I worked in a chemical plant for 11 years, as a plant operator. What is a plant operator? Well, he’s the guy who commonly works rotating shifts in an industry that produces product on a continuous basis. These industries include gas plants, oil refineries, pulp and paper mills, water and sewage treatment facilities, and of course, chemical.

I started working at Dow Chemical when I was 18 and desperately in need of a job. I was lucky, I got in with just grade 12 education; they have since raised their entrance standards to a 2-year college diploma. I had no idea what I was in for, because though I was tinkering with cars and electronics at the time, it was quite another thing to tinker with high-pressure steam, huge pumps twice as tall as I was, and chemicals that would kill me in a second if not properly handled.

I began as a junior operator, working and training with an operator for two weeks, then I was on my own. I was then an OPERATOR. The king, the boss of the plant. I started in one of the safest locations at Dow, the Water Treatment Plant, safe only because chemicals weren’t produced there, only consumed there: no matter, the chemicals would still kill you. A few years later, management took the operators out of this plant and ran it with operators from another area, forcing me to work in the Chlorine Plant, which produced, obviously, chlorine. It also produced by-products like caustic soda and hydrochloric acid. In the course of doing my job, I had to work with these chemicals, as well as powdered asbestos, brine, sulphur dioxide and carbon tetrachloride. That was only in the chlorine plant! I later worked in the Ethylene Oxide plant, making anti-freeze and then at the Styrofoam plant. In the latter I was a Supervising Technician, sort of like a shift-supervisor responsible for a crew of operators and equipment of my plant.

A clarification is in order with reference to use of the word "plant". Dow was (and still is) a world-scale chemical plant complex. The site was about 1 mile square and consisted of numerous and separate production facilities for making different chemicals. Each of these facilities were called "plants" and the term "plant" was also used to describe the entire complex. To avoid confusion, I’ll use the term "complex" to describe the company and the entire site, and use the term "plant" to describe an individual production area such as the Styrofoam Plant, Chlorine Plant, etc.

Since Dow was a large international company it was very organized and regimented. They had a "process" for everything, from how the garbage was picked up to how the coffee was made. It was a very structured organization, everyone knew what piece of the puzzle or tooth on the big gear they were. We all knew where are jobs would lead, and we all knew the path to moving up the ladder, and Dow encouraged this movement.

When I was in school, I was bored. I didn’t want to learn anything. Some say it was because I was "smart" and didn’t need to be there, but really I just hated it because I wanted to work on cars and chase girls. (Still do as a matter of fact…). When I joined Dow, it was clear that those that moved up to better plants or better paying positions were the ones who were educated with trade-like courses. Knowing this, many operators, myself included, took correspondence courses in Steam Engineering. We would start on the first level course which would give us a 4^th class certificate, then work our way through to the other classes, "up" to 1^st Class. On our site, that is, the "complex", there was only one 1^st Class ticket holder; he was the Chief Engineer. So you don’t think that getting one of these certificates was easy, consider that for the 4^th Class, I had to work with many types of equipment to get "boiler time", complete about 24 correspondence lessons within a year, and then write two, eight-hour government tests! It got much worse as one went to the higher (numerically lower) classes, requiring more specific familiarity with equipment such as huge boilers, and more detailed knowledge of process control, steam generation, electricity, and chemicals. It was a tough grind. Over the next 11 years there wasn’t one week when I wasn’t taking a correspondence or extension course, something that even still amazes me, the guy bored with school. I only started my education after I started at Dow.

Dow was an extremely safety-conscious company and I really can’t stress that enough. We would be constantly bombarded with safety messages, slogans, safety notices and accident reports. We had weekly and monthly safety meetings, with minutes taken to make sure we did have the meetings. Any one caught breaking a safety rule was severely reprimanded. In spite of the obviously dangerous environment, I felt safe at Dow because I knew they were doing all they could to make it so. In 11 years, I never lost any time due to work-related injury except when I twisted my ankle running down the stairs to see how fast I could do so! (I was always testing myself, trying to do things faster or more efficient). As an operator I had to be on the fire crew; Dow was big enough to own their own fire-truck and ambulance, and have a fire-chief on staff.

Dow also paid well. In fact, they paid their operators more than any other comparable industry in the area, and there were lots. This is why, even now, 25 years later, there is still no union at this complex: pay the people well, and they won’t have a reason to bitch and form a union. When we had a complaint, management would listen and if the complaint was valid, they would act on it. Talk about a partnering relationship! They paid better overtime than any other employer I’ve ever known. I put in lots of double-time days, and made enough to buy a new truck, new car, snowmobile, 2 motorcycles, all cash. I was never in debt working for Dow.

Dow was also fair. I say that because I was kind of a "shit-disturber" and was always pushing the envelope to see how far I could go. I was immature too. Despite my thinking that management was a bunch of ass-holes at the time, I realize now that I could have been justifiably fired for some of the stunts I pulled. In fact, if management had known about the things I did and describe in this book, I would have been drawn-and-quartered and left to die in one of the sewage pits!

So why am I writing this book? Well, two events lead up to it. The first was my writing a monthly safety story that was distributed via e-mail to my colleagues in the present company I work for. My thanks to Kevin O’Brien for the encouragement and gentle-prodding to get those stories out. I realized that I had many more stories to tell, other than safety, and once again, with Kevin’s encouragement decided to pursue the idea of writing a book.

Enjoy the stories. I hope you laugh.

To all the guys I worked with at Dow Chemical. Hope you’re making lots of money

and still playing soccer on night shift.

I worked in 4 different plants, or "units", as they were also called: Water Treatment (Water Treat), Chlorine (Chlor-Alkali), Ethylene Oxide (EO), and Styrofoam (Styro). In terms of safety, the most "unsafe" was Chlorine. The easiest to work in was a tie between Water Treat and EO, and the most physically demanding was Styro.

At Water Treatment, we produced treated water from raw water from the North Saskatchewan River. We had no river water pumps, so we bought the water from nearby Sherritt-Gordon Mines who sent it by pipeline to our raw water pond. Inside the plant was a vertically-mounted 100 horsepower pump that was in a "deep well", connected by pipe to the pond. The water was pumped to clarifiers outside the plant where settling of dirt and other suspended matter would settle out. Powdered alum (aluminum sulfate) was added by automatic feeders located inside the plant. The alum created "floc" that hung onto the dirt, making it heavy enough to drop to the bottom.

The clarifiers had to be "blown down" regularly to get rid of the mud at the bottom. This could be done automatically or manually. I used to do it manually so I could watch it better, and run experiments. In one experiment I blocked off the drain, something I could do from the main floor, the drain itself being in a cement enclosure 10 feet below grade. Blocking off the drain caused the room to fill up with mud and other crap. I would then open the drain and watch it get sucked down. Of course, I created work for myself because I had to get rid of evidence of "fooling around", so I had to wash down the walls with a hose.

One day when I went to blow down the clarifiers, I saw a big hairy animal at the bottom of the ladder. It wasn’t moving and I was sure it was dead, but I had to know for sure. I threw things at it and it didn’t move, but I figured it was just playing dead, waiting for me to go down there, then it would attack. With a piece of pipe in my hand I stepped down the ladder, pausing on the second last rung, in case this thing jumped up at me suddenly. Feeling really brave, I stepped down to the last rung, and then kicked this animal with my steel-toed boot. Whew! It was dead. I grabbed it by the tail, and brought it to the plant floor for inspection. Then I dumped it around the building, putting a comment in the shift log book about it. I also indicated the dangers of working at this plant. My supervisor looked at the animal the next day an said it was a muskrat. We suspected that the rat was in the clarifier and came out through the 8" blow-down lines when I opened them up on a previous occasion. How it got into the clarifiers was a mystery because it would have had to pass through the deep-well pump.

The water from the clarifiers entered the Clear Well. This water was treated with sulfuric acid, to control the pH level and flowed into the cooling tower basin. This thing was an underground concrete reservoir that the cooling towers and huge cooling tower pumps sat on top of. Cooling water was a very important product that we produced because it was necessary in all other processes: if this failed, the other plants would have to shut down. Eight large pressurized sand filters filtered the cooling water on a continuous basis, taking the water from the pressurized headers and returning it to the cooling water sump.

The cooling tower pumps, 5 in all, were vertical, multi-stage high pressure, high volume pumps, operating on 2300 volts. Together they pumped out 40,000 gallons per minute into a 36" pipe, at about 85 pounds per square inch (psig). A natural gas-driven "fire engine" also pumped out of the reservoir into the same header, pressurizing the header to about 100 psig when the other pumps were on. It was used in case of power failure, when it would automatically start.

We also produced boiler feedwater. Boilers are more finicky than humans when it comes to treated water so their demands are greater. We had to soften the water using Zeolite softeners, filter it, making sure it passed all laboratory tests before we sent it to the steam plant. The softeners had to be monitored closely, and when boiler feed water was being used, we had to regenerate them quite often on a shift. This was done by backwashing the softener, then slowly adding a concentrated brine solution, allowing it to permeate the Zeolite so its hardness removal capabilities would become restored. A regeneration took about 1-1/2 hours.

Drinking water was also produced at our plant. The water from the clear well entered a sand and charcoal filter and chlorine gas was added for purification. Many times the chlorinators stopped working, or the tanks went empty, so frequently people were drinking unchlorinated water. (You know, the sewage from the City of Edmonton immediately upstream…). Sorry guys.

