Working Power Plant Wonders with Willard Stark
Originally posted on July 6, 2013:
Ted Riddle and I were working for an “Acting” foreman named Willard Stark during an overhaul at the plant outside Mustang, Oklahoma the spring of ’86. Willard seemed much older than he was. I would have guessed he was in his late 60’s or early 70’s, but it turned out he was only in his mid to lower 50’s. I found out why he had aged as the overhaul unfolded.
I heard some slight grumblings from a few in the shop when Bill Bennett told me that I was going to the plant near Mustang, Oklahoma that spring. I suppose it was because since I had become an electrician in the Fall of 1983, this was already going to be my third overhaul away from our plant, and all of them ended up being major overhauls.
The reason others were grumbling about this was because when you were able to go on an extended overhaul at another plant, it meant that you were going to earn not only a lot of extra overtime, but you also received travel time, mileage and a per diem (a daily amount of money for expenses). I believe at the time the Per Diem rate was $32.00 each day. This was supposed to pay for your hotel room and your meals while you were away from your family. We lived in trailers to cut down on costs.
Others believed that I had received more than my share of the piece of this pie. I had been sent on every available overhaul since just before I had reached my first year as an electrician. So, by this time, most people would have saved up quite a sum of money. I, however, was making around $7.50 my first year, and by the time 1986 had rolled around, I was still making just under $10.00 an hour. So, overtime amounted to $14.50 an hour.
When you compared this to the first class electricians that were making around $19.00 an hour at the time, they would have been making $28.50 an hour overtime. This was about twice what I was making. So, I was a cheap date.
On December 21, 1985 I had been married (the day following my last day at Horseshoe Lake overhaul — see the post: A Slap in the Face at a Gas-Fired Power Plant), and I had used every cent I had in the world to pay for our honeymoon. I was even relying on paychecks I was receiving while I was away to finish paying for it.
So, it helped to come back and find that we were on a major overhaul at our plant on Unit 1 doing the 5 year checkout. Then finding that I was going to a major overhaul at the plant in Mustang, Oklahoma where I could live with my wife in her apartment in Oklahoma City while she finished her last semester to obtain her nursing degree from Oklahoma University. I went on the overhaul with Ted Riddle.
Ted was hired into the electric shop the previous summer. He wasn’t on my crew so I hadn’t worked much with him. He was a farmer that had an electric background. He was a bigger man than I was and had a good sense of humor. He had a steady temper and didn’t let much bother him. He would laugh at things that might bother others.
I appreciated working with Ted, because his steady mood helped to teach me that blowing my top about little things did little to help the situation. So, for this overhaul, I decided that I would try to emulate Ted Riddle by keeping up with his easy-going-ness (I know…. the dictionary couldn’t find that one).
Bob Kennedy was on this overhaul as well. He had been my acting foreman during the overhaul at Horseshoe Lake. I had described our relationship in the post: “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy“. I was glad to be working with Bob again. As I mentioned, Willard Stark was our acting foreman.
For those that don’t know…. an acting foreman is someone that normally isn’t a foreman, but is appointed to lead a crew for a particular job. These men usually are the best foremen to work for, because they haven’t attended any official “manager training”. This usually made them better foremen, as the manager training had a tendency to destroy one’s character and moral integrity. — I never could figure that one out. Some people came back unscathed, but others came back with PTMD (Post-Traumatic Manager Disorder).
The plant at Mustang was the smallest gas-fired power plant that had people permanently working there. It had some smaller units that they wouldn’t run when the newer larger units weren’t running because the water treatment plant (that creates the boiler water) used more power than the small units could generate. — That amazed me. So, while we were there, I don’t think any of the units were running so they didn’t have to run the water treatment plant.
Willard Stark had spent a good portion of his life working at the plant and had a lot of stories about the plant manager and assistant manager at our plant. He had been an electrician when Bill Moler had first come to the plant as a new green electrician like me. I enjoyed sitting during lunch in Mark Thomas’s electric lab as Willard told us stories.
Willard had an incredible memory. He could remember what he was doing on any specific day decades before. We would listen to Paul Harvey on the radio during lunch, and whenever Paul would say, “….noon news and comment.” Willard would always finish the sentence by saying “…mostly comment.” I had spent a good part of my childhood listening to Paul Harvey on the radio because when I was young, we always had a radio playing in the house and the car. So, Paul Harvey’s voice was always a comfort to me. I was saddened a few years ago when he passed away.
Paul Harvey was one of a kind radio personality. No one will ever fill his shoes.
Working with Ted Riddle cracked me up. He would notice things that I was totally oblivious to (yeah. I see it. A preposition at the end of a sentence). For instance, one day while we were working, Ted asked me if I ever noticed how Bob Kennedy drinks water out of his jar. I told him I hadn’t noticed.
You see, Bob had this jar that looked like a pickle jar that he brought to work each day filled with water. During lunch, he would drink out of this jar. Ted said, “Watch Bob during lunch today. Tell me what you think.” So as I was sitting next to Bob during lunch listening to Paul Harvey, and Willard Stark telling us what he did on any particular date in the past that Paul Harvey might mention, I kept one eye on Bob.
As Bob lifted his jar to his mouth I watched as he began to drink. I immediately knew what Ted had wanted me to see. As Bob took a drink, he slowly tilted the jar up until the water reached his mouth. As the jar was being tilted, Bob’s upper lip would reach way into the jar as far as it could, quivering in anticipation of a cool drink of fresh water. The upper lip of a camel came to my mind.
Bob Kennedy’s upper lip reaching into the water jar…
With all my might, I struggled to keep a straight face as I turned my head slowly to look over at Ted who had a grin from ear-to-ear….. ok. I’ll show you the picture of Andy Griffith again that I included in my post from last week, just so you can see what I saw when I looked over at Ted:
Andy Griffith as Permanent Latrine Orderly in No Time for Sergeants grinning ear-to-ear
I think I almost choked on my ham sandwich as I swallowed while trying to keep my composure.
Another day while Ted and I were cleaning ignitors on the shop work bench Ted asked me if I had noticed what Randy Oxley and Jimmy Armafio were working on. I told him I hadn’t noticed. Ted said that if he’s not mistaken Randy Oxley has been coming into the shop all morning with the same piece of conduit. He bends it, then cuts a little off the end and re-threads it.
So, the next time Randy came into the shop I noticed he had a piece of one and a half inch conduit in his hand. It was about 3 1/2 feet long and had a couple of bends in it. Randy hooked the conduit up in the large conduit bender and using his measuring tape carefully lined it up as Armafio stood back and watched. He bent the conduit a little, then put it in the bandsaw and cut off a few inches. Then he put it in the vice on the work bench and proceeded to thread the end of the conduit.
Then Jimmy and Randy left. Ted said that if he wasn’t mistaken, that’s the same piece of conduit Randy has been working on all morning. So, as we continued the boring job of cleaning the 30 or so ignitors piled on our workbench, I told Ted about the time I was at the plant at Horseshoe Lake and Randy had told a Mechanical A foreman Joe Balkenbush (I think his first name was Joe), who was Randy’s uncle on his mom’s side, that Randy was the best electrician at the plant at Mustang, only he was the only one that knew it.
I mentioned this meeting and the reason for it in the post: “Bobbin Along with Bob Kennedy” (See the link above). Sure enough, a little while later, Randy came back to the shop with the same piece of conduit and performed the same procedure of bending, cutting and threading and scadoodling.
A little while later the electrical B foremen came out into the shop (I can’t remember his name for the life of me… I can see his face – maybe something Campbell), and asked us if we knew how to run conduit. We assured him that we did. I had been thoroughly trained by Gene Roget and Ted, well, as it turned out, Ted was a crackerjack conduit hand.
The foremen took us up onto the boiler and asked us if we could run some conduit from one place to another. He sounded apologetic when he asked if that would be all right. We assured him it was no problem. We would get right on it.
On the way back to the shop, as we were coming down from the boiler, Ted tapped my shoulder and pointed down to the bottom of a light fixture. He said, “Hey! Isn’t that the piece of conduit that Randy has been working on all morning?” Sure enough. There is was. He finally bent it and cut it to fit! Well… The rest of this part of the story is that instead of running back and forth to the shop to bend and cut and thread conduit, Ted and I grabbed a conduit stand, and the appropriate tools and hauled them up on the boiler.
Rigid Conduit threader stand
We carried about 40 foot of conduit up there and began bending, cutting and threading and mounting the conduit. We finished just before lunch. As I mentioned above, Ted was a heck of a conduit person. He knew exactly what he was doing. We carried all the equipment back to the shop.
After lunch Ted and I went back to cleaning ignitors. The foreman saw us out of the window of the office and came out and asked us why we weren’t working on the conduit. When we told him we were done, he had a look of disbelief. He left the shop (to go check out our work). Ted and I smiled at each other.
A little while later the foreman returned with the electric supervisor. The electric supervisor asked us if we wouldn’t mind working on some more jobs to run conduit. Ted told him that we were there to do whatever they needed. I nodded in agreement.
During the rest of the overhaul we worked to repair broken conduit, pull wire and install new conduit where needed. Mark Thomas, the electric specialist, that was about my age, asked if he could use us to pull and mount some new controls. He said he wouldn’t let the others in the shop touch it because he would just have to follow through and redo it when they were done. So, we did that also.
We did get in trouble one day when we went to install some conduit over a control room just off of the T-G floor. We noticed that all of the lights were out except a couple, so we found a couple of large boxes of light bulbs and replaced the burned out bulbs. The Electric Foreman came running up to us a little while later and said, “What are you trying to do? Run us out of business?”
With looks on our faces that conveyed that we didn’t understand what he meant, he explained that in small plants like this one, they don’t have a budget like the bigger plants. They can’t afford to keep the lights burning all over the plant all the time. So, we were only supposed to replace lights in the immediate area where we had to work. Now the foreman had to figure out where he was going to find the money to buy another box of light bulbs. — These were incandescent bulbs that don’t have a long life span.
I had mentioned in an earlier post called Resistance in a Coal-fire Power Plant that Bill Rivers had been given a bum deal when another person had accused him of cutting off the leads of electronic components so that no one could check them to see if they were really bad (which doesn’t make any sense given that you could still check them no matter how short the leads are). Well, I found that the same situation had existed in this plant.
There was this one guy that sat in the electric shop Lab (not the same electric shop lab where Willard and Mark Thomas hung out), working on Gray Phones all day. Ted had asked me if I had noticed how many gray phone boxes were missing gray phones (gray phones are the PA system in a plant. You could go to any one of them and page someone).
Gaitronics Gray Phone
Ted would point to empty gray phone boxes as we walked through the plant. He told me that they have one electrician that doesn’t do anything else but sit in the electric lab working on gray phones. That is all he does. When we asked Willard about it, he told us this story.
Mark Thomas used to work on all the gray phones, and kept them all running in good order. When Mark worked on a gray phone, sometimes to make sure it is working, he would page himself. Just to make sure that part worked. I understood this. When I was working on gray phones with Bill Rivers, he would page me, or I would page him, just to test it.
If you were working by yourself, it would make sense that you would page yourself instead of bugging someone else several times a day while you went from one gray phone to the next. Anyway, people accused Mark Thomas of trying to make himself more important by making others think that he was being paged all the time by paging himself.
Now, anyone with any sense would know how lame of an idea that is. I mean, anyone would recognize Mark Thomas’s voice. The plant wasn’t that big. There weren’t that many people working there. Everyone knew everyone else. Mark was obviously just working on gray phones.
So, after the foreman accused him of trying to promote his self importance by paging himself several times a day, Mark said, “Fine! Let someone else work on the gray phones!” Mark was by far the most intelligent person at the plant. He obviously didn’t need to artificially promote his reputation by making a fool of himself.
