave and the dead person tried to call his long lost love from the past.
Gladys Cooper in the Twilight Zone Episode “Night Call”
I didn’t give it much thought other than that I figured the 189,000 volt arc to ground must have shorted out the telephone line since the phone line ran directly under the auxiliary substation ground grid.
It wasn’t until the next morning when the Southwestern Bell repairman showed up at the plant. I knew him well, since he had been working on our phone lines since before the AT&T breakup in 1984. When I met him in the front of the electric shop, he said that he needed to check our telephone circuits. I told him that I knew that we had a problem because we had a high voltage short to ground yesterday and I found our surge protectors melted away.
He explained to me that not only was our circuit affected, but that every relay house from here to Ponca City was blown out. That’s when I realized that the problem was the reverse of the usual situation. What had happened was that the Ground Grid in the substation and the surrounding area (including the Unit 1 Main Power Transformer) had become hot. What do you do when the ground grid becomes charged?
The Ground Grid is what is supposed to protect you when a surge happens, but what happens when the ground grid itself is the problem? In this case, when the high voltage line about 60 feet from the telephone cable surge protector, arced to ground, it fed a tremendous amount of power back through the ground grid. when equipment detected the surge in voltage, they automatically defaulted their circuits to ground. That’s why the telephone circuit died. That’s what tripped the Main Power Transformer.
When the telephone circuit detected the high voltage surge, it shorted to ground (which was the problem), causing the high voltage to feed directly into the phone line and down the line to the next Southwestern Bell relay switch, which also defaulted to ground, trying to bleed off the surge as it went from relay switch to switch until enough of the power was able to be diverted to ground.
That day sure turned out to be a learning experience. I learned that when all the lights go out in the control room, that it is almost assured that the coffee pot in the electric shop is going to stop working. I also learned that in order to coax the plant manager to the electric shop, a major electrical tragedy is one good way. I learned that when shooting rusty water into the air don’t point it at a high voltage auxiliary substation switch. — I’m sure Mickey Postman learned that lesson too. I also learned that just like in Star Trek… whenever there is a dangerous job to do, the Captain is always the one that wants to do it. Does that make sense? Send a Peon like me in there…
I also learned something else about Power Plant Men…. You see…. People like Dale Mitchell, George Alley and Mickey Postman all are examples of incredibly wonderful Power Plant Men. When they were out there doing their duty and something tragic like this, all the Power Plant Men felt their pain. They knew that they all felt guilty for tripping the unit. It didn’t matter that a million dollars every so many minutes was walking out the door in revenue. The only thing that mattered was that these three men were safe.
Mickey Postman
Since I have left the Power Plant, I have found that the idea that the employee is the greatest asset that a company can possess is not a universal idea. You see, there was never the thought that any of these people should be fired for their mistake. On the contrary. The true Power Plant Men did whatever they could to let them know that they knew exactly how they felt. It could have happened to any of them.
Besides the friendship between Power Plant Men, one of the things I miss most about working at the Power Plant is that the employees are held in high esteem as a real asset to the company. Many could learn from their example.
Comments from the Original post
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That was an exciting day! Another great story. Thanks for the memories.
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I like the mix of storytelling and information sharing you deliver here. Thanks again
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Aug 8, 2011 I lost all reserve in and lost both units in 2 separate storms and A1 would not start for a few minutes and A2 was leaking antifreeze terribly not a scratch and back online in 34 hours both units and no one ever asked me one question even with a Safety Dept not one question asked of me the SS on duty. Not many men on the planet have ever experienced an uncontrolled total plant outage- you would of thought a learning opportunity would of took place. Feb 2011 worst winter temps in years 50 Units or more tripped in Texas let alone the trusty units of Redbud and McClain were fighting Sooner rolled right along with storm warnings for two weeks ahead – the ICS still went to Detroit for just tours of other facilities once again the fall guy Tarver McArthur stood alone. I had authored a Freeze Protection Plan for the plant and that seemed to save the day and explain to the regulatory bodies how we were online and everyone else in Texas was off and enjoying rolling blackouts in a terrible winter weather situation not to mention our powers that be were all stranded in Detroit and very few people could get to the plant without getting stuck trying to get there as well – but a few health heart issues later I am still here to tell about it all you would think folks would want to take advantage of someone that had went through the fire and Ice but thats ok I want them someday distant to get all the credit they deserve when the trumpets sound as that is truly what matters most. DT
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Great story, and yes, you took exactly the proper lesson from it, and it is too bad that many of our bosses haven’t learned it.