The chlorine came in huge 2 ton cylinders that we put on a scale so we could monitor when the chlorine started to run out. It was kind of strange and ironic, that with all the chlorine the Chlorine Plant produced, these 2 ton cylinders full of the liquid (it became a gas at atmospheric pressure), came from another source who bought the chlorine from us!

One day I had to switch tanks and I just could not open the valves of the new tank I had just hooked up. I tried a "snipe", a piece of pipe added to increase leverage. I was getting a little scared, because this was the only tank I had, and it had to produce. I called my friend and former trainer, Crest over to help me. We both wore our respirators, in case the valve broke with all our screwing around. (Scott Air Pacs would have been too unwieldy in this situation). This would be disastrous: 2000 pounds of liquid chlorine, expanding into a gas. It would have been a major spill, not to mention the potential loss of life (ours!) if the valve would have blown off. Crest really "reefed" on the valves and managed to get one of the two open, without incident. He pushed the envelope (well, actually the valve…) more than I would have.

I had two accidents at Water Treat, and they were both my fault because of my own ignorance. The first was a twisted ankle that occurred after I ran down a dozen flights of stairs (60 vertical feet), from the top of the cooling towers down to the bottom. I wanted to find out just how fast I could make down to the bottom. At the bottom, I jumped off the last step, hit the sidewalk sideways with my foot and wrenched the ankle. I was wearing safety shoes, but they had no ankle support, thus causing the injury. I reported to the safety supervisor, then spent a couple days at home watching my ankle turn blue and yellow.

The other accident, which I did not report was when I was helping a pipefitter repair the steam turbine that Zero (page 12) had knocked over with the forklift. I removed a piece of pipe for the fitter after he had unbolted it from the flanges, and when I tilted it to get it out of the way, hot steam condensate flowed out the one end, down my arm. The pipefitter saw immediately what happened (I was whining…), so he just grabbed me roughly and pulled me over to the bathroom. I was scared! Not because of the burn: because of HIM dragging me to the bathroom! He turned on the cold water and forced my arm under the tap and told me to "LEAVE IT THERE!". Man, that water was cold, but he wouldn’t let me move my arm away from the stream. I didn’t report the problem, because this guy saved my arm! Not one scar or any residual pain. I’m glad someone knew what he was doing. This is the same arm I am now typing the right side of the keyboard with.

I screwed up once at Water Treat. I had to check the raw water pond just outside the control room at least once per shift as part of our routine. This included night shift of course, and had to be done rain or shine. One late evening (afternoon shift from 4 PM to midnight), on a cold snowy day, I trudged through the 2 foot snow banks to get to the closer edge of the pond to our building. I started walking around the pond, which was about 100 feet long per side, and held maybe 1 million gallons when full to the top. Since the feed from Sherritt-Gordon was at the far end of the pond, we were expected to walk all the way around to manually inspect the hole in the ice and discern where the level was. Very unscientific. What made it worse on this evening, was I was too lazy to go all the way around, so I stopped halfway. Shining my crappy flashlight towards the ice, I saw the hole and assumed there was water in that hole, so made a rough guess of what that level was. When the level would drop significantly from a previous reading it was our duty as operators to phone Sherritt and ask them to bump up the flow. Yeah, very unscientific. The following midnight shift, although he insisted he DID walk all the way around, made the same determination. On day shift, we ran out of water.

Boy was this a serious faux-pas. The day-operator couldn’t be blamed because he was the one who spotted the hole in the ice, without any water underneath. Of course his "seeing" ( an astronomy term) was pretty good in broad daylight! Mind you, he had the discomfort of watching mud get pumped into the plant, to the clarifiers. After making the pond check and finding it empty, he got on the phone real quick to Sherritt and got them to pump like hell.

The clearwell inside the plant was pumped dry and the boiler feedwater make-up pumps lost suction. I know there were no shutdowns in the other 3 plants that used cooling and boiler feedwater, because I was still employed the next day, but there were serious repercussions nonetheless. I was taken out on the carpet with the midnight shift operator and we were given a good tongue-lashing. In my usual argumentative state, I tried to defend myself but it was to no avail, although my supervisor did concede that it would be hard to determine the level under the conditions mentioned. The supervisor pointed out the meaning of the word "assume" by spelling it out ASS-U-ME. I was in a little more trouble because I assumed from a "further distance". The plants cut back on production to ease the cooling water demands, and the boiler house dropped back as well in steam production, reducing the need for make-up water. About a week after this incident, we had a bubbler level indicator installed. That should have been the end, but the bubbler would fail, giving us an incorrect indication, which was as bad as assuming a level. I don’t know how they ever got around this problem. A walkway out to the center of the pond would have done the trick.

My first boss was an operator, when I was a junior operator starting out at Water Treatment. His name was Crest. I remember it (unlike some of the later ones) because he was truly a mentor, and later a friend who I socialized with. He was about my age, married with no kids, whereas I had two.

Crest taught me a lot about machinery, because until I worked there, I barely knew how to change the oil in my car. (I’ve learned how to do that now. In fact I drag-race an 800 horsepower Mustang pumped out of a 351 cubic inch engine.) Crest came from a farming background, and it’s somewhat legendary how farm kids knew a lot about machinery from working with their fathers on the farm. I didn’t last long as a junior operator because there was an opening for an operator in another plant, and Crest was going to fill it. So, the faster I learned, the faster he could move out.

I started work at Dow on the same day as a Czechoslovakian expatriate who left his country when the Russians moved in with tanks in 1968. So Crest was actually training two of us. Frank had been an engineer at a huge chemical complex in Czechoslovakia, and had been in a supervisory role. Now, here he was trying to work as a junior operator. I admired his spunk. He had a family to feed so he was quite determined to work hard to keep the position, and move up as opportunities became available. What was really incredible was that he had been in Canada for only about 8 weeks and when he first arrived didn’t know one word of English! We could just barely have a conversation with him, sort of like baby-talk, and we had to use our hands a lot. He wanted to learn so much, so fast, he would grab something off the table (I remember a gasket) and say "Vat is dis?". I’d say "gasket", which he would repeat a few times, looking up to me for acknowledgment. Then he’d write the word in his little book, with his definition, in Czech of the same word. I’d barely have time to breathe when he would point to something else, and "Vat’s dat?" When Crest would take us out into the plant to explain some facet of Water Treatment, Frank would nod approvingly at most everything that was pointed out to us, because he really knew more about it than Crest did!

I moved up to operator in about a week; Frank about two weeks later. It was only because of the language thing that I went first, because the readings we took at the brine wells had to be communicated to the Chlorine Plant. Frank really knew a lot about process equipment. I was petrified!

The first day on my own was actually a night shift. I went nuts. I was scared as hell of those tall 500 horse-power cooling-well pumps, the chlorine gas we had to inject into the water stream, the high voltage (2300 volt) switchgear, and the responsibility of keeping the plant running. My first night, I was running back and forth between the control room and production floor every five minutes! I was so worried that the water levels would drop and I wouldn’t be able to compensate or that a motor would suddenly burn up and I wouldn’t know what to do. It’s much like public speaking for the first time: nerves. After a week of this foolishness, I learned how to sleep on night shift, and still get the work done!

I didn’t sleep much though simply because I wanted to use the time learning. I’d bring all kinds of books, read anything that was left there, like old log books, or manuals. I would run experiments with the chemicals, run experiments on the pumps, like shut ‘em down, start ‘em up. I would play with the fire engine, a natural gas driven engine used to increase the water pressure in the fire water lines through-out the plant. I was also always looking for ways to improve operations, and got a few nice letters from the Works Manager for my ideas. (Dow had a "suggestion" policy, whereby you could submit a suggestion on paper, and the supervisor would act on it, or forward it to the right people).

I was at Water Treatment for 3-1/2 years and was quite comfortable there, having learned my job extremely well. Frank meanwhile decided to go to the Chlorine Plant where he began taking Steam Engineering Courses. Every year I talked to him, he was at a new level. He was a smart guy, and once he got better at English was really able to grow by leaps and bounds with correspondence courses. He eventually obtained a 1^st Class Steam Engineering Certificate, a tremendous achievement for anybody let alone someone who had only been in Canada for 4-5 years. I took my 4^th Class and that was hard!

It was a good thing that they took the operators out of Water Treat. It was done for austerity measures, but it had the effect of forcing me to learn more! I realized that after I moved to the next plant, Chlor-Alkali. Though I was quite hesitant to go there, and was a little afraid of the stuff I had to work with, after awhile I got to know the ropes and began to settle in.

One other operator that requires mention is the one we called Zero. I don’t remember his real name, but I know he was an older Dutch fellow, and he had no brains. I heard stories from not only other operators, who followed or preceded his shift, but also from my supervisor! The latter told me how he once came in early in the morning and looked through the control room window to see Zero disconnecting the bolts on a 3 inch pipe flange. Nothing unusual there except that he was doing it on a pressurized line! His reason for removing the bolts? He said the valve was stuck and thought it should be replaced. This was a 3" valve, and it was just stiff. Once a pipe wrench was put on it for leverage, the valve worked fine. Not only was he doing the job for nothing, he was doing it unsafely.

Another time, Zero jumped off a forklift without securing the brake. Come to think of it, he didn’t even shut the unit off. The forklift kept moving and ran into our emergency steam turbine damaging it, and the pipes that were connected to it. This is the bad turbine that burned my arm.