So, they gave the job of gray phone maintenance to someone that didn’t understand electronics. They even bought an expensive gray phone test set to help him out. So each day he would sit in the lab smoking his pipe staring at an ever-growing pile of gray phones. At one point, Ted and I offered to fix them all for him. He said, “That’s ok. It keeps me in the air conditioning.
I know in later times, Mark Thomas went on to greater successes within the company. I believe that Willard stayed around until there was a downsizing and he was able to early retire. I mentioned at the beginning that Willard looked a lot older than he really was. Willard brought this to my attention. He showed me a picture of himself a few years earlier. It was of him standing by a car wearing a suit.
He reminded me of an actor from an old movie, though, I can’t remember the actor’s name at the moment. Willard said that in the past few years he aged rapidly. It happened when the previous foreman had retired. Willard had seniority in the shop and had been at the plant most of his life. He knew what he was doing, and had filled in as foreman many times. He really expected to become the foreman.
Nevertheless, they gave the job to someone from somewhere else who didn’t know the plant, or even much about being a foreman. This upset Willard so much that he said he just gave up. He said the stress from that experience aged him. Mark Thomas agreed.
Mark had his own encounter with this attitude when he decided to retreat to his lab off and away from the electric shop. Willard and Mark, the two electricians that really knew what they were doing at the plant had sequestered themselves in their own hideaway where they would sit each day listening to Paul Harvey at lunch and biding their time until the next phase of their life came around.
Solving the Selection of a Power Plant Solvent
A year after I joined the electricians in the electric shop, Howard Chumbley became my foreman. One day when we were talking about going to the old Osage Plant up the road to clean up a PCB (Polychlorinated Biphenyls) spill, he explained that “In His Day” they used to clean their tools in a vat of transformer oil that was full of PCBs. I remember him telling us that it was normal for him to be up to his elbows in the stuff. They never thought it might be harmful. Now we were getting ready to go up to the old plant to clean up a small spill and I was going to have to suit up in a special hazardous waste suit. I wrote about our experience in the post: “Pioneers of Power Plant Fame Finally Find Peace“.
Now we know about the hazard of developing cancer by having PCBs in your system. Today we know a lot of things we didn’t know back then. We know that Asbestos causes Mesothelioma. We know that Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) destroy the ozone layer. We know that Twinkies are one of the few foods that will be around after a nuclear holocaust.
Years before I became an electrician, the Electric Company had stopped using oil with PCBs. There was still an effort to clean it up from the older plants. At the new coal-fired power plant in north central Oklahoma, we didn’t have a problem with PCBs. We had other problems. Some of which we didn’t know about (well, we knew something, just not so much) at the time.
A very prominent responsibility of mechanics and electricians was to clean oily equipment. Pumps and motors, breakers, fans, mills. All kinds of equipment. Almost everything was lubricated one way or another with oil. Solvent was used to remove the oil when the equipment needed to be cleaned.
We had a standard kind of solvent at our plant. I believe it was called “Standard Solvent 350”. See…. It was a Standard solvent. Even had the word Standard in the name. One of the key ingredients of this standard solvent is a solvent known as “Stoddard Solvent”. This solvent worked real good when cleaning up equipment like motors and pumps and other oily equipment. Many times we were “Up to our elbows” in this solvent.
We had a barrel in the corner of the electric shop close to the door to the main switchgear where we could put a motor and scrub it clean while solvent poured out of a flexible nozzle on the motor, your shirt, your pants, your work boots, and the floor. Some days during overhauls when we would work cleaning motors for 10 hours each day, I would come home from work drenched in solvent. My wife would make me take my clothes off in the utility room where I could put them directly into the washing machine where Oxydol could go to work on it right away.
When Ted Riddle and I were working for Willard Stark on an overhaul at the gas plant outside Mustang Oklahoma during the spring of 1986, Willard said one day that he wanted to show us something. I explained Willard’s situation at the plant in a post called “Working Power Plant Wonders with Willard Stark“.
He was a good example of what I would call a “Contrarian.” That is, he seemed to buck the system often. He thought outside the box a lot. I realized this right way when we would listen to Paul Harvey on the radio during lunch. Every time Paul Harvey would say, “…Noon News and Comment” Willard would always finish the sentence by saying, “Mostly Comment.” I figured then that he had to be a contrarian, because who would ever think that Paul Harvey wasn’t the best person in the world to bring the News to our private little power plant world.
Paul Harvey was one of a kind radio personality. No one will ever fill his shoes.
So, when Willard said he was wanted us to see something “with our own eyes”, I figured this was going to be something good. Probably some kind of secret place where you could hide and take a nap if the day wore on too long, or something like that. Well… It didn’t turn out to be that kind of “something”, but it was something.
Willard took a small metal pan and put some Stoddard Solvent in it. The old gas plant used straight Stoddard Solvent, unlike the more sophisticated Coal-fired plant where Ted Riddle and I normally worked. We walked out into the turbine-generator (T-G) floor. He placed the pan of solvent on the floor, took a WypAll (which is a strong paper rag) and dropped it into the pan:
A package of an Important Power Plant Staple: WypAlls!
Then he bent down and with his lighter, he lit the WypAll on fire. We watched as the flames grew higher and higher. Willard watched our expressions. We had been under the understanding that Solvent was not flammable. He explained that technically, Stoddard Solvent is not considered “Flammable”, but it is considered “Combustible”. Combustible means that it burns.
A bucket of Stoddard Solvent. Notice this bucket clearly says “Combustible”
Stoddard Solvent doesn’t ignite fast enough to be considered “Flammable”. At least that’s the way Willard explained it to us. Willard said he wanted us to be aware of this fact when we have our bodies all soaked in solvent, that if we were to catch on fire for some reason, we were going to go up in flames just like that WypAll. We both appreciated the advice.
I didn’t begin this post expecting to say that much about Stoddard Solvent, but just in case you were really wondering what it is, maybe this picture will explain it to you:
A Chemist-eye view of Stoddard Solvent
I hope that cleared it up for you. You have to wonder why they put that “Oh Oh” down there at the bottom. Almost as if something is supposed to go wrong.
The solvent I really wanted to talk about was one that was used more exclusively in the electric shop. It is called Trichloroethylene 1.1.1. You see, a lot of equipment that we cleaned in the electric shop needed to be cleaned spotless. Solvent 350 would leave a film when it dried. So, in the electric shop when we needed to clean something with electric contacts we would use something called “Electro Contact Cleaner”:
Spray Can of LPS Electro Contact Cleaner – Only the cans we used didn’t say CFC Free
This was very expensive compared to the regular solvent. So, I was surprised when Ben Davis and I first went on an overhaul in Muskogee, and they had this exact same contact cleaner in 55 gallon barrels:
Barrel of LPS Electro Contact Cleaner
I remember John Manning showing us a few of these barrels that they had ordered for the overhaul. I think my jaw dropped. By my calculation, one barrel like this would cost over $3,000.00. I figured if it was in cans, it would have cost three times that amount. The advantage of using Contact cleaner was that it dried clean. It didn’t leave a residue.
Trichloroethylene 1.1.1 was like that. It didn’t leave a residue when it dried. I think this will become obvious to you when you see what it really is:
Chemical Composition of Trichoroethylene
You can see right off the bat that this is going to dry clean… I mean…. it’s obvious… right? I think the CLs on three of the corners indicate that it “Cleans” 3 times better than other solvents.
Anyway. This stuff evaporated quickly so when you were up to your elbows in this solvent, it felt cool because it would evaporate causing a cooling effect. It had a very peculiar smell. It also made you feel a little dizzy when you were using it. Especially when you had to breathe in a lot of it in a confined area. Having fans blowing on you seemed to make it worse, because it would increase the evaporation rate filling the air with more solvent.
It was known at the time that Trichloroethylene would destroy your liver when it gets into your blood stream. There was no quicker way of injecting the solvent into your blood stream than by inhaling it. Finally OSHA decided that this solvent was no longer safe to be used in a plant setting. It could only be used in small quantities like “White Out”.
Gee… Who remembers White Out?
A bottle of White Out. Oh look. A New Formula!
The last time I heard about white out was in a blonde joke about someone using white out on the computer monitor. Who types anymore on a typewriter? I think anyone today that would choose to type on a typewriter would be the type of person that would prefer a typewriter eraser over white out.
I take that back. The last time I heard about White Out was on a show like 60 Minutes where they were showing young kids in Panama or another Central American country being hooked on tubs of White Out. They would sit around all day taking quick whiffs from a tub of White Out. — Why? Because it contained Trichloroethylene and it would give you a buzz.
My dad, a Veterinary professor at Oklahoma State University had told me about the dangers of Trichloroethylene around the time I told him about Bill McAlister using WD-40 on his elbows to ease the pain of his arthritis. Sonny Karcher had asked me to talk to my dad about it to see if he knew why WD-40 would help Arthritis.
My father (I’ll call him Father in this paragraph, because in this paragraph, he’s being more “sophisticated”) told me that WD-40 had the same chemical in it that Veterinarians used on horses to help their joints when they hurt. Then he warned me that the solvent in WD-40 soaks right into your skin and when it does it carries other toxic chemicals into your body than just the arthritis lineament. So, he told me to tell Sonny not to use it often.
A can of Power Plant WD40
So, anyway, we had to find a replacement for Trichloroethylene. Tom Gibson and Bill Bennett went to work ordering samples of other kinds of solvents that salesmen were saying would be a good replacement. One of the first that we tried was called Orange Solvent. It had a real nice Orange smell. Sort of like drinking Tang.
Bottle of Orange Solvent
It had a couple of problems. First, I would be more inclined to drink it since it smelled so good, and I was a fan of Tang at the time.
Tang – Used by the Astronauts on the Apollo missions
The second problem with the Orange Solvent was that it didn’t seem to clean very well. We were used to something cutting the oil and contact grease quickly. the Orange Solvent didn’t cut the mustard (so to speak).
One day during overhaul at our plant, Bill Bennett gave us a barrel of some new kind of solvent. It was supposed to be comparable in it’s cleaning ability to Trichloroethylene (could you imagine Red Skelton trying to say that word?)
Red Skelton saying “Trichloroethylene”
Bill wanted Andy Tubbs and me (I know! It seems as if it should be “Andy Tubbs and I”, but “me” is the correct way to say it) to use the new solvent on the main power transformer main bus connectors. They are normally covered with No-Ox Grease so this would be a good test.
A jar of No-Ox Grease (No-Ox means No Oxide)
So, Andy and I carried the large extension ladder out to the Unit 1 Main Power Transformer and leaned it up against the back side (the transformer’s backside, not ours). We climbed up to the open hatchways and crawled in. We hung a small yellow blower in the doorway to blow fresh air on us.
A Main Power Transformer
Andy and I had everything setup and we were ready to work. We both just fit in the small area with the large bus work between us. We began using our rags soaked in the new solvent on the silver plated bus. I don’t remember how well the solvent cleaned the bus. I just remember thinking that this solvent sure did evaporate quickly. Especially with the blower fan right next to us.
I also remember looking over at Andy crouched across from me. He was looking down at the bus. Then his entire body seemed to swivel around as if he was on some kind of swing which caused him to tilt up the side of the enclosure. I watched his face, and he seemed to be saying something to me, only I couldn’t make it out.
I think I said something like “Huh?” Then about that time all kinds of brightly lit flowers were circling around my head and my arms seemed to be floating in front of me. I heard Andy say with a slur, “We butter git outta here…” His voice sounded like it was in a pipe…. Well, we sort of were sitting in a pipe… He started to move toward the hatchway.
I remember briefly thinking that I was just fine enjoying the interesting scenery. By now there were bright lights streaming toward me from all sides. Then I thought. “No. I better leave.” So, I struggled to pull myself into the hatchway. It was big enough that we could both pull ourselves out together.