And yup, I’ve buried a lot of electrocuted squirrels over the years.
Power Plant Conspiracy Theory
Originally posted September 20, 2014.
I remember the moment when it dawned on me that I may be witnessing an incredible Coal-fired Power Plant Conspiracy! I had just walked into the Control Room one morning in 1990 at the plant in North Central Oklahoma and saw the Shift Supervisor Jack Maloy and Merl Wright in a state of high concentration.
I always knew something was up when Jack Maloy was standing behind the large blue monitors near the Unit 1 Main Electric Board watching the big picture while the Control Room Operator Merl Wright was at the Main Control Panel turning knobs, tapping indicators to make sure they had the correct readings, twisting switches, holding them until red lights turned green…
I love this picture! — not our plant but may be part of the conspiracy
Where had I seen this before? Something was telling me that everything wasn’t as it seemed. Sure… there was an emergency going on. There was no doubt about that. I knew that between Jack Maloy and Merl Wright, the current problem of the main boiler drum losing water was quickly going to be solved. I knew that Oklahoma City wasn’t going to experience any blackouts that day. This was a Cracker Jack team! But I couldn’t help thinking I had seen this somewhere before, and it was gnawing at my common sense.
Here is a picture of Jack Maloy’s team at the time:
Jack Maloy is standing on the far right with the vertically striped shirt (like bars in a jail) directly behind Merl Wright kneeling before him – Coincidence? I think not.
I backed off in a corner to observe the situation while a crowd of operators began to grow to watch the master Shift Supervisor and his faithful Control Room Operator divert a disaster. Merl picked up the walkie talkie from the desk and called Larry Tapp ( Larry is the man in the light blue shirt in the front row in the middle. He’s the only one in the front row that is actually standing, while the rest are down on their knees while the picture is being taken).
Larry was on the boiler opening and closing valves. John Belusko, the Unit Supervisor was out there with him. I can’t tell you what magic they were performing, since I think that’s top secret. I figured that, because the operators seemed to be talking in code. Merl would key the microphone on the walkie talkie and say something like, “Larry, 45”. Larry would reply with something like “Quarter Turn”. “Position?”, “18 as far as I can tell”.
A Motorola Walkie Talkie like this
I translated the coded words to say: “….crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it around the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped and all was safe.” (Something I had read in Moby Dick, by Herman Melville).
Jack paced back and forth behind the counter with the monitors. Then he stopped and read the paper that was streaming out of the alarm printer as it continued humming as the paper piled up on the floor in front of him. Jack was a heavy smoker, and I could tell that right then he would rather be standing out on the T-G floor having a smoke at that moment. Before cigarettes were banned in the control room, Jack would have been pointing at that board with the cigarette.
When the water level began rising in the Boiler Drum, I could see the relieve on everyone’s face. I supposed it meant that a major catastrophe had been avoided due to the intricate knowledge that each operator possessed and their ability to quickly respond to any situation. This made the uneasy feeling I was having even worse. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had seen this before. Just like Deja Vu.
It wasn’t till about a week later when my mom asked me if I knew someone at work named Jack Maloy. She had been talking to a friend of hers from Church named Louise and she mentioned that her husband worked at the Power Plant north of town. I replied by saying that I knew Jack Maloy well. He is a Shift Supervisor. She said that his wife Louise told her that Jack was a real nice person, but she wished that he would go to Church more. She hoped he would come around to that some day.
Then my mom mentioned something that brought back that feeling of uneasiness again. She said that the Maloys had moved to Oklahoma in 1979 from California. I thought that was odd that Jack had only arrived in Oklahoma in 1979, as he was a Shift Supervisor for as long as I could remember. Maybe even as far back as 1979 when I first worked at the plant as a summer help.
In that case, he would have been hired as a Shift Supervisor straight from California. — That seemed odd, since the majority of Shift Supervisors had worked their way up from Auxiliary Operator to Control Room Operator to Unit Supervisor, then finally to Shift Supervisor. Why would Jack be hired fresh from California? And how did Jack know so much about being a Shift Supervisor at our plant so quickly?
Then it dawned on me. You see…. It all went back to a lunch break about a year earlier when Charles Foster, an Electric Foreman and I were eating lunch in the Electric Shop office. When we didn’t know what to talk about, our favorite past time was to talk about movies and TV shows we had watched. We would describe the movie in detail to each other. On this particular day, Charles was doing the talking, and he was telling me about a movie that had to do with a Power Plant in California (yeah. California).