We used to get milk from the main building for our coffee, but we had no fridge. In winter this wasn’t a problem because we could use the air outside, or other areas where temperatures were in between the inside and the outside temperatures (e.g. in between the walls). In summer, it only took a day before the milk turned sour and started to curdle. This is when Zero would drink it. One operator told me he was going to throw out a quart of curd because he couldn’t stand the smell, when Zero grabbed it from him with a "no, no", put it to his mouth and gulped it down! The operator had to hold his lips, because he almost lost his stomach contents. Zero did other stupid things, like blowing the trans-axle in the Scout four-wheel drive. This guy would come to work in a top-coat like he was some kind of spy for Nazi Germany during the war. He was weird. He was fired.

I made a lot of friends at Water Treat, mostly millwrights and electricians, because on day shift, I would always have fresh coffee on, and they would escape the hustle and bustle of work in the other plants by hiding out at my plant. They would come by bicycle, or by truck, sometimes two or three in a truck. I had four or five guys there on a daily basis, just like clock-work. Some of the electricians were Dow employees, but many were working for Dow’s maintenance contractor, Catalytic Construction. Dow employees got coffee free, Catalytic did not. That’s why they came. In winter it was particularly gratifying to come in from the cold for a free cup of hot, fresh coffee.

I made friends with other people too, like the dump-truck driver. He wasn’t well educated and was even a little slow, but he was a nice guy and we became friends, because I didn’t treat him like he was anything less than anyone else. I didn’t get out much to the other plants to socialize with the other operators because I was too shy. Some of them came over to see me.

My supervisor at Water Treat had a first-class steam ticket, as was required for being the supervisor of Water Treatment and the boiler house. The 3 boilers were pretty big units, generating 600 pound steam (i.e. pounds/square inch), and the requirement by the Alberta Boilers Branch dictated that this much "horsepower" had to have a 1^st Class Engineer on day shift and a 2^nd Class Engineer on the off-shifts. The latter was the Supervising Technician of the Chlorine Plant, and under him was the person actually taking care of the boilers, the 3^rd Class Engineer, also known as the Senior Operator. Anyone who wanted to progress from 4^th Class, the second lowest class according to the Boilers Branch (the "Fireman’s Certificate" was lower), to 1^st Class, had to get boiler time (or "hours"), working in the boiler house as a senior operator. He could use the same boilers, but had to spend more time actually operating them and learning more about them to become a second class. All this took years of correspondence school study as well. It was no cake-walk. This was the reason Frank went to the chlorine plant: so he could get boiler time in the boiler house, because this area was part of the process. ( The production of chlorine created as a side-product caustic soda, which required a tremendous amount of steam be used, so the steam plant was close to the caustic production).

When I worked at the Water Treatment Plant, one of my duties was to go down to the river flats twice on my shift to take readings and samples at the brine wells. I also had to switch effluent ponds, a process that involved opening and closing valves to another series of settling ponds. This was pretty spooky for a guy with an imagination like mine, because you see, the area I went to was basically in the bush. Almost monthly there were break-outs from the Fort Saskatchewan Gaol (the old English spelling, as it appeared on the signs), and the convicts would escape along the river, which is basically where I had to be. I had to take samples from within these little heated shacks in the winter, a perfect place for convicts to congregate. Not to mention the Sasquatch that lived in the bush beside the river.

So it was that I decided to bring my German Shepherd dog with me to work. Since I’ve always believed in the adage "Better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission", I didn’t check to see if this was an allowable thing. I just did it.

Queenie would sit in the front seat of the car on my 40 minute drive from Morinville to Fort Saskatchewan. As we approached the Dow Chemical complex, I would tell Queenie to "lay down" and "stay". She was well trained, because this is exactly what she would do as I slowed, and sometimes stopped for the security guard at the gate. She would stay that way until I got to the Water Treatment Plant, where I would meet the current operator on shift. When he left, I would let Queenie out of the car.

She was quite nervous and afraid of the noises inside the plant, but was okay inside the control room, where I would give her fresh water and share my lunch with her. When it was time to get the readings, she was quite excited at being able to ride in the truck. Sometimes I put her in the box, other times, I made her run, and other times she came in the back. I preferred the latter because then I had "someone" to talk to. The downside was that if she got wet, she left the smell of wet-dog behind her in the truck, for the next shift!

One winter day we went out on the reading-run when she spotted a rabbit. People who knew the dog understood how she probably only wanted to play with the rabbit, as she set off to chase it through the open areas between the road-grid that was covered with about 2 feet of snow. On hard-pack a dog may have a chance to catch a rabbit, but in snow there is just no way. So here’s my dog leap-frogging in the deep snow, sinking so deep it looked like she had no legs at all, trying to catch a rabbit sitting on top of the snow. The bunny would stop, wait for Queenie to get within 20 feet, then blast off 50 feet ahead, stop and wait. All three of us were having fun: the rabbit watching this poor snow-shoe competitor; Queenie, determined to get that rabbit, like a farmer-boy at his first Klondike Days shooting gallery; and me, watching the whole affair. I finally had to call the dog off, because she would have chased that animal back to Edmonton.

Another day I was driving slowly back to the plant from the river, letting Queenie run behind the truck , when she started barking profusely. I shone the large flashlight I had at the subject of her interest and saw a large round object in the ditch. It was a large stone, that must have looked like something threatening to the dog. In spite of my pleas to stop barking, telling her "it’s only a rock, Queenie", she persisted. Finally I had to get out of the truck, walk up to the rock and "pet it" to show the dog it was "safe". She reluctantly moved forward and sniffed it, letting out a couple barks as I was walking away, as if to say "Well, I wasn’t really barking at the rock, I just wanted to bark…".

I never brought Queenie to work on day-shift, unless it was the week-end. Then, it was just for company, and to "bond" with my dog, not to have her for security. One weekend I left her tied up using her choke-chain to a metal post in the control room, while I went into the plant, where she did not like to go. Just as I returned through a side-door to the control room, the electrician-supervisor for the complex walked in through the front door. Well, the dog snarled and barked and pulled on her choke-chain as if a grizzly bear had just popped up out of nowhere. The electrician almost peed his pants! His face turned crimson-red! I got Queenie to stop barking, and explained that her bark was worse than her bite, although he didn’t really want to test my synopsis. A few days later, my supervisor informed me that "animals" were not really allowed on the plant site. He said that he had to tell me that, it was his job, but he understood why the dog came with me. He told me to not bring her on any day shift, just in case.

I was late for work one winter morning and was really moving down the highway, in my 1968 fast-back Mustang, with Queenie in the passenger seat. The wind was blowing and it was snowing. Up ahead on the highway was a large snowdrift covering the two lanes of the road. Now a normal person would probably slow up as they approached such a barrier, but I figured I could just blast through, so I put the pedal-to-the- metal, hitting the snowdrift at about 80 miles per hour. I felt the car go up in the air, turn around one and one half times, and land, sliding backwards into the ditch on the other side of the highway. When I stopped I asked Queenie if she was okay, because by then she was laying hap-hazardly on the floor of the car. I was REALLY late for work then, getting out of the ditch by paying a farmer $20 to pull me out with his tractor.

Three years after I started there the company pulled the operators out of Water Treat, giving management and control to the Ethylene Oxide Plant . As a result, I was transferred to the Chlorine Plant. I could no longer take Queenie with me (nor would I have wanted to expose her to the chemicals there), and since I didn’t have to do the river run, I had no good reason to.

A few years ago I took my "significant other", Barbara, with me to the Bearspaw Water Treatment Plant in Calgary. I left her in the control room to chat with the operators as I repaired some part of their control system. When we left the Plant, she asked "Just what is it operators do anyway? These guys were reading, one was sleeping, and the TV set was on!". I explained that an operator isn’t paid to work every minute of the day: he’s there to keep the plant running, and if it’s running well, with no routine work to be done, then the operators can "relax".

So it was at Dow. I had routine work to perform, usually at certain hours of the day, but when that was done, I could do other things. Like work on my car. Or drive the hell out of one of the company trucks. Anything to keep one amused.

One of the Water Treat operators was an amateur astronomer/photographer, so he just loved night shift. He didn’t have to go far from the plant to get darkness and good seeing conditions. I’d wash my car on the off-shifts, that is, the shifts that weren’t the normal 8 AM to 5 PM, Monday to Friday day-shifts. I didn’t work on cars too much then, and wouldn’t want to take the chance that my car wouldn’t start the next morning. For the most part, I read a lot. I had bought this 3000 page Science Encyclopedia, a book that was almost 4 inches thick. I read it. Not only that, but I took notes. It took me over a year to go through it. I still have the book. I should read it again.

I entertained myself in other ways too. One of my favourite past-times was picking up the rubber stoppers on the cooling tower decks and throwing them into the outlet of the huge horizontal-mounted 22-foot fan blades. Those massive blades would kick that stopper 100 feet into the air. Quite amusing to watch. Not so amusing would have been me slipping on the algae-infested water-flooded deck,where I was retrieving the stoppers from. It was 60 feet in the air, with no guard-rail to stop my fall.

I used to experiment with some of the chemicals, just for fun, and scientific curiosity. We had to add sulfuric acid to one of our water streams in the Water Treatment Plant, so I would mix this with other chemicals or burn insects. All in the name of science.