I began climbing down the ladder head first. It was about 15 feet to the ground. I was completely out of the hatch with my body completely upside down on the ladder before I decided that it would be better if I turned over and went down feet first. Somehow I managed to swing my feet down and around without falling off the ladder. I think Andy was pretty much in the same predicament as I was.
Once we were on the ground, we hobbled into the electric shop and sat down. We told Bill Bennett that this was not a good solvent to use. I don’t even want to remember what the name of the solvent was. If I mentioned it, someone may put it in some tubs of white out and sell it to kids in Panama, because Trichloroethylene had nothing on this.
I suppose we finally found a replacement solvent. Though, I don’t remember what it was. All I do know is that it was quite an adventure trying to find one. Maybe we just used a lot of Electro contact cleaner after that.
Like Howard Chumbley, who told stories about being up to his elbows in transformer oil made with PCBs, I can now tell my fellow teammates at work, “Yeah. I remember the days when we were up to our elbows in Trichloroethylene. Never gave it a second thought.” Only, their reaction would be a little different than ours were in the electric shop office. They might raise their eyes up from their computer monitors and look across the cubicle at me for a moment. Then give me a look like “there goes that crazy old guy that used to work in a power plant again. Hasn’t he told us that story about 50 times already?” Well…. That solvent and stuff. It makes you forget things…. I can’t remember what I have already said.
Comments from the original Post:
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If that Trichloroethylene caused you to have some memory loss today, I can’t even begin to imagine what your memory was like before the exposure. I don’t know of anyone with a memory like yours! I mean – who else can remember the shoe size of his cub scout leader’s nephew’s neighbor?
I have a bottle of White-out in my desk today and use it regularly. I play an Eb Contra Bass Clarinet. Most of the music we play is not scored for my instrument so I’ll use Tuba, String Bass, Cello, Bassoon, etc. music (all in “C”) and transpose it to Eb. It takes a little White-out sometimes.
I love Saturday mornings!
Working Power Plant Wonders with Willard Stark
Originally posted on July 6, 2013:
Ted Riddle and I were working for an “Acting” foreman named Willard Stark during an overhaul at the plant outside Mustang, Oklahoma the spring of ’86. Willard seemed much older than he was. I would have guessed he was in his late 60’s or early 70’s, but it turned out he was only in his mid to lower 50’s. I found out why he had aged as the overhaul unfolded.
I heard some slight grumblings from a few in the shop when Bill Bennett told me that I was going to the plant near Mustang, Oklahoma that spring. I suppose it was because since I had become an electrician in the Fall of 1983, this was already going to be my third overhaul away from our plant, and all of them ended up being major overhauls.
The reason others were grumbling about this was because when you were able to go on an extended overhaul at another plant, it meant that you were going to earn not only a lot of extra overtime, but you also received travel time, mileage and a per diem (a daily amount of money for expenses). I believe at the time the Per Diem rate was $32.00 each day. This was supposed to pay for your hotel room and your meals while you were away from your family. We lived in trailers to cut down on costs.
Others believed that I had received more than my share of the piece of this pie. I had been sent on every available overhaul since just before I had reached my first year as an electrician. So, by this time, most people would have saved up quite a sum of money. I, however, was making around $7.50 my first year, and by the time 1986 had rolled around, I was still making just under $10.00 an hour. So, overtime amounted to $14.50 an hour.
When you compared this to the first class electricians that were making around $19.00 an hour at the time, they would have been making $28.50 an hour overtime. This was about twice what I was making. So, I was a cheap date.
On December 21, 1985 I had been married (the day following my last day at Horseshoe Lake overhaul — see the post: A Slap in the Face at a Gas-Fired Power Plant), and I had used every cent I had in the world to pay for our honeymoon. I was even relying on paychecks I was receiving while I was away to finish paying for it.
So, it helped to come back and find that we were on a major overhaul at our plant on Unit 1 doing the 5 year checkout. Then finding that I was going to a major overhaul at the plant in Mustang, Oklahoma where I could live with my wife in her apartment in Oklahoma City while she finished her last semester to obtain her nursing degree from Oklahoma University. I went on the overhaul with Ted Riddle.
Ted was hired into the electric shop the previous summer. He wasn’t on my crew so I hadn’t worked much with him. He was a farmer that had an electric background. He was a bigger man than I was and had a good sense of humor. He had a steady temper and didn’t let much bother him. He would laugh at things that might bother others.
I appreciated working with Ted, because his steady mood helped to teach me that blowing my top about little things did little to help the situation. So, for this overhaul, I decided that I would try to emulate Ted Riddle by keeping up with his easy-going-ness (I know…. the dictionary couldn’t find that one).
Bob Kennedy was on this overhaul as well. He had been my acting foreman during the overhaul at Horseshoe Lake. I had described our relationship in the post: “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy“. I was glad to be working with Bob again. As I mentioned, Willard Stark was our acting foreman.
For those that don’t know…. an acting foreman is someone that normally isn’t a foreman, but is appointed to lead a crew for a particular job. These men usually are the best foremen to work for, because they haven’t attended any official “manager training”. This usually made them better foremen, as the manager training had a tendency to destroy one’s character and moral integrity. — I never could figure that one out. Some people came back unscathed, but others came back with PTMD (Post-Traumatic Manager Disorder).
The plant at Mustang was the smallest gas-fired power plant that had people permanently working there. It had some smaller units that they wouldn’t run when the newer larger units weren’t running because the water treatment plant (that creates the boiler water) used more power than the small units could generate. — That amazed me. So, while we were there, I don’t think any of the units were running so they didn’t have to run the water treatment plant.
Willard Stark had spent a good portion of his life working at the plant and had a lot of stories about the plant manager and assistant manager at our plant. He had been an electrician when Bill Moler had first come to the plant as a new green electrician like me. I enjoyed sitting during lunch in Mark Thomas’s electric lab as Willard told us stories.
Willard had an incredible memory. He could remember what he was doing on any specific day decades before. We would listen to Paul Harvey on the radio during lunch, and whenever Paul would say, “….noon news and comment.” Willard would always finish the sentence by saying “…mostly comment.” I had spent a good part of my childhood listening to Paul Harvey on the radio because when I was young, we always had a radio playing in the house and the car. So, Paul Harvey’s voice was always a comfort to me. I was saddened a few years ago when he passed away.
Paul Harvey was one of a kind radio personality. No one will ever fill his shoes.
Working with Ted Riddle cracked me up. He would notice things that I was totally oblivious to (yeah. I see it. A preposition at the end of a sentence). For instance, one day while we were working, Ted asked me if I ever noticed how Bob Kennedy drinks water out of his jar. I told him I hadn’t noticed.
You see, Bob had this jar that looked like a pickle jar that he brought to work each day filled with water. During lunch, he would drink out of this jar. Ted said, “Watch Bob during lunch today. Tell me what you think.” So as I was sitting next to Bob during lunch listening to Paul Harvey, and Willard Stark telling us what he did on any particular date in the past that Paul Harvey might mention, I kept one eye on Bob.
As Bob lifted his jar to his mouth I watched as he began to drink. I immediately knew what Ted had wanted me to see. As Bob took a drink, he slowly tilted the jar up until the water reached his mouth. As the jar was being tilted, Bob’s upper lip would reach way into the jar as far as it could, quivering in anticipation of a cool drink of fresh water. The upper lip of a camel came to my mind.
Bob Kennedy’s upper lip reaching into the water jar…
With all my might, I struggled to keep a straight face as I turned my head slowly to look over at Ted who had a grin from ear-to-ear….. ok. I’ll show you the picture of Andy Griffith again that I included in my post from last week, just so you can see what I saw when I looked over at Ted:
Andy Griffith as Permanent Latrine Orderly in No Time for Sergeants grinning ear-to-ear
I think I almost choked on my ham sandwich as I swallowed while trying to keep my composure.
Another day while Ted and I were cleaning ignitors on the shop work bench Ted asked me if I had noticed what Randy Oxley and Jimmy Armafio were working on. I told him I hadn’t noticed. Ted said that if he’s not mistaken Randy Oxley has been coming into the shop all morning with the same piece of conduit. He bends it, then cuts a little off the end and re-threads it.
So, the next time Randy came into the shop I noticed he had a piece of one and a half inch conduit in his hand. It was about 3 1/2 feet long and had a couple of bends in it. Randy hooked the conduit up in the large conduit bender and using his measuring tape carefully lined it up as Armafio stood back and watched. He bent the conduit a little, then put it in the bandsaw and cut off a few inches. Then he put it in the vice on the work bench and proceeded to thread the end of the conduit.
Then Jimmy and Randy left. Ted said that if he wasn’t mistaken, that’s the same piece of conduit Randy has been working on all morning. So, as we continued the boring job of cleaning the 30 or so ignitors piled on our workbench, I told Ted about the time I was at the plant at Horseshoe Lake and Randy had told a Mechanical A foreman Joe Balkenbush (I think his first name was Joe), who was Randy’s uncle on his mom’s side, that Randy was the best electrician at the plant at Mustang, only he was the only one that knew it.
I mentioned this meeting and the reason for it in the post: “Bobbin Along with Bob Kennedy” (See the link above). Sure enough, a little while later, Randy came back to the shop with the same piece of conduit and performed the same procedure of bending, cutting and threading and scadoodling.
A little while later the electrical B foremen came out into the shop (I can’t remember his name for the life of me… I can see his face), and asked us if we knew how to run conduit. We assured him that we did. I had been thoroughly trained by Gene Roget and Ted, well, as it turned out, Ted was a crackerjack conduit hand.
The foremen took us up onto the boiler and asked us if we could run some conduit from one place to another. He sounded apologetic when he asked if that would be all right. We assured him it was no problem. We would get right on it.
On the way back to the shop, as we were coming down from the boiler, Ted tapped my shoulder and pointed down to the bottom of a light fixture. He said, “Hey! Isn’t that the piece of conduit that Randy has been working on all morning?” Sure enough. There is was. He finally bent it and cut it to fit! Well… The rest of this part of the story is that instead of running back and forth to the shop to bend and cut and thread conduit, Ted and I grabbed a conduit stand, and the appropriate tools and hauled them up on the boiler.
Rigid Conduit threader stand
We carried about 40 foot of conduit up there and began bending, cutting and threading and mounting the conduit. We finished just before lunch. As I mentioned above, Ted was a heck of a conduit person. He knew exactly what he was doing. We carried all the equipment back to the shop.
After lunch Ted and I went back to cleaning ignitors. The foreman saw us out of the window of the office and came out and asked us why we weren’t working on the conduit. When we told him we were done, he had a look of disbelief. He left the shop (to go check out our work). Ted and I smiled at each other.
A little while later the foreman returned with the electric supervisor. The electric supervisor asked us if we wouldn’t mind working on some more jobs to run conduit. Ted told him that we were there to do whatever they needed. I nodded in agreement.
During the rest of the overhaul we worked to repair broken conduit, pull wire and install new conduit where needed. Mark Thomas, the electric specialist, that was about my age, asked if he could use us to pull and mount some new controls. He said he wouldn’t let the others in the shop touch it because he would just have to follow through and redo it when they were done. So, we did that also.
We did get in trouble one day when we went to install some conduit over a control room just off of the T-G floor. We noticed that all of the lights were out except a couple, so we found a couple of large boxes of light bulbs and replaced the burned out bulbs. The Electric Foreman came running up to us a little while later and said, “What are you trying to do? Run us out of business?”
With looks on our faces that conveyed that we didn’t understand what he meant, he explained that in small plants like this one, they don’t have a budget like the bigger plants. They can’t afford to keep the lights burning all over the plant all the time. So, we were only supposed to replace lights in the immediate area where we had to work. Now the foreman had to figure out where he was going to find the money to buy another box of light bulbs. — These were incandescent bulbs that don’t have a long life span.