Charles Foster
As Charles described the story, he told me that there was this Shift Supervisor named Jack (yeah… like our Shift Supervisor… Jack Maloy), and he was such a good Shift Supervisor that he could tell that there was something wrong with the Boiler Feed Pumps just by the way the coffee in his coffee cup would vibrate. Yeah. He was that good.
Charles went on to tell me about how at one part of the movie the water level was dropping in a tank and it was imperative that they raise the water level or some big disaster was going to happen. — Now you see where I’m going with this? Yeah. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? At that time, the incident in the Control Room hadn’t happened yet with Jack Maloy.
The movie sounded interesting so, when I had the opportunity, we rented the VHS tape from the video store and I watched it. Sure enough. This is what I saw….
Here is Jack the Shift Supervisor in California working with his Control Room operator trying to divert a disaster
Here is Jack Maloy and Merl Wright from the team picture above:
Jack Maloy and Merl Wright
Very similar don’t you think? Two Shift Supervisors named Jack from California with the exact same hairstyle. Two Control Room Operators that look like Wilford Brimley. Coincidence?
Wilford Brimley in the movie playing the same job as Merl Wright
Even Wilford Brimley’s hairline is the same as Merl Wright’s hairline!
For those of you who don’t know yet. The name of the movie is: The China Syndrome. It is about a nuclear Power Plant that has a near meltdown:
The China Syndrome
Need more? Ok. — hey this is fun….. So…. This movie came out in 1979. The same year that Jack Maloy shows up in Oklahoma from California. Obviously an experienced Power Plant Shift Supervisor. Merl Wright went to work 10 months earlier in 1978 at an older power plant just down the road (The old Osage plant), and then shortly after, was transferred to the same plant with Jack Maloy, only to end up working for Jack.
Need more? The China Syndrome Movie came out on March 16, 1979. Jack Maloy began working at the Coal-Fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma February 26, 1979, just two and a half weeks earlier.
I mentioned this coincidence to Charles Foster one day, but as far as I know, I never mentioned it again to anyone else… Maybe Scott Hubbard, since he was my best friend as well…
Scott Hubbard – See how he smiled when I told him?
So, here are my thoughts about this….
What if Jack Maloy was the Shift Supervisor being portrayed in the movie “The China Syndrome”? He needed to move out of California just before the movie came out just in case someone found out his true identity. Being a Shift Supervisor at a Nuclear Power Plant, he would surely be in high demand at any Electric Company. Our particular Power Plant was in an out-of-the-way location. Sort of like a “witness protection program”.
I don’t know Merl’s earlier background, so I can still think that he moved to Oklahoma from California and began working for the Electric Company on April 24, 1978 just two weeks before I moved to Oklahoma from Columbia, Missouri. Since I don’t know any better, I can continue thinking this. It makes it more fun that way. — Of course, Merl, who may on occasion read this blog, may correct me in the comment section below…
So, what was it that I was experiencing that morning when I walked in the control room? I mean… What was I “really” experiencing? If, suppose, Jack and Merl really are the two that were in the control room when the “China Syndrome” almost occurred? Was it just an innocent crisis where the water level somehow decided to drop to a dangerously low level all by itself because of a faulty valve that was supposed to be closed, but was really open?
Or…
Was Jack and Merl trying to relive the excitement they had felt years earlier when they worked in a nuclear plant and they almost melted a hole all the way from there to China? Was this what experienced bored Power Plant Heroes do during downtime? I suppose it’s possible. It could have been a drill drummed up to test the acuity of the operators. To keep them on their toes. All “Shipshape and Bristol Fashion” just like on the Pequod in Moby Dick.
Something to think about.
Today Merl still lives in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Jack Maloy has moved to Cape Carol, Florida with his wife Louise. I suppose now that he has more time on his hand, hopefully he has given up smoking and is now making his wife happy by attending Church regularly. We can only hope he is at peace, on the opposite side of the United States from California so he doesn’t accidentally run into his old cohorts.
We are all glad that on his way to Florida from California that Jack decided to stop for 25 or so years in Oklahoma to Supervise the Coal-fired Power Plant out in the middle of the countryside…. As Charles Champlin from the Los Angeles Times said of the movie “The China Syndrome” — “Stunning and Skillfully Executed!” — Yeah. That describes Merl and Jack. Either way… Conspiracy or not. These two men are my heroes!
I wish Merl and Jack the best rest of their lives!
Comments from the original post: (one of my most commented posts)
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I remember in the 1980’s when someone had taken one of the spare annunciator windows out and placed a hand written paper in it that said ” China Syndrome”. It was there for a while.