When I was at Water Treatment and having to go down to the river to take readings, I used to "experiment" with the company trucks. It was especially fun when we were given the only 4-wheel drive vehicle (an International Scout) at the complex. Four-wheel drive vehicles were very rare in the early 70’s, so this truck was quite expensive and special. Well…one fine spring day I wanted to test the 4 wheel drive capabilities of the truck, so I decided to forget the roads and get to my destination "cross-country". I headed across this area that looked like a dried up lake bed, well at least the surface was all cracked and dry. I hit the area at about 40 mph and sunk the truck right up to the doors! When I managed to push the door open against the mud, I got out and sunk to my knees. No way I was going to get out of this mess with only 4 wheels. Since it was Saturday, I radioed to the security guard (a person I had befriended) to come and get me. He did so, but said he couldn’t help me out because he had some other important activity to do. (He just didn’t want to get involved with a trouble-maker like me). I was driven to the shop area where I managed to procure a large truck known as the "cherry-picker". It supposedly got it’s name from it’s original purpose: to pick cherries! However, rather than having a bucket at the end of it’s extendible boom, it had a hook for lifting, or winching objects. I had never driven such a big vehicle, let alone operated all the controls for the boom and winch, but what the hell, a person has to learn sometime.

I understood just how much trouble I would be in if I got this big unit stuck, so I didn’t take any more chances, and parked the truck on the road. I put out it’s extendible support legs, and then started the winch unrolling. Grabbing the huge hook, I dragged it back to the Scout, about 200 feet away, then ran back to shut the winch off before it started looping back on itself, possibly breaking the cable.

I didn’t care how dirty I got at this point, because I was in danger of being severely disciplined, (or at the very least get my peepee whacked), so I laid down in the mud to get the hook attached to the truck. Then I ran back, winched the Scout out of the bog, disconnected, brought the truck back, walked back to get the Scout. Then I washed it off to destroy the evidence of my folly. Luckily, the plant that I was responsible for was running okay and there were no upsets. No one ever discussed this matter with me, despite there being a witness from another plant who was laughing too much to come and help me with my plight. He was sitting in his truck on another road, watching me winch the Scout out of the muck.

A few months later, "Zero" got the truck stuck near the cooling towers. It was always wet and boggy around there, so it was easy to visualize a vehicle sinking in the water-saturated earth. Zero didn’t know when to stop when it came to trying to free himself, and he destroyed the trans-axle that cost about $5000 to repair. When this was mentioned to me by my supervisor, all I could do was exclaim what a fool Zero was. "What was he doing off the road anyway?" I asked. "Some people; always fooling around…"

I used to throw a very strong dye, used for colouring anti-freeze, into the sewer at various locations, then rush down to the effluent ponds or the river outlet and measure the time it took to get there. This was only for fun and scientific curiosity: figuring out the speed of the effluent flow.

I’d spend a lot of time in the Complex’s "bone yard". This is where any old, unused parts, like pipe, valves, wire, etc. were stored because they were surplus. I used to check out stuff, take some of the obviously "junk" materials to my plant, or home to use them for my own projects. Some of the more potentially "worthy" goods I would ask for, and was almost always granted permission. I once picked up a gas chromatograph for nothing because it was just old junk. I still, to this day, have a bunch of the precision calibrated potentiometers that I use in my electronic projects. Dow was really the beginning of my second career: that of junk-collector!

One day at Water Treat a flowmeter that metered the raw water from the outside settling pond into the plant stopped working. Because I was curious how the meter worked, rather than phone for an instrument man, I decided to check it out myself. I shut down the deep well pump, blocked everything in, and pulled this very large, and heavy, turbine flow-meter out of the 12 inch pipe line. I don’t remember what I fixed (it could have been weeds jamming the mechanism), but I did fix it. When I reported it in the log book, my supervisor was quite pleased that I’d take on a job like that. I told him I was "having fun. With more experience under my belt as an Instrumentation Technologist, I look back and think this was a pretty trivial job. But at THAT time, it wasn’t. I had no idea what I was doing, and I had to shut down the deep well pump, allowing the clearwell to get dangerously low. I could have lost the boiler feedwater pumps, which would have been REAL bad! Fortunately the meter went back together okay, and I got the gasket on correctly so it didn’t leak. (If the gasket would have broken or leaked, I could have lost it all then as well).

That incident reminded me of a situation I had when I was about 13 years old. We had boarders at our house who worked the pipeline as it passed through town. One of boarders, Ralph, stayed around and began dating my mother. He bought a new lawnmower for me to cut the grass, and one day, in my curiosity of how things worked, I took the thing apart! I had the head of the engine off and any other easy part I could remove. I put it all together and the damn thing didn’t work! Now I started to sweat. I would be killed for doing this, even though Ralph was such an easy-going guy. My cousin, a mechanic was asked for his opinion of what the problem could be (I didn’t tell him what I did) and he thought it was the head gasket. So the next time someone went to Edmonton and I went along, I got a gasket from some small engine repair shop. I took the engine apart again. Now that I was an expert, it came apart much faster. Sure enough, the gasket was shot and the replacement fixed the problem. No one ever knew I had done this, but I did tell Ralph about it 30 years later.

Whenever drilling rigs were on site to drill new brine wells, I would check out the equipment when the workers weren’t around. One well that had been drilled and cased was about 6000 feet deep, the average depth of the salt field. Of course the light of a flashlight only went down about 5 feet before it diverged enough that one couldn’t see down to the bottom. Ahh, to have the lasers I have now to play with!  I dropped one end of a very long extension cord down the pipe, and the entire string dropped out of site. I then entertained myself by dropping stones down the well, trying as best I could to get it to drop straight down and not bounce off the insides of the pipe. The sound reverberated for what seemed like minutes on the rock’s journey to the bottom. Did I calculate the depth using the time and Newton’s equations for acceleration due to gravity? No. The sound gradually petered out without an ending "thud" signifying it got to the end. In spite of the rock making lots of noise all the way down the tube, it was so deep that vibrations in the pipe just petered out to nothing.

The security guard called me one evening to tell me the workers on the rig were complaining about a strong chemical smell that was burning their eyes. I met the guard down by one of the huge Commonwealth Drilling rigs that was drilling another brine well. He had a gas sniffer with him to detect minute vapours of chlorine gas, which he had been using at ground level, detecting nothing. The rig hand said it was worse up in the crowsnest, about 60 feet above the drilling deck and would the guard or I go up there? He said "here, I’ll show you how we get up there", as he proceeded to step on this little 18 inch square plate and grab a cable coming down from the crowsnest. When he gave the signal, he was accelerated upwards like a friggin’ catapult! Up until then it sounded like fun, but now it was like that sling-shot ride at the Calgary Stampede. I didn’t need any organs repositioned so I said no, and instructed him on how to do the sniff test.

I had fun one night at Water Treatment with my wife. Yes, my wife. I was 20, she was 19, and she was 8 months pregnant. Lynn didn’t want to stay alone in our apartment in Edmonton one night, so I asked her if she wanted to come to work with me. "Is that allowed?", she asked. "What’s that got to do with it?", was my reply. So I came upon a plan to get her in without asking for permission, which I most certainly would not have obtained.

About a mile from the plant, under the cover of darkness, she got out of the seat of my car, and into the trunk. Now this car was a fastback 1968 Mustang, and those that know the kind of car it was know the trunk was very small. I had put some blankets in there so she would be comfortable and hopefully not pop the kid on my way through the gate. How would I explain THAT!

We went through the gate, then to Water Treat where I hurriedly shoo’ed the operator away so I could see if my wife survived. She did, and lasted about 2 hours before she couldn’t stay awake anymore and had to go to sleep in the back seat. That was more uncomfortable than the trunk.

In the morning, I had to wake her up to put her back in the trunk so I could sneak her out. The baby, our first, was born a month later. In a hospital.

I used to go to the warehouse/shop after hours not only to snoop around and play with the equipment but also to get pop or candy from the machines in the lunch room. One night, convinced that I could probably get a free pop if I could figure out how the drop mechanism worked, I stuck my arm up the outlet channel, and felt around. I could feel the cans, and the big wheel that they were stored in. I kept feeling around, thinking if I could find a micro-switch or something that would open the trap door, I could trip it and get my free pop. Well, I touched the wrong side of a switch and got the shock of my life, with my arm halfway up the machine! Man, did I get a lesson fast.. I was reminded of how "art" imitates life recently when, on a episode of "The Simpsons", Homer had to walk around with a pop machine on his arm because he got it stuck doing the same thing I did!

When I was 17 or 18 I saw a show on TV that scared the daylights out of me. Of course, when I was about 12, I used to scare the daylights out of myself by using my own hand, fingers outstretched coming towards my face! The show I saw was about a human arm that fell out of a space capsule after the craft blew up in space. Despite the corny, unbelievable concept, it got scarier as this arm crawled around the country killing anyone who somehow had something to do with the space mission. It would pull itself around by it’s fingers, crawling into open windows, up fences and the like. Then it would find a victim and strangle it with the one attached hand. Quite a versatile arm, considering there was no brain around to tell it what to do. "The Hand" came back to haunt me one night when I went down to the brine wells to get samples.

First I had to switch settling ponds. Effluent from the plant flowed into one of two small ponds, which was filled to allow the heavy chemicals to settle out, and then allowed to drain into the bigger settling pond. Since there were two smaller ponds, one pond was always filling while the other was draining. My job, and I accepted to do it Mr Phelps, was to crank open the large 10" valve that diverted the outlets of pond 1 or pond 2 to the main pond. So it was at 2 AM that I’m down in the river flats doing this. It was dark and it was damn spooky. From what I had seen on television, this was the perfect setting for the Sasquatch. Where was Queenie when I needed her?