I had mentioned in an earlier post called Resistance in a Coal-fire Power Plant that Bill Rivers had been given a bum deal when another person had accused him of cutting off the leads of electronic components so that no one could check them to see if they were really bad (which doesn’t make any sense given that you could still check them no matter how short the leads are). Well, I found that the same situation had existed in this plant.
There was this one guy that sat in the electric shop Lab (not the same electric shop lab where Willard and Mark Thomas hung out), working on Gray Phones all day. Ted had asked me if I had noticed how many gray phone boxes were missing gray phones (gray phones are the PA system in a plant. You could go to any one of them and page someone).
Gaitronics Gray Phone
Ted would point to empty gray phone boxes as we walked through the plant. He told me that they have one electrician that doesn’t do anything else but sit in the electric lab working on gray phones. That is all he does. When we asked Willard about it, he told us this story.
Mark Thomas used to work on all the gray phones, and kept them all running in good order. When Mark worked on a gray phone, sometimes to make sure it is working, he would page himself. Just to make sure that part worked. I understood this. When I was working on gray phones with Bill Rivers, he would page me, or I would page him, just to test it.
If you were working by yourself, it would make sense that you would page yourself instead of bugging someone else several times a day while you went from one gray phone to the next. Anyway, people accused Mark Thomas of trying to make himself more important by making others think that he was being paged all the time by paging himself.
Now, anyone with any sense would know how lame of an idea that is. I mean, anyone would recognize Mark Thomas’s voice. The plant wasn’t that big. There weren’t that many people working there. Everyone knew everyone else. Mark was obviously just working on gray phones.
So, after the foreman accused him of trying to promote his self importance by paging himself several times a day, Mark said, “Fine! Let someone else work on the gray phones!” Mark was by far the most intelligent person at the plant. He obviously didn’t need to artificially promote his reputation by making a fool of himself.
So, they gave the job of gray phone maintenance to someone that didn’t understand electronics. They even bought an expensive gray phone test set to help him out. So each day he would sit in the lab smoking his pipe staring at an ever-growing pile of gray phones. At one point, Ted and I offered to fix them all for him. He said, “That’s ok. It keeps me in the air conditioning.
I know in later times, Mark Thomas went on to greater successes within the company. I believe that Willard stayed around until there was a downsizing and he was able to early retire. I mentioned at the beginning that Willard looked a lot older than he really was. Willard brought this to my attention. He showed me a picture of himself a few years earlier. It was of him standing by a car wearing a suit.
He reminded me of an actor from an old movie, though, I can’t remember the actor’s name at the moment. Willard said that in the past few years he aged rapidly. It happened when the previous foreman had retired. Willard had seniority in the shop and had been at the plant most of his life. He knew what he was doing, and had filled in as foreman many times. He really expected to become the foreman.
Nevertheless, they gave the job to someone from somewhere else who didn’t know the plant, or even much about being a foreman. This upset Willard so much that he said he just gave up. He said the stress from that experience aged him. Mark Thomas agreed.
Mark had his own encounter with this attitude when he decided to retreat to his lab off and away from the electric shop. Willard and Mark, the two electricians that really knew what they were doing at the plant had sequestered themselves in their own hideaway where they would sit each day listening to Paul Harvey at lunch and biding their time until the next phase of their life came around.
Solving the Selection of a Power Plant Solvent
A year after I joined the electricians in the electric shop, Howard Chumbley became my foreman. One day when we were talking about going to the old Osage Plant up the road to clean up a PCB (Polychlorinated Biphenyls) spill, he explained that “In His Day” they used to clean their tools in a vat of transformer oil that was full of PCBs. I remember him telling us that it was normal for him to be up to his elbows in the stuff. They never thought it might be harmful. Now we were getting ready to go up to the old plant to clean up a small spill and I was going to have to suit up in a special hazardous waste suit. I wrote about our experience in the post: “Pioneers of Power Plant Fame Finally Find Rest“.
Now we know about the hazard of developing cancer by having PCBs in your system. Today we know a lot of things we didn’t know back then. We know that Asbestos causes Mesothelioma. We know that Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) destroy the ozone layer. We know that Twinkies are one of the few foods that will be around after a nuclear holocaust.
Years before I became an electrician, the Electric Company had stopped using oil with PCBs. There was still an effort to clean it up from the older plants. At the new coal-fired power plant in north central Oklahoma, we didn’t have a problem with PCBs. We had other problems. Some of which we didn’t know about (well, we knew something, just not so much) at the time.
A very prominent responsibility of mechanics and electricians was to clean oily equipment. Pumps and motors, breakers, fans, mills. All kinds of equipment. Almost everything was lubricated one way or another with oil. Solvent was used to remove the oil when the equipment needed to be cleaned.
We had a standard kind of solvent at our plant. I believe it was called “Standard Solvent 350”. See…. It was a Standard solvent. Even had the word Standard in the name. One of the key ingredients of this standard solvent is a solvent known as “Stoddard Solvent”. This solvent worked real good when cleaning up equipment like motors and pumps and other oily equipment. Many times we were “Up to our elbows” in this solvent.
We had a barrel in the corner of the electric shop close to the door to the main switchgear where we could put a motor and scrub it clean while solvent poured out of a flexible nozzle on the motor, your shirt, your pants, your work boots, and the floor. Some days during overhauls when we would work cleaning motors for 10 hours each day, I would come home from work drenched in solvent. My wife would make me take my clothes off in the utility room where I could put them directly into the washing machine where Oxydol could go to work on it right away.
When Ted Riddle and I were working for Willard Stark on an overhaul at the gas plant outside Mustang Oklahoma during the spring of 1986, Willard said one day that he wanted to show us something. I explained Willard’s situation at the plant in a post called “Working Power Plant Wonders with Willard Stark“.
He was a good example of what I would call a “Contrarian.” That is, he seemed to buck the system often. He thought outside the box a lot. I realized this right way when we would listen to Paul Harvey on the radio during lunch. Every time Paul Harvey would say, “…Noon News and Comment” Willard would always finish the sentence by saying, “Mostly Comment.” I figured then that he had to be a contrarian, because who would ever think that Paul Harvey wasn’t the best person in the world to bring the News to our private little power plant world.
Paul Harvey was one of a kind radio personality. No one will ever fill his shoes.
So, when Willard said he was wanted us to see something “with our own eyes”, I figured this was going to be something good. Probably some kind of secret place where you could hide and take a nap if the day wore on too long, or something like that. Well… It didn’t turn out to be that kind of “something”, but it was something.
Willard took a small metal pan and put some Stoddard Solvent in it. The old gas plant used straight Stoddard Solvent, unlike the more sophisticated Coal-fired plant where Ted Riddle and I normally worked. We walked out into the turbine-generator (T-G) floor. He placed the pan of solvent on the floor, took a WypAll (which is a strong paper rag) and dropped it into the pan:
A package of an Important Power Plant Staple: WypAlls!
Then he bent down and with his lighter, he lit the WypAll on fire. We watched as the flames grew higher and higher. Willard watched our expressions. We had been under the understanding that Solvent was not flammable. He explained that technically, Stoddard Solvent is not considered “Flammable”, but it is considered “Combustible”. Combustible means that it burns.
A bucket of Stoddard Solvent. Notice this bucket clearly says “Combustible”
Stoddard Solvent doesn’t ignite fast enough to be considered “Flammable”. At least that’s the way Willard explained it to us. Willard said he wanted us to be aware of this fact when we have our bodies all soaked in solvent, that if we were to catch on fire for some reason, we were going to go up in flames just like that WypAll. We both appreciated the advice.
I didn’t begin this post expecting to say that much about Stoddard Solvent, but just in case you were really wondering what it is, maybe this picture will explain it to you:
A Chemist-eye view of Stoddard Solvent
I hope that cleared it up for you. You have to wonder why they put that “Oh Oh” down there at the bottom. Almost as if something is supposed to go wrong.
The solvent I really wanted to talk about was one that was used more exclusively in the electric shop. It is called Trichloroethylene 1.1.1. You see, a lot of equipment that we cleaned in the electric shop needed to be cleaned spotless. Solvent 350 would leave a film when it dried. So, in the electric shop when we needed to clean something with electric contacts we would use something called “Electro Contact Cleaner”:
Spray Can of LPS Electro Contact Cleaner – Only the cans we used didn’t say CFC Free
This was very expensive compared to the regular solvent. So, I was surprised when Ben Davis and I first went on an overhaul in Muskogee, and they had this exact same contact cleaner in 55 gallon barrels:
Barrel of LPS Electro Contact Cleaner
I remember John Manning showing us a few of these barrels that they had ordered for the overhaul. I think my jaw dropped. By my calculation, one barrel like this would cost over $3,000.00. I figured if it was in cans, it would have cost three times that amount. The advantage of using Contact cleaner was that it dried clean. It didn’t leave a residue.
Trichloroethylene 1.1.1 was like that. It didn’t leave a residue when it dried. I think this will become obvious to you when you see what it really is:
Chemical Composition of Trichoroethylene
You can see right off the bat that this is going to dry clean… I mean…. it’s obvious… right? I think the CLs on three of the corners indicate that it “Cleans” 3 times better than other solvents.
Anyway. This stuff evaporated quickly so when you were up to your elbows in this solvent, it felt cool because it would evaporate causing a cooling effect. It had a very peculiar smell. It also made you feel a little dizzy when you were using it. Especially when you had to breathe in a lot of it in a confined area. Having fans blowing on you seemed to make it worse, because it would increase the evaporation rate filling the air with more solvent.
It was known at the time that Trichloroethylene would destroy your liver when it gets into your blood stream. There was no quicker way of injecting the solvent into your blood stream than by inhaling it. Finally OSHA decided that this solvent was no longer safe to be used in a plant setting. It could only be used in small quantities like “White Out”.
Gee… Who remembers White Out?
A bottle of White Out. Oh look. A New Formula!
The last time I heard about white out was in a blonde joke about someone using white out on the computer monitor. Who types anymore on a typewriter? I think anyone today that would choose to type on a typewriter would be the type of person that would prefer a typewriter eraser over white out.
I take that back. The last time I heard about White Out was on a show like 60 Minutes where they were showing young kids in Panama or another Central American country being hooked on tubs of White Out. They would sit around all day taking quick whiffs from a tub of White Out. — Why? Because it contained Trichloroethylene and it would give you a buzz.
My dad, a Veterinary professor at Oklahoma State University had told me about the dangers of Trichloroethylene around the time I told him about Bill McAlister using WD-40 on his elbows to ease the pain of his arthritis. Sonny Karcher had asked me to talk to my dad about it to see if he knew why WD-40 would help Arthritis.
My father (I’ll call him Father in this paragraph, because in this paragraph, he’s being more “sophisticated”) told me that WD-40 had the same chemical in it that Veterinarians used on horses to help their joints when they hurt. Then he warned me that the solvent in WD-40 soaks right into your skin and when it does it carries other toxic chemicals into your body than just the arthritis lineament. So, he told me to tell Sonny not to use it often.
A can of Power Plant WD40
So, anyway, we had to find a replacement for Trichloroethylene. Tom Gibson and Bill Bennett went to work ordering samples of other kinds of solvents that salesmen were saying would be a good replacement. One of the first that we tried was called Orange Solvent. It had a real nice Orange smell. Sort of like drinking Tang.
Bottle of Orange Solvent
It had a couple of problems. First, I would be more inclined to drink it since it smelled so good, and I was a fan of Tang at the time.
Tang – Used by the Astronauts on the Apollo missions
The second problem with the Orange Solvent was that it didn’t seem to clean very well. We were used to something cutting the oil and contact grease quickly. the Orange Solvent didn’t cut the mustard (so to speak).