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Thanks Fred for reminding me of that. Um… I didn’t do it!
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Jack was from Byng, Oklahoma- a Byng graduate he had attended Okmulgee Tech as well- He worked at Barstow, CA awhile at a plant there- and there training was far different than ours is who he learned so much- he even did some lineman training for them as well as other stuff- I don’t know all his capacity while he was there- he had a lot of experience with combined cycle unit they had but, I know one thing he was a heck of an operator- seen him do some things know one else could ever do- he had the best power plant knowledge of any of the operators ever other than Joe , he, Joe Gallahar, and Padgett were all really good ones. learned a lot from everyone.
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LOL You hooked me in early on this one, but as soon as you said “by the way the coffee in his coffee cup would vibrate” I knew which track we were on an enjoyed the rest of the ride. Reminded me of the movie and also the very real stress of Three Mile Island. Funny how your “conspiracy theory” brought those feelings of terror back more than 35 years after I was sitting glued to the TV every day when I came home from high school!
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Great story! And 2 great men. Thanks for the memories.
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awesome conspiracy story…maybe Jack knew just how to mess with the system, just so he could save it, all in hopes that they would make another movie out of his job.
So anyway, I really enjoyed that. Thanks for sharing. -
We got The China Syndrome from the library based on this post! Good movie, it does seem very coincidental the way Jack just sort of appeared at your plant right before the movie came out. I love a good conspiracy theory 😉
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God, I must be old. China Syndrome came to mind as soon as you said near tragedy in California plant! I saw this in the theater fresh out if high school. Jane and Jack were incredible by the way. Interesting theories. Anything is possible. And probable. Nice post.
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Good post. Did you ever talk to Jack about California?
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No. I didn’t want to open that can of worms. 🙂
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Power Plant Security Guard Finds Fame Amid Mass Murder
I stayed home one Wednesday morning because I was going to be a guinea pig at the Stillwater Medical Center that morning while some nurses were being certified to give PICC lines. That is, when they insert a catheter in a vein in your arm and thread it all the way up to your heart. In order to be certified, you had to actually perform this procedure 2 or 3 times on a live vict…. uh…. subject. My wife Kelly had coaxed me into this position with promises of Chicken Cacciatore.
PICC Catheter
Anyway. I was able to sleep in that morning. So, I had just risen from bed a few minutes before 9:00am in time to say goodbye to my daughter Elizabeth, who was on her way to Kindergarten. Kelly was taking her. I didn’t have to be ready to go to the hospital until 10:00.
I watched from our front atrium as my wife drove down the gravel driveway to the dirt road and turn right out of sight. As I walked back to our bedroom to take my shower, I heard and felt a rumble. To me it sounded like a semi truck had just pulled into our driveway. This was not too impossible, as our country neighbors would use our drive sometimes if a big truck needed to reach their barn.
I thought I would see what was going on, so I returned to the living room and looked out of the window. There was no truck. Then I thought that the rumble felt more like an earthquake than a truck. I used to live on the main highway through Stillwater (Highway 53, also known as 6th street) before moving out to the country, and I knew the difference between an earthquake and a semi truck.
I returned to bedroom and continued on my way to the shower. When I was finished, I walked into the bedroom and flipped on the TV. I thought I would see if there was any news about the earthquake on the news. Instead, for the next two hours I sat on the edge of the bed glued to the television as tears ran down my face.
At the time that I felt the earthquake, one of the Instrument and Controls Technicians at our Power Plant was talking to someone in our Corporate Headquarters in Oklahoma City. There was the sound of a large explosion and the person on the other end said there had been an explosion and they had to go, and the phone went dead. The Corporate Headquarters building is one block south of the Federal Murrah Building.
This was the morning of April 15, 1995. Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the bombing. I lived about 50 miles as the crow flies from the Federal Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. At 9:02 a.m. the earthquake I had felt was from the Murrah Building Bombing at the time when 168 people were killed by the blast.
Murrah Building before the bombing in 1995
As I sat watching the events unfold a yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis was driving north on I-35 toward Kansas. There was one anomaly about this car. The license plate on the back was not properly attached. As the car passed exit 186, the driver could see the Charles Machine Works off to the east manufacturing Ditch Witch trenchers in Perry, Oklahoma.
Ditch Witch Trencher
A Power Plant Security Guard at our plant, who as his second job (because working at a Power Plant would of course be the first and foremost job), was also a member of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol was on duty that day keeping the public safe. As he watched the flow of traffic the crooked license plate on the yellow car caught his attention. As was customary for officer Charlie Hanger, he proceeded to pull the car over.