Anyway, I positioned the truck so the lights shine inside the door of the building I have to enter to switch the ponds. I had a flashlight in my hand, and shone it out into the trees to make sure no Sasquatch is on his way over to say hello. Wish I had a machine gun.

Satisfied that nothing hairy was in the area, I entered the building, and shone the flashlight inside. No one there either. I shone the light down to the "basement" of the building. Nothing coming up. So far so good, I breathed easier. Picking up the valve wheel and using my flashlight to light up the socket the wheel has to fit into I see this goddamn ARM! Lying there with its fingers pointing up, waiting to grab my neck! Arrrgghggh!!! The hair on my neck is sticking out so much no one could have gotten their hands around it. My hard-hat is being lifted off my head for the same reason. I bolt out of there like a bat out of hell, jump into the truck and drive a million miles an hour back to the plant!

The next day, I was asked where the valve handle was because the next operator couldn’t find it. Apparently it fell in the basement and broke, because it was made of brittle cast iron. When I escaped from THE HAND, I let the handle fall wherever it wanted to; I wasn’t hanging around for a piece of metal when a horrible death was staring me in the face. And the ponds? Well they never were switched, so the one pond filled up and overflowed into the main pond. Since the material in the main pond was flowing into the river, there’s a chance that some real crappy stuff got into the ecosystem. The people living downstream of the river ought to thank me for there being no Sasquatch attacks, because of the extinction of the beasts from drinking the water straight.

The Hand? It was an industrial rubber glove, the kind I wore when I took samples from ponds. I went back on dayshift and got rid of it. That took guts.

(Addendum April 2006: I submitted this story to CBC Radio as a scary story for Halloween and won first prize.  I'm still waiting for the movie deal)

There was a funny story (funny because it wasn’t me), concerning this same area on a night shift, and a former Water Treat operator who, like me, had been taking samples. It also involved a giant named Bob. I met Bob one midnight shift when I was alone in the control room of Water Treat. I was "resting my eyes" by resting my head on the desk, which faced the door. I didn’t want to be stabbed by an escaped convict, or grabbed by Sasquatches, so I always sat with my back to a wall, facing the door. All of a sudden, the door flies open, and this incredibly huge "thing" ducks under the door sill (an 80 inch door!) and walks in. He looks like a mountain man: long blonde hair to the middle of his back, full blonde beard, at least 2 inches long, dressed in the most ragged clothes I’ve ever seen. Were it not for the Dow hard-hat he was wearing, I would have pissed my pants then and there. (Maybe I did, but I ain’t admitting nuthin’!) Bob was an operator at the Herbicides Plant where chemicals like 2-4-D and 2,4,5-T were manufactured. Because of the chemical splashes encountered, everyone was issued with khaki uniforms, and these invariably became tattered, especially around the boots. Bob was 6’8" in socks, the boots gave him another inch or inch and a half, and the helmet about another 3-4 inches. What a nice guy! He had just come over to see me, the new operator, to introduce himself.

Now that you know who/what Bob was, I’ll relate the story that was told to me by Reg, the same Reg who worked with me at Styro later, and had worked at Herbicides with Bob. One night the Herbicides guys wanted to pull a prank on the new operator at the Water Treatment Plant. One of them drives Bob down to the ponds, where he hides behind a small hill. Normally, when an operator would drive into the yard to park, he would take a wide turn so that he wouldn’t have to back up the truck, and could conveniently exit the truck on the driver’s side. Well, the operator enters the yard, and just as he’s into the wide turn, the hairy giant Bob, in his tattered clothes jumps out from behind the hill with his arms in the air! Yeeeeehhaaawwww! The operator put the pedal-to-the-metal, almost losing control of the truck as it over-steered and headed towards the big settling pond. He managed to control it and drive at least as fast as I did back to the Water Treatment Plant! The Herbicides guys in on the trick had a real good laugh over that one. I’m not sure what happened to the operator, if he even finished his shift.

When Bob worked at Herbicides he had problems walking under high-lines which were supports for piping and electrical conduit: he hit his head on the cross braces. So he brought the matter up at a plant-wide safety meeting. Of course we all snickered when he told his story, because after all, he WAS 6’8" tall! He made his point that his height, though above average, was NOT that unusual. (In fact a guy at Chlor-Alkali named Tiny, was 6’8" as well.) Within a couple days, all the braces in the entire plant were cut out and moved up a foot.

No one would take on Bob in an argument. After all, he could kill a person just by standing up! So when a safety rule came down that long hair was not allowed, he once again took the matter to task. When he heard the reason behind the long-hair rule was that it was unsafe because it could catch in moving equipment, he suggested tying his hair back. Would that be acceptable? After drilling his arguments into the heads of management, and getting some support from other operators, the safety supervisor conceded that tying one’s hair back in a pony-tail would meet the requirements.

When I went to Toronto with Bob and two other operators, we would always follow Bob into the bar. It was quite neat being associated with this big guy, kinda like tagging along with Dirty Harry. More than once Bob’s head would hit something hanging down from the ceiling in those bars and restaurants. People would always stare and point at us (well Bob) when we walked in.

I heard another story of some fun the Herbicides guys had with another operator. It was routine for operators to go out and inspect tanks and other vessels in their area at regular intervals. If any strange noises were heard, (possible signs of an impending chemical or steam leak) it was important to investigate. Many operators become nervous wrecks, never knowing what could happen to them on a shift.

One night the operator is making his rounds taking tank readings when he stops to listen to what he thinks is a leak. Unknown to him, a second operator is approaching from another direction. This guy sees the first operator slowly walking around this large tank, moving his head to and fro as he tries to pin-point the source of the sound. The second operator approaches quietly, just around the bend of the tank so he can’t be seen. Knowing full well that the tank is empty, he takes the 30 inch-long pipe wrench he has with him and swings it at the tank. Well that tank responded with a sound you could hear all over the plant, followed by laughter of the perpetrator as he watches the first guy jump out of his skin!

We had a shift supervisor at the complex who was responsible for all the plants on the off-shifts. He had the authority to call out any help or equipment needed in an emergency. He related the story of how some Herbicides commandos went over to the Chlorine Plant and hit the operators there in an early morning raid. Three guys, 15 gallons of water. It was a slaughter. Not to be outdone, a few nights later 3 guys from Chlorine went over to Herbicides to do the same thing. It was well choreographed: they would sneak into the main control room and strike whoever was in there. Past the first door, they looked inside and saw someone at the desk, back to the door, reading the log book. One commando slowly opened the door, two commandos with 10 gallons of water, creep in, splitting apart on each side of the guy at the desk. He had no chance. Five gallons of cold water first from the left, then from the right deluged him, soaking the desk and all the materials on it. The Israelis would have been proud. Perfect execution. Too bad they got the wrong guy! The guy they got was the supervisor of the plant who was there because of a plant upset! Heh heh. There were no operators in the control room. Only one supervisor.

The Chlorine Commandos were too busy dumping their water on the poor sloth to consider that he was dressed in civvies, not the traditional khaki of the plant. He obviously had a sense of humor (or an inferiority complex), because he never reported it or had any disciplinary action taken.

The reason for Dow Chemical being in Fort Saskatchewan in the first place was dictated firstly by the huge salt beds 6000 feet under ground. Second was access to lots of water, in this case the North Saskatchewan River. And thirdly, local markets for the chlorine and caustic soda produced. Since Alberta and British Columbia have large pulp and paper mills that use both chemicals, Fort Saskatchewan was a no-brainer for a plant site.

Chlor-Alkali gets it’s name from the products it produces. Real estate-wise we are really talking about 2 different plants, very interrelated. The crystallized and very dense salt (it looks like quartz) is reached by drilling wells deep underground, then injecting hot water to dissolve the compound. Using 2000 horsepower feed pumps, the brine is pushed up the dual-walled pipe, up the hill, to the Chlorine Plant into a raw brine tank. It leaves the tank where hydrochloric acid is added to it to make it more conductive to electricity, necessary for electrolysis to occur. The brine enters the chlorine cells where huge DC currents split the sodium chloride molecules into constituent sodium and chlorine atoms. The sodium reacts with the water in the brine to produce sodium hydroxide (also called caustic soda), and the chlorine and hydrogen gas bubbles off the top of the cells.

The cells are not some puny little things the size of a desk. No, these behemoths are 12 feet by 12 feet square, by 2 feet wide, and that’s just ONE cell! Forty of these together make up a skid. The tops and bottoms are 12 inch thick concrete and the sides something like 8 inches thick. Inside each cell is a metal screen, coated with paste asbestos, and inside the screen was a large 1" thick graphite block (fluffy asbestos that looks like the loose, gray coloured, cellulose insulation in house attics, is like papier-mâché when it gets wet. It makes a nice thick paste.) These are the anodes of what can best be described as a big battery in reverse. Forty of these cells are pushed together, sealed with big gobs of sticky black "mastic", a cross between rubber and home caulking. To keep this skid together, 4 of the longest bolts you could ever imagine squeeze the 4 corners together. It’s like handling a very large Dagwood sandwich, with your fingers representing the 4 clamps. It’s all put together "Mechano-style". Think of one of those Betty Crocker square freezer cakes cut up into 1" slices and you basically have the layout and proportions of a skid. The small plant, where I worked, had 5 of these skids in operation, with one always down for maintenance or rebuild.