One day during overhaul at our plant, Bill Bennett gave us a barrel of some new kind of solvent. It was supposed to be comparable in it’s cleaning ability to Trichloroethylene (could you imagine Red Skelton trying to say that word?)
Red Skelton saying “Trichloroethylene”
Bill wanted Andy Tubbs and me (I know! It seems as if it should be “Andy Tubbs and I”, but “me” is the correct way to say it) to use the new solvent on the main power transformer main bus connectors. They are normally covered with No-Ox Grease so this would be a good test.
A jar of No-Ox Grease (No-Ox means No Oxide)
So, Andy and I carried the large extension ladder out to the Unit 1 Main Power Transformer and leaned it up against the back side. We climbed up to the open hatchways and crawled in. We hung a small yellow blower in the doorway to blow fresh air on us.
A Main Power Transformer
Andy and I had everything setup and we were ready to work. We both just fit in the small area with the large bus work between us. We began using our rags soaked in the new solvent on the silver plated bus. I don’t remember how well the solvent cleaned the bus. I just remember thinking that this solvent sure did evaporate quickly. Especially with the blower fan right next to us.
I also remember looking over at Andy crouched across from me. He was looking down at the bus. Then his entire body seemed to swivel around as if he was on some kind of swing which caused him to tilt up the side of the enclosure. I watched his face, and he seemed to be saying something to me, only I couldn’t make it out.
I think I said something like “Huh?” Then about that time all kinds of brightly lit flowers were circling around my head and my arms seemed to be floating in front of me. I heard Andy say with a slur, “We butter git outta here…” His voice sounded like it was in a pipe…. Well, we sort of were sitting in a pipe… He started to move toward the hatchway.
I remember briefly thinking that I was just fine enjoying the interesting scenery. By now there were bright lights streaming toward me from all sides. Then I thought. “No. I better leave.” So, I struggled to pull myself into the hatchway. It was big enough that we could both pull ourselves out together.
I began climbing down the ladder head first. It was about 15 feet to the ground. I was completely out of the hatch with my body completely upside down on the ladder before I decided that it would be better if I turned over and went down feet first. Somehow I managed to swing my feet down and around without falling off the ladder. I think Andy was pretty much in the same predicament as I was.
Once we were on the ground, we hobbled into the electric shop and sat down. We told Bill Bennett that this was not a good solvent to use. I don’t even want to remember what the name of the solvent was. If I mentioned it, someone may put it in some tubs of white out and sell it to kids in Panama, because Trichloroethylene had nothing on this.
I suppose we finally found a replacement solvent. Though, I don’t remember what it was. All I do know is that it was quite an adventure trying to find one. Maybe we just used a lot of Electro contact cleaner after that.
Like Howard Chumbley, who told stories about being up to his elbows in transformer oil made with PCBs, I can now tell my fellow teammates at work, “Yeah. I remember the days when we were up to our elbows in Trichloroethylene. Never gave it a second thought.” Only, their reaction would be a little different than ours were in the electric shop office. They might raise their eyes up from their computer monitors and look across the cubicle at me for a moment. Then give me a look like “there goes that crazy old guy that used to work in a power plant again. Hasn’t he told us that story about 50 times already?” Well…. That solvent and stuff. It makes you forget things…. I can’t remember what I have already said.
Comments from the original Post:
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When I was in my early 20’s my company shipped me up north to a different branch office and so began eight years of living in contractors guest house accommodation in a run down once-holiday-resort town. For about a year we had eight guys who were working on a local power station stay at the guest house, they were “lagging strippers” which wasn’t some night club job for brazen hussy’s but a job where the power station authorities had recognised that the asbestos that clad every single inch of their pipework was dangerous enough to get rid of, but not so dangerous that it had yet been legislated against when treating or handling the stuff (this was 1978/1980-ish).
The team of eight spent several years travelling the UK chipping off asbestos cement by hand wearing nothing more complicated that a thin paper face mask over their nose and mouth, their work clothing was jeans and tee shirt because as you’ll know, the inside of a power station can be warm work.
Their rate of pay was at least four times what our “normal” contracting electricians were being paid and our electricians were craftsmen and so on what was considered a “good wage”, the asbestos guys accepted with a shrug of the shoulders that theirs was a dangerous job, it was known that asbestos was dangerous but ther was no H&S law to protect them and so they took the money and hoped they wouldn’t die young – I have no doubt at all that most of them will be dead now as they used to come back to the guest house covered in white dust on the nights when they’d been in a hurry to leave site and not bothered getting changed, hell they probably exposed me to lots of asbestos dust too.
On one public holiday weekend we’d all gone back to our home towns and returned after the break, except this time there were only seven of them, the other had been to his doctor for a chest infection and an x-ray had revealed a shadow on his lung, the atmosphere was pretty down that week as they all knew what it could be, he never returned to the job.
As a sign off let me add that theses guys were not stupid or fearless or uncaring about their own mortality, they all had wives and some had young children, but they were mainly unskilled and how much persuasion do you need when you are unskilled and unemployed other than to offer you four times the skilled man rates – I saw lots of our electricians take up the golden wage packets on the oil rigs during the 1970s UK rush for North Sea oil – now there was a dangerous occupation…
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If that Trichloroethylene caused you to have some memory loss today, I can’t even begin to imagine what your memory was like before the exposure. I don’t know of anyone with a memory like yours! I mean – who else can remember the shoe size of his cub scout leader’s nephew’s neighbor?
I have a bottle of White-out in my desk today and use it regularly. I play an Eb Contra Bass Clarinet. Most of the music we play is not scored for my instrument so I’ll use Tuba, String Bass, Cello, Bassoon, etc. music (all in “C”) and transpose it to Eb. It takes a little White-out sometimes.
I love Saturday mornings!
Working Power Plant Wonders with Willard Stark
Originally posted on July 6, 2013:
We were working for an “Acting” foreman named Willard Stark during an overhaul at the plant outside Mustang, Oklahoma the spring of ’86. Willard seemed much older than he was. I would have guessed he was in his late 60’s or early 70’s, but it turned out he was only in his mid to lower 50’s. I found out why he had aged as the overhaul unfolded.
I heard some slight grumblings from a few in the shop when Bill Bennett told me that I was going to the plant near Mustang, Oklahoma that spring. I suppose it was because since I had become an electrician in the Fall of 1983, this was already going to be my third overhaul away from our plant, and all of them ended up being major overhauls.
The reason others were grumbling about this was because when you were able to go on a an extended overhaul at another plant, it meant that you were going to earn not only a lot of extra overtime, but you also received travel time, mileage and a per diem (a daily amount of money for expenses). I believe at the time the Per Diem rate was $32.00 each day. This was supposed to pay for your hotel room and your meals while you were away from your family. We lived in trailers to cut down on costs.
Others believed that I had received more than my share of the piece of this pie. I had been sent on every available overhaul since just before I had reached my first year as an electrician. So, by this time, most people would have saved up quite a sum of money. I, however, was making around $7.50 my first year, and by the time 1986 had rolled around, I was still making just under $10.00 an hour. So, overtime amounted to $14.50 an hour.
When you compared this to the first class electricians that were making around $19.00 an hour at the time, they would have been making $28.50 an hour overtime. This was about twice what I was making. So, I was a cheap date.
On December 21, 1985 I had been married (the day following my last day at Horseshoe Lake overhaul — see the post: A Slap in the Face at a Gas-Fired Power Plant), and I had used every cent I had in the world to pay for our honeymoon. I was even relying on paychecks I was receiving while I was away to finish paying for it.
So, it helped to come back and find that we were on a major overhaul at our plant on Unit 1 doing the 5 year checkout. Then finding that I was going to a major overhaul at the plant in Mustang, Oklahoma where I could live with my wife in her apartment in Oklahoma City while she finished her last semester to obtain her nursing degree from Oklahoma University. I went on the overhaul with Ted Riddle.
Ted was hired into the electric shop the previous summer. He wasn’t on my crew so I hadn’t worked much with him. He was a farmer that had an electric background. He was a bigger man than I was and had a good sense of humor. He had a steady temper and didn’t let much bother him. He would laugh at things that might bother others.
I appreciated working with Ted, because his steady mood helped to teach me that blowing my top about little things did little to help the situation. So, for this overhaul, I decided that I would try to emulate Ted Riddle by keeping up with his easy-going-ness (I know…. the dictionary couldn’t find that one).
Bob Kennedy was on this overhaul as well. He had been my acting foreman during the overhaul at Horseshoe Lake. I had described our relationship in the post: “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy“. I was glad to be working with Bob again. As I mentioned, Willard Stark was our acting foreman.
For those that don’t know…. an acting foreman is someone that normally isn’t a foreman, but is appointed to lead a crew for a particular job. These men usually are the best foremen to work for, because they haven’t attended any official “manager training”. This usually made them better foremen, as the manager training had a tendency to destroy one’s character and moral integrity. — I never could figure that one out. Some people came back unscathed, but others came back with PTMD (Post-Traumatic Manager Disorder).
The plant at Mustang was the smallest gas-fired power plant that had people permanently working there. It had some smaller units that they wouldn’t run when the newer larger units weren’t running because the water treatment plant (that creates the boiler water) used more power than the small units could generate. — That amazed me. So, while we were there, I don’t think any of the units were running so they didn’t have to run the water treatment plant.
Willard Stark had spent a good portion of his life working at the plant and had a lot of stories about our plant manager and assistant manager. He had been an electrician when Bill Moler had first come to the plant as a new green electrician like me. I enjoyed sitting during lunch in Mark Thomas’s electric lab as Willard told us stories.
Willard had an incredible memory. He could remember what he was doing on any specific day decades before. We would listen to Paul Harvey on the radio during lunch, and whenever Paul would say, “….noon news and comment.” Willard would always finish the sentence by saying “…mostly comment.” I had spent a good part of my childhood listening to Paul Harvey on the radio because when I was young, we always had a radio playing in the house and the car. So, Paul Harvey’s voice was always a comfort to me. I was saddened a few years ago when he passed away.
Paul Harvey was one of a kind radio personality. No one will ever fill his shoes.
Working with Ted Riddle cracked me up. He would notice things that I was totally oblivious to. For instance, one day while we were working, Ted asked me if I ever noticed how Bob Kennedy drinks water out of his jar. I told him I hadn’t noticed.
You see, Bob had this jar that looked like a pickle jar that he brought to work each day filled with water. During lunch, he would drink out of this jar. Ted said, “Watch Bob during lunch today. Tell me what you think.” So as I was sitting next to Bob during lunch listening to Paul Harvey, and Willard Stark telling us what he did on any particular date in the past that Paul Harvey might mention, I kept one eye on Bob.
As Bob lifted his jar to his mouth I watched as he began to drink. I immediately knew what Ted had wanted me to see. As Bob took a drink, he slowly tilted the jar up until the water reached his mouth. As the jar was being tilted, Bob’s upper lip would reach way into the jar as far as it could, quivering in anticipation of a cool drink of fresh water. The upper lip of a camel came to my mind.
Bob Kennedy’s upper lip reaching into the water jar…
With all my might, I struggled to keep a straight face as I turned my head slowly to look over at Ted who had a grin from ear-to-ear….. ok. I’ll show you the picture of Andy Griffith again that I included in my post from last week, just so you can see what I saw when I looked over at Ted:
Andy Griffith as Permanent Latrine Orderly in No Time for Sergeants grinning ear-to-ear
I think I almost choked on my ham sandwich as I swallowed while trying to keep my composure.
Another day while Ted and I were cleaning ignitors on the shop work bench Ted asked me if I had noticed what Randy Oxley and Jimmy Armafio were working on. I told him I hadn’t noticed. Ted said that if he’s not mistaken Randy Oxley has been coming into the shop all morning with the same piece of conduit. He bends it, then cuts a little off the end and re-threads it.