Oklahoma State Trooper Charlie Hanger
The man that stepped out of the car was Timothy McVeigh, the person that left a truck bomb in a Ryder truck parked in front of the Murrah Building 90 minutes earlier:
Timothy McVeigh
After informing Officer Charlie that he had a weapon in the car, Charlie Hanger arrested him for carrying a concealed weapon. The rest of that part of the story is history.
Timothy McVeigh’s Getaway Car
At the Power Plant, some referred to the Security Guard Charlie Hanger as “Deputy Fife”.
Barney Fife played by Don Knotts in the Andy Griffith Show
It was said that he was the type of law enforcement officer that would arrest his own mother for jaywalking. What are the odds that Charlie was in the right place at the right time and had decided to pull this one car over?
Charlie Hanger said that the main reason that he pulled over Timothy McVeigh that day was because of Divine Intervention. God had placed him in the right place at the right time. This is a common occurence for those who worked at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma. God had placed them at the right place at the right time.
If you lived anywhere around Central Oklahoma that day, then you know as well as I, that there was a lot more that went on, than Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols setting off a truck bomb. For those who watched the story unfold, we remember perfectly well that other unexploded bombs were found as the rescue effort began. Everyone was pulled off of the site several times while bombs were diffused, and the Whitewater files pertaining to the investigation into Hilary Clinton (which just happened to be stored in the Murrah Building) were quickly removed from the scene never to be seen again.
Oklahomans would tell you that the Conspiracy theory that makes the least sense is that the truck bomb is what brought the Murrah building down. Survivors that worked in the Murrah building had seen men doing things to the pillars in the parking garage below the building days before.
Aerial view of the Murrah Building after the bombing
If the truck bomb had destroyed that much of one of the most reinforced building in Oklahoma City, then it was the biggest and strangest truck bomb in history. It was interesting to watch how much effort was put into stopping investigations into the Murrah Building bombing. Even going so far as having a company from the Main Stream Media buy out KFOR TV station and quickly shut down the Murrah Building Bombing investigation by Jayna Davis.
Anyway… if you are interested in what I was watching during those first few hours, before the media rewrote the story, watch this documentary. I encourage you to watch these all the way through:
Here is a video from KFOR News about the Ryder truck bombing:
Here is a video about Jayna Davis’s investigation and Timothy McVeigh’s connection with Al Qaeda:
Another video about the Murrah Building Bombing Conspiracy:
Just about everyone that lived around Oklahoma City at the time of the bombing was affected by the Oklahoma City Bombing. Here are some of my stories:
When Kelly came home, she told me that she had heard what happened on the radio. She called the hospital and some of the nurses had headed to Oklahoma City to help out with any medical needs. The PICC Line certification had been cancelled because the nurses and other medical professionals were all going to go help out. Kelly went to the hospital to fill in, because they were shorthanded. I told her that I would pick up Elizabeth from Kindergarten at noon.
After I picked up Elizabeth, I took her to the police station. We had been planning on going there that day, since I was taking the day off work and she said she would like to see the Police station just to see what it looked like. So, I figured we would go down there and ask for a tour.
When we arrived at the Stillwater Police Station, the front door was locked. I thought this was odd because it was the middle of the day. I could see people inside, so I knocked on the door. Someone came and opened the door and asked what we needed. I told them that I was wondering if it was possible for my daughter to have a tour of the police station. They were glad to show her all around.
Because of the way the person answered the door, I realized right away that they were in “lock down” mode because of the Murrah Building bombing.
My brother, who today is a U.S. Marine Colonel worked as the Executive Officer for the Marine Corps Recruiting office in the Murrah building in 1994. I had visited his office a year earlier. He left the previous June. Greg’s replacement, who was a father of four children, just like my brother was killed that day. The officer who first recruited my brother happened to be visiting that morning from Stillwater, was left blind. My brother felt responsible for the officer’s death because he had encouraged him to take his place when he moved on.
Colonel Gregory T. Breazile
One of the first two friends I had when I went to College was Kirby Davis. He worked as a journalist in the Journal Record building across the way from the Murrah Building. I met him one day by accident in September 1996 when I was working in Oklahoma City for the electric company. He was walking down the street during lunch. I had just visited the memorial fence at the Murrah Building site. I was still choked up by my visit to the fence when I saw him walking from across the street. I told my friend Mike Gibbs that I would see him later, I just saw an old friend of mine, and I wanted to go talk to him.