At both ends of the skid were the copper cathodes, connected by a large collection of about 50 cables, 2" in diameter. These power cables transmitted the power from the rectifier room where AC was converted to DC. No small battery here: I remember 80,000 Amperes at 550 volts showing on the control panel. This was for the cells only, not the entire plant or plant site! At the time I was there, in the 1970’s, Dow Chemical was the 3^rd largest power consumer in the province, only Edmonton and Calgary used more. When more chlorine production was required, it was a simple matter of turning the big black dial on the control panel that changed the current flow. More current caused more electrolysis which created more product.

Two ¼" plastic hoses coming off a large 6" header pipe fed brine into each side of the cell. At the bottom of each cell, was a 2" plastic outlet pipe from where the caustic solution flowed, into a large 2 foot wide concrete collecting trough. Each trough fed into an underground storage tank from where the liquid was pumped to the caustic plant (the "alkali" in Chlor-Alkali). Chlorine and hydrogen both came off the top of the center of the skid and could be kept separate by virtue of their different molecular weights, chlorine being much heavier than hydrogen.

Chlorine of course is a dangerous gas. In strong concentrations it attacks the tissues of the lungs making breathing difficult, or impossible. In the latter case, you die of asphyxiation. When I would walk in the cell area, there was always a smell of chlorine and a slight haze was obvious. When the haze became green, it was prudent to use the respirator (hanging from my neck at all times). When it was thick enough to really burn your eyes I had to don a Scott Air Pac.

I heard a story about a chlorine spill that drifted across the complex towards the Herbicides Plant. Although the guys had Scott Air Pacs there to protect themselves from their own products, they didn’t plan on sticking around with this green cloud hanging over their plant. Some guys jumped into a pickup and headed for the gate. Whether the gas cloud was too thick, or they just didn’t care, they didn’t stop to open the steel gate. Crash!! Knocked that sucker flat to the ground. Gate? What gate?

While working at Chlor-Alkali I got a sore throat (go figure!) so I went to my local doctor in St.Albert. I didn’t talk to the Company nurse or doctor because I didn’t see anyone else from the Chlorine Plant complaining, so assumed this was a "local" thing. The doctor asked where I worked and with what chemicals. As soon as I mentioned the word "chlorine" he said "Well that’s why you have a sore throat!". (Doctors go to school for 10 years to make this quick determination.) He then made me fill in a form for the Workmen’s Compensation Board. A week later, the Safety Supervisor who oversaw these kinds of things called me in and asked me why I went to the WCB. Obviously I was naïve about such matters and responded as such. I was sent away with a warning that all medical problems be reported to the Safety Department first so they could investigate, then send me to the Company doctor. Shades of Silverwood. (See the movie with Cher. Cover-up. Cover-up.)

As the complex grew, the necessity for better medicals and closer control became more important. So Dow built a small medical center in the administration building and staffed it with first one nurse, then two. They then began routine medical tests, mandatory for all employees. They did hearing tests, vision, usual blood pressure, cardiogram, etc. They also took blood, for analysis at the clinic in town. A very dangerous and unfortunate incident developed from some blood samples taken by the nurse one day. She got the names mixed up on the blood samples. Now just this fact alone would not have caused a problem had the blood work not turned up any difference between the two involved. But what happened was one of the men had a serious liver ailment that the other (healthy) man suddenly inherited! So the guy who had been "okay" suddenly got a serious disease, and the sick guy (who knew before this test he had a problem), was suddenly cured! Boy, did the fur fly over this one. All into the same fan as the other stuff.

I was the cell operator at Chlor-Alkali. It was my job to take care of the brine well pumps and the cells. After I produced the raw products, it was up to the other operators (acid and caustic) to treat it and convert it to useful high grade product.

I had some pretty terrible jobs to do as cell operator. I hesitate to say it was the worst job at Chlor-alkali, because I would hang out with the other operators once in a while, and observe their jobs. I was satisfied that we all ALL had crappy jobs.

One of my rotten jobs was taking samples. Every two hours, I had to carry a large container, that held forty 100 ml sample bottles, to the top of a chosen skid and sample each one of the forty lines going into each cell. The minimum required safety gear (now fashionably known as "Personal Protective Equipment") was hard hat, monogoggles, acid-proof high top rubber boots with 1" rubber soles, thick high temperature rubber gloves, and a respirator. The monogoggles completely protected the eyes by forming a seal around the user’s face, much like gas-welding goggles, or ski goggles. The lens was unbreakable polycarbonate, which also resisted scratches. The rubber boots weighed a couple pounds because they were steel shank and toe, in addition to covering half of the shin. These things were good for any abuse. Walk in mud, caustic, concentrated acids, with impunity. We were supposed to check for continuity of the boots before starting the shift, or any time we felt our toes tingle when walking on top a skid. We never forgot that there was only porous concrete separating our soles from 550 volts DC and 80,000 amperes. We would be reminded when we felt a "buzz" in the boot. The respirator was a mouth type, that is, a person stuck it in his mouth and put his lips over the rubber piece to get a good seal. Quite similar to the mouthpiece of underwater diving gear. At the end was a carbon canister, good for small concentrations of chlorine. It was no substitute for a Scott Air Pac, but would allow a person to work, and save himself in case of a bad leak. (Save himself for 10 seconds. We could hold our breath THAT long!)

The process of sampling sounds fairly simple, and it was: pull the plastic tube out of the cell (watch the green gas come up the little hole), and let the brine/acid solution fill the little bottle. Well by the time I’d get half-way through the 40 cells, my hands would start to tingle because my hands were sweating inside my insulated rubber gloves. Sometimes I would continue (after all it was just a little buzz) because I was too lazy to go get a fresh pair. When I got the "buzz in da’ boot", I couldn’t just change my boots because we only were issued one pair. I could change my socks, but that was too trouble-some. I could endure more in my feet than I could in my hands so I usually ignored it. It wasn’t painful, just irritating because you always wondered what would happen if you stepped on an area that was maybe a little thinner or more conductive than others.

One of the most irritating occurrences was when a feeder broke at the header. The brine would piss out 20 feet, getting the operator all wet in the process. Remember the brine is conductive at this point, and this solution is connected to that high voltage just below the operator. I was hit in the face more than once with this stuff, once when I had my monogoggles on my forehead! It was early in my career as a cell operator and I got careless, removing my goggles so I could "see" better. They got fogged up due to the extreme 35 degree heat and humidity on top of the skids. I got some of the solution in my eye, left the damn feeder to piss way up in the air, and ran down to the eyewash fountain. I was okay, and again didn’t report the incident for fear of being called an idiot. I wanted to go blind instead. (The brine contained about 10% by volume of Hydrochloric Acid). I was an idiot, who needed to be called one?

Getting back to this errant feeder, I had to get a similar piece of plastic tubing , remove the broken piece with it’s bushing and lock nut, and install these pieces on the new tube. Then, with 30 or 40 pounds of pressure resisting my efforts to slip this nut back onto the header, I would get all wet again. Have you ever been sprayed with a hose by your little brother and tried NOT to get wet by putting your hand in front of the nozzle that was pointed at you? That’s the effect. Then I was really wet and salty, like sushi. Pickled sushi. I would finish my sampling round before changing in case it happened again. Man, I just hated it when that happened.

Another crappy job, related to the above was "rodding" a feeder. If the flow wasn’t up to par with the other ones, due to lines plugging up with salt, I had to take a metal welding rod and shove it into the feeder spewing out the acidized brine. Once again, shock city. And almost invariably, the brittle (from the heat and chemical mistreatment) plastic tube would snap and I had to replace it anyway. Arrrgghhhh!

It was important that the pH  be maintained at somewhere between 1.35 and 1.5. The sampling procedure was a backup for the installed pH analyzers that failed at least once per shift. The analysis I did was quite quick, though not automated as much as it could have been, even back then in the ‘70s. Each of the 40 was analyzed, the date logged, and the SuperTech would look at them to see if he had to make a process, or pH meter calibration change. The pH meters actually were part of a feedback control loop, so if the pH dropped, less acid would be mixed in with the brine, and if the pH rose, more acid would be added. If the meter itself was giving a false reading, as determined by my analysis, then the ‘super’ could "re-zero" the analyzer to put things back in sync.

Another hated job, which only had to be done once per shift, was rodding the caustic outlets. The outlets were made of 2" plastic and were continually dumping out a hot 10% solution of sodium hydroxide into the large collecting trough all along the side of the skid. Since the skids were put together like some kind of Lego, for easy tear-down and re-build, the concrete collectors had to be temporary as well. As a result the trough was made up of 10 or 20 foot sections of concrete that were pushed together and held in place with the same mastic that made the cells leak proof. When the flow would diminish from any outlet, it was necessary to insert a large rod, similar to re-bar, into this outlet to restore flow. Once again, shock city, only much more prevalent. Here I would change gloves often, and make sure my boots weren’t conductive. We had a tester where we put our boot in water and held on to a metal lead; if the indicator light went on, we "theoretically" couldn’t proceed to the cell area.

Rodding could cause another problem. If the rod hit the asbestos diaphragm it could knock a piece off and expose the metal cage underneath, and the graphite anode under that. Then the caustic flow would turn black forcing the operator into a quick action before the anode became consumed by the caustic. This membrane was all that separated the caustic from the brine, a kind of osmosis curtain. Next rotten job was mixing up a solution of powdered asbestos with water, in a 5 gallon pail. We did this on top of the skid because when water was added to asbestos it was heavy like cement. The first time I saw this done and then had to do it myself, the operator training me said "You should put your respirator on, because asbestos isn’t the best stuff to inhale". He also compared it to Fiberglas insulation, saying it was as "irritating". People wonder why I laugh when I see a room cleared if a little chunk of asbestos (actually cellulose) insulation falls from the ceiling.