So, the next time Randy came into the shop I noticed he had a piece of one and a half inch conduit in his hand. It was about 3 1/2 feet long and had a couple of bends in it. Randy hooked the conduit up in the large conduit bender and using his measuring tape carefully lined it up as Armafio stood back and watched. He bent the conduit a little, then put it in the bandsaw and cut off a few inches. Then he put it in the vice on the work bench and proceeded to thread the end of the conduit.
Then Jimmy and Randy left. Ted said that if he wasn’t mistaken, that’s the same piece of conduit Randy has been working on all morning. So, as we continued the boring job of cleaning the 30 or so ignitors piled on our workbench, I told Ted about the time I was at the plant at Horseshoe Lake and Randy had told a Mechanical A foreman Joe Balkenbush (I think his first name was Joe), who was Randy’s uncle on his mom’s side, that Randy was the best electrician at the plant at Mustang, only he was the only one that knew it.
I mentioned this meeting and the reason for it in the post: “Bobbin Along with Bob Kennedy” (See the link above). Sure enough, a little while later, Randy came back to the shop with the same piece of conduit and performed the same procedure of bending, cutting and threading and scadoodling.
A little while later the electrical B foremen came out into the shop (I can’t remember his name for the life of me… I can see his face), and asked us if we knew how to run conduit. We assured him that we did. I had been thoroughly trained by Gene Roget and Ted, well, as it turned out, Ted was a crackerjack conduit hand.
The foremen took us up onto the boiler and asked us if we could run some conduit from one place to another. He sounded apologetic when he asked if that would be all right. We assured him it was no problem. We would get right on it.
On the way back to the shop, as we were coming down from the boiler, Ted tapped my shoulder and pointed down to the bottom of a light fixture. He said, “Hey! Isn’t that the piece of conduit that Randy has been working on all morning?” Sure enough. There is was. He finally bent it and cut it to fit! Well… The rest of this part of the story is that instead of running back and forth to the shop to bend and cut and thread conduit, Ted and I grabbed a conduit stand, and the appropriate tools and hauled them up on the boiler.
Rigid Conduit threader stand
We carried about 40 foot of conduit up there and began bending, cutting and threading and mounting the conduit. We finished just before lunch. As I mentioned above, Ted was a heck of a conduit person. He knew exactly what he was doing. We carried all the equipment back to the shop.
After lunch Ted and I went back to cleaning ignitors. The foreman saw us out of the window of the office and came out and asked us why we weren’t working on the conduit. When we told him we were done, he had a look of disbelief. He left the shop (to go check out our work). Ted and I smiled at each other.
A little while later the foreman returned with the electric supervisor. The electric supervisor asked us if we wouldn’t mind working on some more jobs to run conduit. Ted told him that we were there to do whatever they needed. I nodded in agreement.
During the rest of the overhaul we worked to repair broken conduit, pull wire and install new conduit where needed. Mark Thomas, the electric specialist, that was about my age, asked if he could use us to pull and mount some new controls. He said he wouldn’t let the others in the shop touch it because he would just have to follow through and redo it when they were done. So, we did that also.
We did get in trouble one day when we went to install some conduit over a control room just off of the T-G floor. We noticed that all of the lights were out except a couple, so we found a couple of large boxes of light bulbs and replaced the burned out bulbs. The Electric Foreman came running up to us a little while later and said, “What are you trying to do? Run us out of business?”
With looks on our faces that conveyed that we didn’t understand what he meant, he explained that in small plants like this one, they don’t have a budget like the bigger plants. They can’t afford to keep the lights burning all over the plant all the time. So, we were only supposed to replace lights in the immediate area where we had to work. Now the foreman had to figure out where he was going to find the money to buy another box of light bulbs. — These were incandescent bulbs that don’t have a long life span.
I had mentioned in an earlier post called Resistance in a Coal-fire Power Plant that Bill Rivers had been given a bum deal when another person had accused him of cutting off the leads of electronic components so that no one could check them to see if they were really bad (which doesn’t make any sense given that you could still check them no matter how short the leads are). Well, I found that the same situation had existed in this plant.
There was this one guy that sat in the electric shop Lab (not the same electric shop lab where Willard and Mark Thomas hung out), working on Gray Phones all day. Ted had asked me if I had noticed how many gray phone boxes were missing gray phones (gray phones are the PA system in a plant. You could go to any one of them and page someone).
Gaitronics Gray Phone
Ted would point to empty gray phone boxes as we walked through the plant. He told me that they have one electrician that doesn’t do anything else but sit in the electric lab working on gray phones. That is all he does. When we asked Willard about it, he told us this story.
Mark Thomas used to work on all the gray phones, and kept them all running in good order. When Mark worked on a gray phone, sometimes to make sure it is working, he would page himself. Just to make sure that part worked. I understood this. When I was working on gray phones with Bill Rivers, he would page me, or I would page him, just to test it.
If you were working by yourself, it would make sense that you would page yourself instead of bugging someone else several times a day while you went from one gray phone to the next. Anyway, people accused Mark Thomas of trying to make himself more important by making others think that he was being paged all the time by paging himself.
Now, anyone with any sense would know how lame of an idea that is. I mean, anyone would recognize Mark Thomas’s voice. The plant wasn’t that big. There weren’t that many people working there. Everyone knew everyone else. Mark was obviously just working on gray phones.
So, after the foreman accused him of trying to promote his self importance by paging himself several times a day, Mark said, “Fine! Let someone else work on the gray phones!” Mark was by far the most intelligent person at the plant. He obviously didn’t need to artificially promote his reputation by making a fool of himself.
So, they gave the job of gray phone maintenance to someone that didn’t understand electronics. They even bought an expensive gray phone test set to help him out. So each day he would sit in the lab smoking his pipe staring at an ever-growing pile of gray phones. At one point, Ted and I offered to fix them all for him. He said, “That’s ok. It keeps me in the air conditioning.
I know in later times, Mark Thomas went on to greater successes within the company. I believe that Willard stayed around until there was a downsizing and he was able to early retire. I mentioned at the beginning that Willard looked a lot older than he really was. Willard brought this to my attention. He showed me a picture of himself a few years earlier. It was of him standing by a car wearing a suit.
He reminded me of an actor from an old movie, though, I can’t remember the actor’s name at the moment. Willard said that in the past few years he aged rapidly. It happened when the previous foreman had retired. Willard had seniority in the shop and had been at the plant most of his life. He knew what he was doing, and had filled in as foreman many times. He really expected to become the foreman.
Nevertheless, they gave the job to someone from somewhere else who didn’t know the plant, or even much about being a foreman. This upset Willard so much that he said he just gave up. He said the stress from that experience aged him. Mark Thomas agreed.
Mark had his own encounter with this attitude when he decided to retreat to his lab off and away from the electric shop. Willard and Mark, the two electricians that really knew what they were doing at the plant had sequestered themselves in their own hideaway where they would sit each day listening to Paul Harvey at lunch and biding their time until the next phase of their life came around.
Solving the Selection of a Power Plant Solvent
A year after I joined the electricians in the electric shop, Howard Chumbley became my foreman. One day when we were talking about going to the old Osage Plant up the road to clean up a PCB (Polychlorinated Biphenyls) spill, he explained that “In His Day” they used to clean their tools in a vat of transformer oil that was full of PCBs. I remember him telling us that it was normal for him to be up to his elbows in the stuff. They never thought it might be harmful. Now we were getting ready to go up to the old plant to clean up a small spill and I was going to have to suit up in a special hazardous waste suit. I wrote about our experience in the post: “Pioneers of Power Plant Fame Finally Find Rest“.
Now we know about the hazard of developing cancer by having PCBs in your system. Today we know a lot of things we didn’t know back then. We know that Asbestos causes Mesothelioma. We know that Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) destroy the ozone layer. We know that Twinkies are one of the few foods that will be around after a nuclear holocaust.
Years before I became an electrician, the Electric Company had stopped using oil with PCBs. There was still an effort to clean it up from the older plants. At the new coal-fired power plant in north central Oklahoma, we didn’t have a problem with PCBs. We had other problems. Some of which we didn’t know about (well, we knew something, just not so much) at the time.
A very prominent responsibility of mechanics and electricians was to clean oily equipment. Pumps and motors, breakers, fans, mills. All kinds of equipment. Almost everything was lubricated one way or another with oil. Solvent was used to remove the oil when the equipment needed to be cleaned.
We had a standard kind of solvent at our plant. I believe it was called “Standard Solvent 350”. See…. It was a Standard solvent. Even had the word Standard in the name. One of the key ingredients of this standard solvent is a solvent known as “Stoddard Solvent”. This solvent worked real good when cleaning up equipment like motors and pumps and other oily equipment. Many times we were “Up to our elbows” in this solvent.
We had a barrel in the corner of the electric shop close to the door to the main switchgear where we could put a motor and scrub it clean while solvent poured out of a flexible nozzle on the motor, your shirt, your pants, your work boots, and the floor. Some days during overhauls when we would work cleaning motors for 10 hours each day, I would come home from work drenched in solvent. My wife would make me take my clothes off in the utility room where I could put them directly into the washing machine where Oxydol could go to work on it right away.
When Ted Riddle and I were working for Willard Stark on an overhaul at the gas plant outside Mustang Oklahoma during the spring of 1986, Willard said one day that he wanted to show us something. I explained Willard’s situation at the plant in a post called “Working Power Plant Wonders with Willard Stark“.
He was a good example of what I would call a “Contrarian.” That is, he seemed to buck the system often. He thought outside the box a lot. I realized this right way when we would listen to Paul Harvey on the radio during lunch. Every time Paul Harvey would say, “…Noon News and Comment” Willard would always finish the sentence by saying, “Mostly Comment.” I figured then that he had to be a contrarian, because who would ever think that Paul Harvey wasn’t the best person in the world to bring the News to our private little power plant world.
Paul Harvey was one of a kind radio personality. No one will ever fill his shoes.
So, when Willard said he was wanted us to see something “with our own eyes”, I figured this was going to be something good. Probably some kind of secret place where you could hide and take a nap if the day wore on too long, or something like that. Well… It didn’t turn out to be that kind of “something”, but it was something.
Willard took a small metal pan and put some Stoddard Solvent in it. The old gas plant used straight Stoddard Solvent, unlike the more sophisticated Coal-fired plant where Ted Riddle and I normally worked. We walked out into the turbine-generator (T-G) floor. He placed the pan of solvent on the floor, took a WypAll (which is a strong paper rag) and dropped it into the pan:
A package of an Important Power Plant Staple: WypAlls!
Then he bent down and with his lighter, he lit the WypAll on fire. We watched as the flames grew higher and higher. Willard watched our expressions. We had been under the understanding that Solvent was not flammable. He explained that technically, Stoddard Solvent is not considered “Flammable”, but it is considered “Combustible”. Combustible means that it burns.
A bucket of Stoddard Solvent. Notice this bucket clearly says “Combustible”
Stoddard Solvent doesn’t ignite fast enough to be considered “Flammable”. At least that’s the way Willard explained it to us. Willard said he wanted us to be aware of this fact when we have our bodies all soaked in solvent, that if we were to catch on fire for some reason, we were going to go up in flames just like that WypAll. We both appreciated the advice.
I didn’t begin this post expecting to say that much about Stoddard Solvent, but just in case you were really wondering what it is, maybe this picture will explain it to you:
A Chemist-eye view of Stoddard Solvent
I hope that cleared it up for you.