Memorial Fence at the site of the Murrah Building
I was surprised when I asked Kirby how he was doing and he replied that he was devastated. I asked him what had happened and he told me that the day the Murrah Building was bombed, his entire life had been ruined. At that point, I decided that even though my lunch hour was just about over Kirby needed to talk. So, we found a bench in a small park by his office and for the next hour he explained to me what had happened.
Even though the Journal Record building had been damaged in the bombing, that wasn’t what had destroyed Kirby. It was what happened in the aftermath. Here is the short story of what he said to me.
After the bombing occurred, rescue teams came from all over the country to help clear the debris. Kirby’s wife went to work at the Convention Center where they were housing the rescue workers to help serving them. While she was there serving the rescue workers, she became romantically involved with one of the workers. The result of this was that she divorced Kirby and moved away.
I walked with Kirby back to his office at the Journal Record and said goodbye to him and returned to work. I continue to pray for Kirby and his family. I ask that those of you who read my blog and are so inclined, please say a prayer for him as well.
As I mentiioned, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. I think we should all take a moment to reflect on how in times of trouble like this, when evil seems to be having its way and tragedy is all around, God sends men like the trooper and Power Plant Guard Charlie Hangar.
Power Plant Conspiracy Theory
Originally posted September 20, 2014.
I remember the moment when it dawned on me that I may be witnessing an incredible Coal-fired Power Plant Conspiracy! I had just walked into the Control Room one morning in 1990 at the plant in North Central Oklahoma and saw the Shift Supervisor Jack Maloy and Merl Wright in a state of high concentration.
I always knew something was up when Jack Maloy was standing behind the large blue monitors near the Unit 1 Main Electric Board watching the big picture while the Control Room Operator Merl Wright was at the Main Control Panel turning knobs, tapping indicators to make sure they had the correct readings, twisting switches, holding them until red lights turned green…
I love this picture! — not our plant but may be part of the conspiracy
Where had I seen this before? Something was telling me that everything wasn’t as it seemed. Sure… there was an emergency going on. There was no doubt about that. I knew that between Jack Maloy and Merl Wright, the current problem of the main boiler drum losing water was quickly going to be solved. I knew that Oklahoma City wasn’t going to experience any blackouts that day. This was a Cracker Jack team! But I couldn’t help thinking I had seen this somewhere before, and it was gnawing at my common sense.
Here is a picture of Jack Maloy’s team at the time:
Jack Maloy is standing on the far right with the vertically striped shirt (like bars in a jail) directly behind Merl Wright kneeling before him – Coincidence? I think not.
I backed off in a corner to observe the situation while a crowd of operators began to grow to watch the master Shift Supervisor and his faithful Control Room Operator divert a disaster. Merl picked up the walkie talkie from the desk and called Larry Tapp ( Larry is the man in the light blue shirt in the front row in the middle. He’s the only one in the front row that is actually standing, while the rest are down on their knees while the picture is being taken).
Larry was on the boiler opening and closing valves. John Belusko, the Unit Supervisor was out there with him. I can’t tell you what magic they were performing, since I think that’s top secret. I figured that, because the operators seemed to be talking in code. Merl would key the microphone on the walkie talkie and say something like, “Larry, 45”. Larry would reply with something like “Quarter Turn”. “Position?”, “18 as far as I can tell”.
A Motorola Walkie Talkie like this
I translated the coded words to say: “….crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it around the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped and all was safe.” (Something I had read in Moby Dick, by Herman Melville).
Jack paced back and forth behind the counter with the monitors. Then he stopped and read the paper that was streaming out of the alarm printer as it continued humming as the paper piled up on the floor in front of him. Jack was a heavy smoker, and I could tell that right then he would rather be standing out on the T-G floor having a smoke at that moment. Before cigarettes were banned in the control room, Jack would have been pointing at that board with the cigarette.
When the water level began rising in the Boiler Drum, I could see the relieve on everyone’s face. I supposed it meant that a major catastrophe had been avoided due to the intricate knowledge that each operator possessed and their ability to quickly respond to any situation. This made the uneasy feeling I was having even worse. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had seen this before. Just like Deja Vu.
It wasn’t till about a week later when my mom asked me if I knew someone at work named Jack Maloy. She had been talking to a friend of hers from Church named Louise and she mentioned that her husband worked at the Power Plant north of town. I replied by saying that I knew Jack Maloy well. He is a Shift Supervisor. She said that his wife Louise told her that Jack was a real nice person, but she wished that he would go to Church more. She hoped he would come around to that some day.