I have since read a report that showed that cigarette smokers are 8 times more likely to develop lung cancer if exposed to asbestos, because the asbestos acts as a "promoter". I smoked. I asbestosed. Damn.

Anyway, this thick soup of asbestos was then poured down the center of the cell through a 2 inch hole in the top of the cell. Boy the chlorine sure spewed out of there! By virtue of the natural brine flow through the damaged membrane the asbestos would just fill and plug the hole. Goodbye and have a nice day.

I had never worn a respirator before coming to Chlor-Alkali and it required some practice. The part that was put in the mouth fit in there like a hot-dog with edges: once it was in, you had to wrap your lips around the edge of the tube. Rookies like me had to use the nose clamp to make sure we never breathed through the nose when in a gassy area, but I just couldn’t get used to it. Eventually, after forgetting the plug so many times, and then finding myself in a green atmosphere (chlorine is green, and heavier than air) breathing through my nose, I learned. Pavlov’s dog all over again.

One problem that developed with the respirators was the mouthpiece would get salty/acidy from laying on the front of my chest which was usually wet with brine. Put that in your mouth and suck it for awhile. Not pleasant.

I was a cigarette smoker when I worked there, but I might have had only 1 cigarette the entire shift. Even a small whiff of chlorine that would not need a respirator to work with would get into the body’s breathing parts and linger there, making a cigarette taste like the worst chemical taste you could ever have. It was nauseating. Almost made me quit. Should have when I had such a good reason to.

Dow provided free milk to all the plants like they provided coffee. In Chlor-Alkali it was a health thing, the other plants only got the milk because the chlorine guys did. Apparently the milk was good for those that were continually breathing in chlorine. I’m not sure if we had to inhale the milk or what. In any case, I drank the stuff.

I only had to work one turn-around on day-shift. A turn-around was a big shut-down which we had about once every year. All through the year anything that needed repair that couldn’t be repaired while the plant was running was scheduled for the turn-around. Since the cell area was mine to take care of, I was the one responsible for making equipment safe for the workers to work on. This involved closing valves, draining pipes, purging with water or nitrogen, locking out electrical equipment so it wouldn’t start up. After turn-around was the startup, which was equally as harrowing because of all the work involved. Brine levels had to be brought up properly, in sync with power increases. As the caustic started to flow, there was lots of rodding to do. Sometimes 20 of the 40 cells, on ONE skid would have to be rodded. And during startup there were always chlorine releases into the building, which is why only the cell operator was allowed in the area at this critical time. (When I left Dow, I forgot to thank them for their consideration…)

At about the time I left Chlorine for EO, a new Chlor-Alkali plant was being constructed. This was a 600 ton-per-day chlorine producer, whereas the old plant where I worked was max’ed out at 300 tons per day. I do believe there is an even bigger plant than this, Chlor-Alkali III, that was built 10 years ago. Hey, I’m not writing a technical book here, I don’t feel I have to do research to get the facts!

At the chlorine plant, after my Cell Operator training , my immediate supervisor was the Supervising Technician, or as they were known at the time, the "Control Operator". This guy, who’s name I’ll never remember, and that’s unfortunate, was a really good guy to work with and for. He was always giving me helpful hints, asking me how my part of the plant was going, how my job was, etc. He would even come out and help me every once in a while. What I remember most about him was that he was always cheerful and never really pushed his weight around in the control room. He left Dow a few years later to work up in a new pulp and paper mill in Grande Prairie, because there was possibility of management type jobs up there if you got in early enough. (Addendum April 2006:Actually I do remember.  His last name was Samoil)

The guy who trained me for his position of cell operator, Monty, moved one supposed "step up", to become the Acid Operator. I say "supposed" because Monty had to take care of the process whereby hydrogen gas was lit in a burner and allowed to burn in an atmosphere of chlorine gas. This was done in a tower with little "waterfalls" designed to absorb the combination of the gases, creating hydrochloric acid (HCL). He was kind of like a bull in a china shop: everything he did, he did it with total abandon. (As the driver of the "trackmobile", a small railroad engine for moving tank cars around, he derailed it and a string of cars more than once. He actually ran over the derailer.) When he taught me my job, it was like learning how to sweep floors: "do this, do that, simple, don’t worry, blah, blah, blah". He was talking about dealing with chlorine gas, hydrogen gas, caustic soda, hydrochloric acid, like he was talking about roasting marshmallows! He knew his job and he wasn’t afraid of anything. I was afraid at first, but got used to the idea of what I was dealing with. I attribute my good safety record to just that: being afraid. I always respected things that I knew would kill me, and not feel remorse in the morning!

Since I was the only operator at Water Treat on my shift, I never had any opportunities to pull tricks on others. In fact, because I was so new to industrial work, I never knew that horse-play even took place. That changed when I moved to the Chlor-Alkali (also known as Chlorine) Plant where there were 4 operators on shift. On my very first day in my new job there, I was taking a hot shower after a miserably long 12 hour night shift, when another operator comes bursting into the shower stall with a 5 gallon pail of cold water. This had the effect of waking me up, and was my initiation into the group. I heard from others that I was lucky I was wet when I got hit. Others had been doused just as they got their work clothes on at the beginning of the shift, and still others, with a bucket over the toilet stall!

Another pastime at the Chlorine Plant that others took part in was filling paper bags with hydrogen gas, a product we produced there in abundance. The bags were filled and allowed to float up in the air. Well, one time one of these bags ventured close to a stack that was burning excess hydrogen and the bag started on fire. This was definitely a dangerous situation, but luckily the bag burned itself out before something else caught fire. The practice ended that night.

Another time, one of the senior operators was having fun with "surgical hose", the kind of soft and pliable rubber hose used to hook chemical apparatus together. He had wired one end of a 2 foot section, closed and attached the other end to the lab water tap, the type with a pointed nozzle. As he slowly turned the tap on, the hose began to expand, both radially and along it’s length: it was almost 3 inches in diameter and over 5 feet long and still expanding! By then no one wanted to be around it in case it "blew" when one got close. So we all moved to the other side of the control room to watch. Just then, the weight of the "sausage" pulled the end out of the tap and all the water shot out of the open end, mostly into the sink. What a let-down! Just before we left our shift, the operator hooked it up again, but tied it off at the tap so it wouldn’t slip off. I never did find out if the next shift found it in time, or if they were "surprised". Heh heh heh.

The process of making chlorine involved the hydrolysis of brine which, using immense amounts of power. This created an immense magnetic field, so intense that we were told never to wear a watch, because it wouldn’t work the next day. One experiment that I performed to measure the power of this field was hanging tools from my tool belt on the side of the chlorine cell. I could take my 12" crescent wrench and have it hang horizontally from the vertical surface of the cell! That’s right, at right angles, and it would stay there! I also tried nails and made a long chain with them, the same way.

My wife was in labour with my son one midnight shift that I was working. Unlike the kind of jobs most people work where they can just leave and no one will miss them, I could not just leave. My job was very important and we just couldn’t phone someone at 2 AM to ask him to come in and work. When my shift ended, I drove right to the hospital, spent all day with my wife who was still in labour. Finally, after 13 hours the boy was born, and after another hour with the wife, I left. I slept for about 2 hours at my mother’s, got some hand-outs for my lunch that night, then went back to work for another 8-hour midnight shift. Nowadays, wimpy fathers take "paternity" leave for two weeks.

I wasn’t at Chlorine long, when the opportunity came up for a job at EO. This plant was considered the "retirement" home, because the process was so clean with few noxious chemicals that it ran forever without problems. My supervisor there was a guy named Wes, and he was the SuperTech It was at this time that operations voted on the proposal to move from 7 day, 8 hour shifts, to 3 day, 12 hour shifts. I voted against it, the other 49 operators voted for it, so it was carried. (To this day I don’t understand why I voted against it, because after my first week of 12 hour shifts, I just loved the new pattern. We were basically working 3 days, then get 3 days off, then 3 night-shifts, and another 3 days off. I had a long weekend every 3 days!)

Wes was a great guy. He was quite brilliant and had a good sense of humor. He never talked down to me, and would often help me with some of my jobs, like loading trucks, changing out the ethanolamine absorber, the worst job I had to do at EO. He was a good conversationalist but spoke only when he had something interesting to say; never hogging a conversation. I learned a whole lot from this guy because he was capable of doing so many things. He was the best teacher I ever had at the complex. We saw each other socially a few times for non-Dow functions, and usually sat together for Dow functions. He liked a good practical joke and was fully capable of pulling one. He taught me that kind of stuff too.

To give you an idea how "Joe Cool" Wes was, I’ll relate a story of an event at EO that could have been much more serious than it was.