The solvent I really wanted to talk about was one that was used more exclusively in the electric shop. It is called Trichloroethylene 1.1.1. You see, a lot of equipment that we cleaned in the electric shop needed to be cleaned spotless. Solvent 350 would leave a film when it dried. So, in the electric shop when we needed to clean something with electric contacts we would use something called “Electro Contact Cleaner”:
Spray Can of LPS Electro Contact Cleaner – Only the cans we used didn’t say CFC Free
This was very expensive compared to the regular solvent. So, I was surprised when Ben Davis and I first went on an overhaul in Muskogee, and they had this exact same contact cleaner in 55 gallon barrels:
Barrel of LPS Electro Contact Cleaner
I remember John Manning showing us a few of these barrels that they had ordered for the overhaul. I think my jaw dropped. By my calculation, one barrel like this would cost over $3,000.00. I figured if it was in cans, it would have cost three times that amount. The advantage of using Contact cleaner was that it dried clean. It didn’t leave a residue.
Trichloroethylene 1.1.1 was like that. It didn’t leave a residue when it dried. I think this will become obvious to you when you see what it really is:
Chemical Composition of Trichoroethylene
You can see right off the bat that this is going to dry clean… I mean…. it’s obvious… right?
Anyway. This stuff evaporated quickly so when you were up to your elbows in this solvent, it felt cool because it would evaporate causing a cooling effect. It had a very peculiar smell. It also made you feel a little dizzy when you were using it. Especially when you had to breathe in a lot of in a confined area. Having fans blowing on you seemed to make it worse, because it would increase the evaporation rate filling the air with more solvent.
It was known at the time that Trichloroethylene would destroy your liver when it gets into your blood stream. There was no quicker way of injecting the solvent into your blood stream than by inhaling it. Finally OSHA decided that this solvent was no longer safe to be used in a plant setting. It could only be used in small quantities like “White Out”.
Gee… Who remembers White Out?
A bottle of White Out. Oh look. A New Formula!
The last time I heard about white out was in a blonde joke about someone using white out on the computer monitor. Who types anymore on a typewriter? I think anyone today that would choose to type on a typewriter would be the type of person that would prefer a typewriter eraser over white out.
I take that back. The last time I heard about White Out was on a show like 60 Minutes where they were showing young kids in Panama or another Central American country being hooked on tubs of White Out. They would sit around all day taking quick whiffs from a tub of White Out. — Why? Because it contained Trichloroethylene and it would give you a buzz.
My dad, a Veterinary professor at Oklahoma State University had told me about the dangers of Trichloroethylene around the time I told him about Bill McAlister using WD-40 on his elbows to ease the pain of his arthritis. Sonny Karcher had asked me to talk to my dad about it to see if he knew why WD-40 would help Arthritis.
My father (I’ll call him Father in this paragraph, because in this paragraph, he’s being more “sophisticated”) told me that WD-40 had the same chemical in it that Veterinarians used on horses to help their joints when they hurt. Then he warned me that the solvent in WD-40 soaks right into your skin and when it does it carries other toxic chemicals into your body than just the arthritis lineament. So, he told me to tell Sonny not to use it often.
A can of Power Plant WD40
So, anyway, we had to find a replacement for Trichloroethylene. Tom Gibson and Bill Bennett went to work ordering samples of other kinds of solvents that salesmen were saying would be a good replacement. One of the first that we tried was called Orange Solvent. It had a real nice Orange smell. Sort of like drinking Tang.
Bottle of Orange Solvent
It had a couple of problems. First, I would be more inclined to drink it since it smelled so good, and I was a fan of Tang at the time.
Tang – Used by the Astronauts on the Apollo missions
The second problem with the Orange Solvent was that it didn’t seem to clean very well. We were used to something cutting the oil and contact grease quickly. the Orange Solvent didn’t cut the mustard (so to speak).
One day during overhaul at our plant, Bill Bennett gave us a barrel of some new kind of solvent. It was supposed to be comparable in it’s cleaning ability to Trichloroethylene (could you imagine Red Skelton trying to say that word?)
Red Skelton saying “Trichloroethylene”
Bill wanted Andy Tubbs and I to use the new solvent on the main power transformer main bus connectors. They are normally covered with No-Ox Grease so this would be a good test.
A jar of No-Ox Grease (No-Ox means No Oxide)
So, Andy and I carried the large extension ladder out to the Unit 1 Main Power Transformer and leaned it up against the back side. We climbed up to the open hatchways and climbed in. We hung a small yellow blower in the doorway to blow fresh air on us.
A Main Power Transformer
Andy and I had everything setup and we were ready to work. We both just fit in the small area with the large bus work between us. We began using our rags soaked in the new solvent on the silver plated bus. I don’t remember how well the solvent cleaned the bus. I just remember thinking that this solvent sure did evaporate quickly. Especially with the blower fan right next to us.
I also remember looking over at Andy crouched across from me. He was looking down at the bus. Then his entire body seemed to swivel around as if he was on some kind of swing which caused him to tilt up the side of the enclosure. I watched his face, and he seemed to be saying something to me, only I couldn’t make it out.
I think I said something like “Huh?” Then about that time all kinds of brightly lit flowers were circling around my head and my arms seemed to be floating in front of me. I heard Andy say with a slur, “We better get out of here…” His voice sounded like it was in a pipe…. Well, we sort of were sitting in a pipe… He started to move toward the hatchway.
I remember briefly thinking that I was just fine enjoying the interesting scenery. By now there were bright lights streaming toward me from all sides. Then I thought. “No. I better leave.” So, I struggled to pull myself into the hatchway. It was big enough that we could both pull ourselves out together.
I began climbing down the ladder head first. It was about 15 feet to the ground. I was completely out of the hatch with my body completely upside down on the ladder before I decided that it would be better if I turned over and went down feet first. Somehow I managed to swing my feet down and around without falling off the ladder. I think Andy was pretty much in the same predicament as I was.
Once we were on the ground, we hobbled into the electric shop and sat down. We told Bill Bennett that this was not a good solvent to use. I don’t even want to remember what the name of the solvent was. If I mentioned it, someone may put it in some tubs of white out and sell it to kids in Panama, because Trichloroethylene had nothing on this.
I suppose we finally found a replacement solvent. Though, I don’t remember what it was. All I do know is that it was quite an adventure trying to find one. Maybe we just used a lot of Electro contact cleaner after that.
Like Howard Chumbley, who told stories about being up to his elbows in transformer oil made with PCBs, I can now tell my fellow teammates at work, “Yeah. I remember the days when we were up to our elbows in Trichloroethylene. Never gave it a second thought.” Only, their reaction would be a little different than ours were in the electric shop office. They might raise their eyes up from their computer monitors and look across the cubicle at me for a moment. Then give me a look like “there goes that crazy guy that used to work in a power plant again. Hasn’t he told us that story about 50 times already?” Well…. That solvent and stuff. It makes you forget things…. I can’t remember what I have already said.
Comments from the original Post:
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When I was in my early 20’s my company shipped me up north to a different branch office and so began eight years of living in contractors guest house accommodation in a run down once-holiday-resort town. For about a year we had eight guys who were working on a local power station stay at the guest house, they were “lagging strippers” which wasn’t some night club job for brazen hussy’s but a job where the power station authorities had recognised that the asbestos that clad every single inch of their pipework was dangerous enough to get rid of, but not so dangerous that it had yet been legislated against when treating or handling the stuff (this was 1978/1980-ish).
The team of eight spent several years travelling the UK chipping off asbestos cement by hand wearing nothing more complicated that a thin paper face mask over their nose and mouth, their work clothing was jeans and tee shirt because as you’ll know, the inside of a power station can be warm work.
Their rate of pay was at least four times what our “normal” contracting electricians were being paid and our electricians were craftsmen and so on what was considered a “good wage”, the asbestos guys accepted with a shrug of the shoulders that theirs was a dangerous job, it was known that asbestos was dangerous but ther was no H&S law to protect them and so they took the money and hoped they wouldn’t die young – I have no doubt at all that most of them will be dead now as they used to come back to the guest house covered in white dust on the nights when they’d been in a hurry to leave site and not bothered getting changed, hell they probably exposed me to lots of asbestos dust too.
On one public holiday weekend we’d all gone back to our home towns and returned after the break, except this time there were only seven of them, the other had been to his doctor for a chest infection and an x-ray had revealed a shadow on his lung, the atmosphere was pretty down that week as they all knew what it could be, he never returned to the job.
As a sign off let me add that theses guys were not stupid or fearless or uncaring about their own mortality, they all had wives and some had young children, but they were mainly unskilled and how much persuasion do you need when you are unskilled and unemployed other than to offer you four times the skilled man rates – I saw lots of our electricians take up the golden wage packets on the oil rigs during the 1970s UK rush for North Sea oil – now there was a dangerous occupation…
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If that Trichloroethylene caused you to have some memory loss today, I can’t even begin to imagine what your memory was like before the exposure. I don’t know of anyone with a memory like yours! I mean – who else can remember the shoe size of his cub scout leader’s nephew’s neighbor?
I have a bottle of White-out in my desk today and use it regularly. I play an Eb Contra Bass Clarinet. Most of the music we play is not scored for my instrument so I’ll use Tuba, String Bass, Cello, Bassoon, etc. music (all in “C”) and transpose it to Eb. It takes a little White-out sometimes.
I love Saturday mornings!
Working Power Plant Wonders with Willard Stark — Repost
- Originally posted on July 6, 2013:
We were working for an “Acting” foreman named Willard Stark during an overhaul at the plant outside Mustang, Oklahoma the spring of ’86. Willard seemed much older than he was. I would have guessed he was in his late 60’s or early 70’s, but it turned out he was only in his mid to lower 50’s. I found out why as the overhaul unfolded.
I heard some slight grumblings from a few in the shop when Bill Bennett told me that I was going to the plant near Mustang, Oklahoma that spring. I suppose it was because since I had become an electrician in the Fall of 1983, this was already going to be my third overhaul away from our plant, and all of them ended up being major overhauls.
The reason others were grumbling about this was because when you were able to go on a an extended overhaul at another plant, it meant that you were going to earn not only a lot of extra overtime, but you also received travel time, mileage and a per diem (a daily amount of money for expenses). I believe at the time the Per Diem rate was $32.00 each day. This was supposed to pay for your hotel room and your meals while you were away from your family. We lived in trailers to cut down on costs.
Others believed that I had received more than my share of the piece of this pie. I had been sent on every available overhaul since just before I had reached my first year as an electrician. So, by this time, most people would have saved up quite a sum of money. I, however, was making around $7.50 my first year, and by the time 1986 had rolled around, I was still making just under $10.00 an hour. So, overtime amounted to $14.50 an hour.
When you compared this to the first class electricians that were making around $19.00 an hour at the time, they would have been making $28.50 an hour overtime. This was about twice what I was making. So, I was a cheap date.
On December 21, 1985 I had been married (the day following my last day at Horseshoe Lake overhaul — see the post: A Slap in the Face at a Gas-Fired Power Plant), and I had used every cent I had in the world to pay for our honeymoon. I was even relying on paychecks I was receiving while I was away to finish paying for it.
So, it helped to come back and find that we were on a major overhaul at our plant on Unit 1 doing the 5 year checkout. Then finding that I was going to a major overhaul at the plant in Mustang, Oklahoma where I could live with my wife in her apartment in Oklahoma City while she finished her last semester to obtain her nursing degree from Oklahoma University. I went on the overhaul with Ted Riddle.
Ted was hired into the electric shop the previous summer. He wasn’t on my crew so I hadn’t worked much with him. He was a farmer that had an electric background. He was a bigger man than I was and had a good sense of humor. He had a steady temper and didn’t let much bother him. He would laugh at things that might bother others.
I appreciated working with Ted, because his steady mood helped to teach me that blowing my top about little things did little to help the situation. So, for this overhaul, I decided that I would try to emulate Ted Riddle by keeping up with his easy-going-ness (I know…. the dictionary couldn’t find that one).