Then my mom mentioned something that brought back that feeling of uneasiness again. She said that the Maloys had moved to Oklahoma in 1979 from California. I thought that was odd that Jack had only arrived in Oklahoma in 1979, as he was a Shift Supervisor for as long as I could remember. Maybe even as far back as 1979 when I first worked at the plant as a summer help.
In that case, he would have been hired as a Shift Supervisor straight from California. — That seemed odd, since the majority of Shift Supervisors had worked their way up from Auxiliary Operator to Control Room Operator to Unit Supervisor, then finally to Shift Supervisor. Why would Jack be hired fresh from California? And how did Jack know so much about being a Shift Supervisor at our plant so quickly?
Then it dawned on me. You see…. It all went back to a lunch break about a year earlier when Charles Foster, an Electric Foreman and I were eating lunch in the Electric Shop office. When we didn’t know what to talk about, our favorite past time was to talk about movies and TV shows we had watched. We would describe the movie in detail to each other. On this particular day, Charles was doing the talking, and he was telling me about a movie that had to do with a Power Plant in California (yeah. California).
Charles Foster
As Charles described the story, he told me that there was this Shift Supervisor named Jack (yeah… like our Shift Supervisor… Jack Maloy), and he was such a good Shift Supervisor that he could tell that there was something wrong with the Boiler Feed Pumps just by the way the coffee in his coffee cup would vibrate. Yeah. He was that good.
Charles went on to tell me about how at one part of the movie the water level was dropping in a tank and it was imperative that they raise the water level or some big disaster was going to happen. — Now you see where I’m going with this? Yeah. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? At that time, the incident in the Control Room hadn’t happened yet with Jack Maloy.
The movie sounded interesting so, when I had the opportunity, we rented the VHS tape from the video store and I watched it. Sure enough. This is what I saw….
Here is Jack the Shift Supervisor in California working with his Control Room operator trying to divert a disaster
Here is Jack Maloy and Merl Wright from the team picture above:
Jack Maloy and Merl Wright
Very similar don’t you think? Two Shift Supervisors named Jack from California with the exact same hairstyle. Two Control Room Operators that look like Wilford Brimley. Coincidence?
Wilford Brimley in the movie playing the same job as Merl Wright
Even Wilford Brimley’s hairline is the same as Merl Wright’s hairline!
For those of you who don’t know yet. The name of the movie is: The China Syndrome. It is about a nuclear Power Plant that has a near meltdown:
The China Syndrome
Need more? Ok. — hey this is fun….. So…. This movie came out in 1979. The same year that Jack Maloy shows up in Oklahoma from California. Obviously an experienced Power Plant Shift Supervisor. Merl Wright went to work 10 months earlier in 1978 at an older power plant just down the road (The old Osage plant), and then shortly after, was transferred to the same plant with Jack Maloy, only to end up working for Jack.
Need more? The China Syndrome Movie came out on March 16, 1979. Jack Maloy began working at the Coal-Fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma February 26, 1979, just two and a half weeks earlier.
I mentioned this coincidence to Charles Foster one day, but as far as I know, I never mentioned it again to anyone else… Maybe Scott Hubbard, since he was my best friend as well…
Scott Hubbard – See how he smiled when I told him?
So, here are my thoughts about this….
What if Jack Maloy was the Shift Supervisor being portrayed in the movie “The China Syndrome”? He needed to move out of California just before the movie came out just in case someone found out his true identity. Being a Shift Supervisor at a Nuclear Power Plant, he would surely be in high demand at any Electric Company. Our particular Power Plant was in an out-of-the-way location. Sort of like a “witness protection program”.
I don’t know Merl’s earlier background, so I can still think that he moved to Oklahoma from California and began working for the Electric Company on April 24, 1978 just two weeks before I moved to Oklahoma from Columbia, Missouri. Since I don’t know any better, I can continue thinking this. It makes it more fun that way. — Of course, Merl, who may on occasion read this blog, may correct me in the comment section below…
So, what was it that I was experiencing that morning when I walked in the control room? I mean… What was I “really” experiencing? If, suppose, Jack and Merl really are the two that were in the control room when the “China Syndrome” almost occurred? Was it just an innocent crisis where the water level somehow decided to drop to a dangerously low level all by itself because of a faulty valve that was supposed to be closed, but was really open?
Or…
Was Jack and Merl trying to relive the excitement they had felt years earlier when they worked in a nuclear plant and they almost melted a hole all the way from there to China? Was this what experienced bored Power Plant Heroes do during downtime? I suppose it’s possible. It could have been a drill drummed up to test the acuity of the operators. To keep them on their toes. All “Shipshape and Bristol Fashion” just like on the Pequod in Moby Dick.
Something to think about.
Today Merl still lives in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Jack Maloy has moved to Cape Carol, Florida with his wife Louise. I suppose now that he has more time on his hand, hopefully he has given up smoking and is now making his wife happy by attending Church regularly. We can only hope he is at peace, on the opposite side of the United States from California so he doesn’t accidentally run into his old cohorts.
We are all glad that on his way to Florida from California that Jack decided to stop for 25 or so years in Oklahoma to Supervise the Coal-fired Power Plant out in the middle of the countryside…. As Charles Champlin from the Los Angeles Times said of the movie “The China Syndrome” — “Stunning and Skillfully Executed!” — Yeah. That describes Merl and Jack. Either way… Conspiracy or not. These two men are my heroes!
I wish Merl and Jack the best rest of their lives!
Comments from the original post: (one of my most commented posts)
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I remember in the 1980’s when someone had taken one of the spare annunciator windows out and placed a hand written paper in it that said ” China Syndrome”. It was there for a while.
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Thanks Fred for reminding me of that. Um… I didn’t do it!
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Jack was from Byng, Oklahoma- a Byng graduate he had attended Okmulgee Tech as well- He worked at Barstow, CA awhile at a plant there- and there training was far different than ours is who he learned so much- he even did some lineman training for them as well as other stuff- I don’t know all his capacity while he was there- he had a lot of experience with combined cycle unit they had but, I know one thing he was a heck of an operator- seen him do some things know one else could ever do- he had the best power plant knowledge of any of the operators ever other than Joe , he, Joe Gallahar, and Padgett were all really good ones. learned a lot from everyone.
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LOL You hooked me in early on this one, but as soon as you said “by the way the coffee in his coffee cup would vibrate” I knew which track we were on an enjoyed the rest of the ride. Reminded me of the movie and also the very real stress of Three Mile Island. Funny how your “conspiracy theory” brought those feelings of terror back more than 35 years after I was sitting glued to the TV every day when I came home from high school!
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Great story! And 2 great men. Thanks for the memories.
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awesome conspiracy story…maybe Jack knew just how to mess with the system, just so he could save it, all in hopes that they would make another movie out of his job.
So anyway, I really enjoyed that. Thanks for sharing. -
We got The China Syndrome from the library based on this post! Good movie, it does seem very coincidental the way Jack just sort of appeared at your plant right before the movie came out. I love a good conspiracy theory 😉
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God, I must be old. China Syndrome came to mind as soon as you said near tragedy in California plant! I saw this in the theater fresh out if high school. Jane and Jack were incredible by the way. Interesting theories. Anything is possible. And probable. Nice post.
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Good post. Did you ever talk to Jack about California?
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No. I didn’t want to open that can of worms. 🙂
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Power Plant Men 
I remember in the 1980’s when someone had taken one of the spare annunciator windows out and placed a hand written paper in it that said ” China Syndrome”. It was there for a while.
Thanks Fred for reminding me of that. Um… I didn’t do it!
Jack was from Byng, Oklahoma- a Byng graduate he had attended Okmulgee Tech as well- He worked at Barstow, CA awhile at a plant there- and there training was far different than ours is who he learned so much- he even did some lineman training for them as well as other stuff- I don’t know all his capacity while he was there- he had a lot of experience with combined cycle unit they had but, I know one thing he was a heck of an operator- seen him do some things know one else could ever do- he had the best power plant knowledge of any of the operators ever other than Joe , he, Joe Gallahar, and Padgett were all really good ones. learned a lot from everyone.
LOL You hooked me in early on this one, but as soon as you said “by the way the coffee in his coffee cup would vibrate” I knew which track we were on an enjoyed the rest of the ride. Reminded me of the movie and also the very real stress of Three Mile Island. Funny how your “conspiracy theory” brought those feelings of terror back more than 35 years after I was sitting glued to the TV every day when I came home from high school!
Great story! And 2 great men. Thanks for the memories.
awesome conspiracy story…maybe Jack knew just how to mess with the system, just so he could save it, all in hopes that they would make another movie out of his job.
So anyway, I really enjoyed that. Thanks for sharing.
We got The China Syndrome from the library based on this post! Good movie, it does seem very coincidental the way Jack just sort of appeared at your plant right before the movie came out. I love a good conspiracy theory 😉
God, I must be old. China Syndrome came to mind as soon as you said near tragedy in California plant! I saw this in the theater fresh out of high school. Jane and Jack were incredible by the way. Interesting theories. Anything is possible. And probable. Nice post.