Bob Kennedy was on this overhaul as well. He had been my acting foreman during the overhaul at Horseshoe Lake. I had described our relationship in the post: “Bobbin’ Along with Bob Kennedy“. I was glad to be working with Bob again. As I mentioned, Willard Stark was our acting foreman.
For those that don’t know…. an acting foreman is someone that normally isn’t a foreman, but is appointed to lead a crew for a particular job. These men usually are the best foremen to work for, because they haven’t attended any official “manager training”. This usually made them better foremen, as the manager training had a tendency to destroy one’s character and moral integrity. — I never could figure that one out. Some people came back unscathed, but others came back with PTMD (Post-Traumatic Manager Disorder).
The plant at Mustang was the smallest gas-fired power plant that had people permanently working there. It had some smaller units that they wouldn’t run when the newer larger units weren’t running because the water treatment plant (that creates the boiler water) used more power than the small units could generate. — That amazed me. So, while we were there, I don’t think any of the units were running so they didn’t have to run the water treatment plant.
Willard Stark had spent a good portion of his life working at the plant and had a lot of stories about our plant manager and assistant manager. He had been an electrician when Bill Moler had first come to the plant as a new green electrician like me. I enjoyed sitting during lunch in Mark Thomas’s electric lab as Willard told us stories.
Willard had an incredible memory. He could remember what he was doing on any specific day decades before. We would listen to Paul Harvey on the radio during lunch, and whenever Paul would say, “….noon news and comment.” Willard would always finish the sentence by saying “…mostly comment.” I had spent a good part of my childhood listening to Paul Harvey on the radio because when I was young, we always had a radio playing in the house and the car. So, Paul Harvey’s voice was always a comfort to me. I was saddened a few years ago when he passed away.
Paul Harvey was one of a kind radio personality. No one will ever fill his shoes.
Working with Ted Riddle cracked me up. He would notice things that I was totally oblivious to. For instance, one day while we were working, Ted asked me if I ever noticed how Bob Kennedy drinks water out of his jar. I told him I hadn’t noticed.
You see, Bob had this jar that looked like a pickle jar that he brought to work each day filled with water. During lunch, he would drink out of this jar. Ted said, “Watch Bob during lunch today. Tell me what you think.” So as I was sitting next to Bob during lunch listening to Paul Harvey, and Willard Stark telling us what he did on any particular date in the past that Paul Harvey might mention, I kept one eye on Bob.
As Bob lifted his jar to his mouth I watched as he began to drink. I immediately knew what Ted had wanted me to see. As Bob took a drink, he slowly tilted the jar up until the water reached his mouth. As the jar was being tilted, Bob’s upper lip would reach way into the jar as far as it could, quivering in anticipation of a cool drink of fresh water. The upper lip of a camel came to my mind.
Bob Kennedy’s upper lip reaching into the water jar…
With all my might, I struggled to keep a straight face as I turned my head slowly to look over at Ted who had a grin from ear-to-ear….. ok. I’ll show you the picture of Andy Griffith again that I included in my post from last week, just so you can see what I saw when I looked over at Ted:
Andy Griffith as Permanent Latrine Orderly in No Time for Sergeants grinning ear-to-ear
I think I almost choked on my ham sandwich as I swallowed while trying to keep my composure.
Another day while Ted and I were cleaning ignitors on the shop work bench Ted asked me if I had noticed what Randy Oxley and Jimmy Armafio were working on. I told him I hadn’t noticed. Ted said that if he’s not mistaken Randy Oxley has been coming into the shop all morning with the same piece of conduit. He bends it, then cuts a little off the end and re-threads it.
So, the next time Randy came into the shop I noticed he had a piece of one and a half inch conduit in his hand. It was about 3 1/2 feet long and had a couple of bends in it. Randy hooked the conduit up in the large conduit bender and using his measuring tape carefully lined it up. He bent the conduit a little, then put it in the bandsaw and cut off a few inches. Then he put it in the vice on the work bench and proceeded to thread the end of the conduit.
Then Jimmy and Randy left. Ted said that if he wasn’t mistaken, that’s the same piece of conduit Randy has been working on all morning. So, as we continued the boring job of cleaning the 30 or so ignitors piled on our workbench, I told Ted about the time I was at the plant at Horseshoe Lake and Randy had told a Mechanical A foreman Joe Balkenbush (I think his first name was Joe), who was Randy’s uncle on his mom’s side, that Randy was the best electrician at the plant at Mustang, only he was the only one that knew it.
I mentioned this meeting and the reason for it in the post: “Bobbin Along with Bob Kennedy” (See the link above). Sure enough, a little while later, Randy came back to the shop with the same piece of conduit and performed the same procedure of bending, cutting and threading and scadoodling.
A little while later the electrical B foremen came out into the shop (I can’t remember his name for the life of me… I can see his face), and asked us if we knew how to run conduit. We assured him that we did. I had been thoroughly trained by Gene Roget and Ted, well, as it turned out, Ted was a crackerjack conduit hand.
The foremen took us up onto the boiler and asked us if we could run some conduit from one place to another. He sounded apologetic when he asked if that would be all right. We assured him it was no problem. We would get right on it. On the way back to the shop, as we were coming down from the boiler, Ted tapped my shoulder and pointed down to the bottom of a light fixture. He said, “Hey! Isn’t that the piece of conduit that Randy has been working on all morning?” Sure enough. There is was. He finally bent it and cut it to fit! Well… The rest of this part of the story is that instead of running back and forth to the shop to bend and cut and thread conduit, Ted and I grabbed a conduit stand, and the appropriate tools and hauled them up on the boiler.
Rigid Conduit threader stand
We carried about 40 foot of conduit up there and began bending, cutting and threading and mounting the conduit. We finished just before lunch. As I mentioned above, Ted was a heck of a conduit person. He knew exactly what he was doing. We carried all the equipment back to the shop.
After lunch Ted and I went back to cleaning ignitors. The foreman saw us out of the window of the office and came out and asked us why we weren’t working on the conduit. When we told him we were done, he had a look of disbelief. He left the shop (to go check out our work). Ted and I smiled at each other.
A little while later the foreman returned with the electric supervisor. The electric supervisor asked us if we wouldn’t mind working on some more jobs to run conduit. Ted told him that we were there to do whatever they needed. I nodded in agreement.
During the rest of the overhaul we worked to repair broken conduit, pull wire and install new conduit where needed. Mark Thomas, the electric specialist, that was about my age, asked if he could use us to pull and mount some new controls. He said he wouldn’t let the others in the shop touch it because he would just have to follow through and redo it when they were done. So, we did that also.
I had mentioned in an earlier post called Resistance in a Coal-fire Power Plant that Bill Rivers had been given a bum deal when another person had accused him of cutting off the leads of electronic components so that no one could check them to see if they were really bad (which doesn’t make any sense given that you could still check them no matter how short the leads are). Well, I found that the same situation had existed in this plant.
There was this one guy that sat in the electric shop Lab (not the same electric shop lab where Willard and Mark Thomas hung out), working on Gray Phones all day. Ted had asked me if I had noticed how many gray phone boxes were missing gray phones (gray phones are the PA system in a plant. You could go to any one of them and page someone).
Gaitronics Gray Phone
Ted would point to empty gray phone boxes as we walked through the plant. He told me that they have one electrician that doesn’t do anything else but sit in the electric lab working on gray phones. That is all he does. When we asked Willard about it, he told us this story.
Mark Thomas used to work on all the gray phones, and kept them all running in good order. When Mark worked on a gray phone, sometimes to make sure it is working, he would page himself. Just to make sure that part worked. I understood this. When I was working on gray phones with Bill Rivers, he would page me, or I would page him, just to test it.
If you were working by yourself, it would make sense that you would page yourself instead of bugging someone else several times a day while you went from one gray phone to the next. Anyway, people accused Mark Thomas of trying to make himself more important by making others think that he was being paged all the time by paging himself.
Now, anyone with any sense would know how lame of an idea that is. I mean, anyone would recognize Mark Thomas’s voice. The plant wasn’t that big. There weren’t that many people working there. Everyone knew everyone else. Mark was obviously just working on gray phones.
So, after the foreman accused him of trying to promote his self importance by paging himself several times a day, Mark said, “Fine! Let someone else work on the gray phones!” Mark was by far the most intelligent person at the plant. He obviously didn’t need to artificially promote his reputation by making a fool of himself.
So, they gave the job of gray phone maintenance to someone that didn’t understand electronics. They even bought an expensive gray phone test set to help him out. So each day he would sit in the lab smoking his pipe staring at an ever-growing pile of gray phones. At one point, Ted and I offered to fix them all for him. He said, “That’s ok. It keeps me in the air conditioning.
I know in later times, Mark Thomas went on to greater successes within the company. I believe that Willard stayed around until there was a downsizing and he was able to early retire. I mentioned at the beginning that Willard looked a lot older than he really was. Willard brought this to my attention. He showed me a picture of himself a few years earlier. It was of him standing by a car wearing a suit.
He reminded me of an actor from an old movie, though, I can’t remember the actor’s name at the moment. Willard said that in the past few years he aged rapidly. It happened when the previous foreman had retired. Willard had seniority in the shop and had been at the plant most of his life. He knew what he was doing, and had filled in as foreman many times. He really expected to become the foreman.
Nevertheless, they gave the job to someone from somewhere else who didn’t know the plant, or even much about being a foreman. This upset Willard so much that he said he just gave up. He said the stress from that experience aged him. Mark Thomas agreed.
Mark had his own encounter with this attitude when he decided to retreat to his lab off and away from the electric shop. Willard and Mark, the two electricians that really knew what they were doing at the plant had sequestered themselves in their own hideaway where they would sit each day listening to Paul Harvey at lunch and biding their time until the next phase of their life came around.
Power Plant Men 
When I was in my early 20’s my company shipped me up north to a different branch office and so began eight years of living in contractors guest house accommodation in a run down once-holiday-resort town. For about a year we had eight guys who were working on a local power station stay at the guest house, they were “lagging strippers” which wasn’t some night club job for brazen hussy’s but a job where the power station authorities had recognized that the asbestos that clad every single inch of their pipework was dangerous enough to get rid of, but not so dangerous that it had yet been legislated against when treating or handling the stuff (this was 1978/1980-ish).
The team of eight spent several years travelling the UK chipping off asbestos cement by hand wearing nothing more complicated that a thin paper face mask over their nose and mouth, their work clothing was jeans and tee shirt because as you’ll know, the inside of a power station can be warm work.
Their rate of pay was at least four times what our “normal” contracting electricians were being paid and our electricians were craftsmen and so on what was considered a “good wage”, the asbestos guys accepted with a shrug of the shoulders that theirs was a dangerous job, it was known that asbestos was dangerous but there was no H&S law to protect them and so they took the money and hoped they wouldn’t die young – I have no doubt at all that most of them will be dead now as they used to come back to the guest house covered in white dust on the nights when they’d been in a hurry to leave site and not bothered getting changed, hell they probably exposed me to lots of asbestos dust too.
On one public holiday weekend we’d all gone back to our home towns and returned after the break, except this time there were only seven of them, the other had been to his doctor for a chest infection and an x-ray had revealed a shadow on his lung, the atmosphere was pretty down that week as they all knew what it could be, he never returned to the job.
As a sign off let me add that theses guys were not stupid or fearless or uncaring about their own mortality, they all had wives and some had young children, but they were mainly unskilled and how much persuasion do you need when you are unskilled and unemployed other than to offer you four times the skilled man rates – I saw lots of our electricians take up the golden wage packets on the oil rigs during the 1970s UK rush for North Sea oil – now there was a dangerous occupation…