We had this huge tank that held what we called "base-blend" for antifreeze. Basically it was antifreeze without things like dye, anti-foam and detergents in it. The name of the tank was "hundred-by-fifty", which was a reference to it’s dimensions in feet, that is, 100 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. (When I once referred to it by it’s number, D301, I was laughed at, like we all laughed at the Lieutenant in Good Morning Vietnam when he asked if any one wanted a "beverage"). It held 2 million gallons of antifreeze, about what we sold in a year to about 20 big customers like GM, Ford, Turbo, and Imperial Oil. One warm day (the fact it was warm figures prominently in this story) , during the off-season, the decision was made to repaint the tank. Because this would involve sand-blasting the tank, the supervisor of the plant took it upon himself to walk up to the top of the tank and put a plastic bag over the 10 inch vent spout coming off the roof. This was a tank, not a pressure vessel, so a vent was there to keep the tank at atmospheric pressure while we pumped liquid into and out of it. Because of it’s size, it was located away from our own tank farm of about 40 tanks, and was close to a neighboring plant, Herbicides. It was actually right at the back door of their production floor, close to the control room.

The plastic bag that the supervisor had used was a very tough, thick plastic, used to bag one of the Herbicides chemicals. He put the bag over the vent, securing it with black tape to keep it from falling off. That night it rained. A cool, cool rain.

We got an emergency radio call from the SuperTech at Herbicides saying he was shutting down his plant and evacuating the employees, because 100 by 50 was collapsing! Wes listened to the message, trying to calm the guy down. As he was doing so, he walked, not ran, to the area and saw that the tank wasn’t collapsing, but rather buckling inward. He understood the problem right away: the hot air in the tank was cooled by the rain, reducing the pressure within the tank. Because the vent was "plugged", the pressure couldn’t equalize, and this small pressure differential inside and out was enough to buckle the tank. Just like the high school experiment where the teacher heats a metal turpentine can with the top off, puts the top on, then runs the tank under cold water. The can buckles immediately.

Wes walked up, briskly, to the top of the tank, saw the bag half sucked in, like some hard-formed plastic salad bowl. He took his knife and stabbed at it, and was greeted with this loud "whoosh" as the air was let back into the tank. When this happened, the tank bounced back out a couple of feet!

When daylight appeared and we went back for a better look, the tank was the funniest thing you ever saw. It was buckled up just like that turpentine can, only better. Among all the perfectly formed tanks and pipes was this huge accordion! I was curious about the metal thickness, and noticed that where the plates overlapped and were welded (they were not butt-welded), the bottom layer of plates was 1" thick. You would not be able to lift a piece of one foot square 1" metal plate, that’s how heavy this was! As I walked up the stairs on the side of the tank, the plate thickness diminished to about ¼" at the top.

Fortunately, no antifreeze leaked out of the vessel, that is no cracks developed. The Herbicides operators were worried because they had no idea how full this tank was, and indeed, if it had been full, and the tank blew out at the bottom, they probably would have drowned in antifreeze. The tank was that close to them, and the pit around the tank would not have contained the entire contents. When the tank was filled with antifreeze, over the course of the next few months, the tank bounced out a bit more, with only small bumps to indicate it’s traumatic past.

The supervisor, though he hadn’t really done anything wrong, was fired. He was approaching retirement age and was really just a figurehead, with not very much actual management duties, so he was "marked" anyway for dismissal. The tank implosion only accelerated his demise.

Wes also showed his cool after a major chemical spill. He was so cool, that no one ever found out about it. It went down like this:

Part of my job was to fill tank cars with antifreeze. It took typically a couple of hours to fill a tank car with the loading pumps that we used, so we didn’t stand around and watch. What we did was divide the capacity of the tank car (shown on the side of the car) by the capacity of the pump. I was actually new to the plant and didn’t really know too much about how this worked or the values to use, so I depended on Wes to tell me how long it would take. He came up with an answer of so many minutes, to which we added a safety factor of about 20% where we would have to go visually inspect the tank car to see how full it was. Then we would stay around to top it up. Since this was a tank car operating at atmospheric (unlike liquefied gases like chlorine that were loaded into pressurized vessels), the man-hole in the center top of the car was open, and the loading nozzle just pushed in. The loading pipe was 3" in diameter and when spewing out product did so under good high pressure, so there was a lot of flow. I can’t remember the exact values, but I know it was something like 200 gallons per minute.

So, we started the pump, then went back to the control room for coffee. Close to the allotted time Wes went out to check the tank car, with it’s 20% safety factor built in, and saw that it was overflowing! At 200 gallons per minute! It only took seconds to get to the pump and shut it down, so there was very little loss once Wes saw the overflow. His calculation was wrong because the pump capacity was much more than he thought, so consequently the tank filled up faster than he thought it would. Wes took the tank level readings before and after the "spill" to find out how much went into the car, and how much down the sewer and came up with a loss of 8000 gallons! That’s a lot of radiators! Except for the dye, which we would have added at the "20% to go" mark, the antifreeze was fully blended and exactly what you would buy in a store, in 1 gallon bottles. (Let’s see, at $8.00 a gallon, that’s $64,000!)

So here was the dilemma: admit there was a spill and either get fired or ridiculed, or admit nothing and try and "bury it". Since being ridiculed was a fate worse than firing or even death, we decided to bury it. Again I had to depend on the wise man to figure out how to do this. I would have just blamed someone else from another plant... What we did was do a bunch of tank transfers from the buckled "100 by 50" into the tank we took the blend out of. Then we transferred that into other tanks. After a few of these transfers, we were convinced that the 8000 gallons was lost somewhere in the "gauging". The reason this worked was because when we took 40,000 gallons out of the 100 foot diameter tank, the tank gauge only dropped 10". Or was it 9-1/2" or 10-1/2"? It was so subjective that it was easy to say the number that would be beneficial to our cause. (This would have been a good scam for anyone wanting to steal antifreeze.) The other tanks were 40,000 gallons capacity and though the error was less pronounced, we could make ¼" disappear, which amounted to a couple hundred gallons.

The only evidence that "something" happened was an elevated value of "organics" in the effluent, a test done daily on the material flowing to the river. All the antifreeze would have gone to the settling ponds before going to the river, so it most likely reacted with other chemicals and converted into something safer for the environment. Glycol is related, chemically to glucose (sugar) and has a sweet taste to it. (It’s extremely poisonous - Do not do this at home! )

I always wondered why the ponds never froze over. We were never discovered, and the episode taught us how to calculate better.

Rocket fuel. That’s what ethylene oxide ( "oxide") has been used for, and possibly still is, for liquid-fueled rockets. We certainly handled it like it demanded respect. I was told when I first worked there that if either of the two large horizontal tanks "blew", that the plant would be relocated at Sherritt-Gordon, about 5 miles away. I had read of an EO plant in Louisiana that did blow up and destroy the plant. The force of the explosion was so great that it created this immense negative pressure (a vacuum) and when a strong "wind" moved in to replace the missing air, it moved large distillation towers off their huge bolted-down mounts. I saw the pictures, and the towers had been moved towards the explosion. In other words, there was an explosion, followed by an implosion. Both destroyed the plant. Pretty incredible. Convinced me to use the grounding strap whenever I off-loaded the tank cars into the field tanks. We had to use brass tools whenever we worked on any pipe or component that contained "oxide" because brass didn’t cause sparks. More than once I dropped the wrench on top of the tank car, and was glad I was following the rules. We used a brass hammer to make the connections of hoses from tank car to off-loading ramp because the style of connect was called a hammer-union. It was a screw-type fitting, about 2" in diameter, made of stainless steel, and around the periphery of the fitting head were 3 large, very strong looking steel "horns" . This is what we struck with the hammer to insure a leak-free, high-pressure fitting.

I heard a story of someone who got some oxide in his boot. On the way to swelling up to double size, his boot had to be cut off because he couldn’t slip it off normally. This too scared me enough to respect the stuff.

To get the ethylene oxide into the plant we used a special pump to prevent heating of the product which could be a bad thing. Only once when I was operating there did we have anything we could call a "problem". For some reason oxide in the pump wasn’t allowed to recycle back to the tank, and pressure built up in the lines. The heat of the pumping polymerized the oxide in the pump. We had to put the plant on "total recycle" while we took the pump apart and pulled this stringy, gooey substance out of the pump.

The oxide was pumped to a reactor which was just a mixing chamber followed by lots of cooling exchangers. Once the oxide was injected into a water stream, it reacted exothermally, creating lots of heat, and we had to cool it real quick and controlled or the reaction would go out of control. (A loss of cooling water would cause the oxide flow to shut off automatically before this could happen). This simple reaction produced ethylene glycol which we flowed through a triple-effect evaporation system to remove the excess water. The output from the 3^rd evaporator would go to the big 100 by 50 tank as "base blend", and some was fed to the first distillation column. The glycol was circulated in big heaters called reboilers and the vapours allowed to permeate upwards within the column. This column contained about 80 "bubble-cap" trays that had good product called reflux flowing from one tray to another, side to side, then top to bottom, over the caps. As the vapors moved up the tower, they would push on the bubble caps, causing the vapor to mix with the reflux. By the time the vapour got to the top, it was pure mono-ethylene glycol. The vapour was condensed into a liquid and sent to the mono tank.

The product at the base of the mono tower was sent to the next tower just beside it, the di-ethylene glycol tower. Here the heavier molecules of glycol were removed, exactly in the same fashion as the mono was produced. The only difference was the tower was smaller because less capacity was needed, and the temperatures needed to do the separation were much higher.

The last product in the chain was tri-ethylene glycol. The "bottoms" from this tower was something we called tars. It was a black, stinky substance from which no useful product could be obtained. We dumped it into a "tar-pot" just below the tower, and emptied the carcinogenic crud into the river and children’s playgrounds. (We had a special area where we dumped this stuff. I think we even sold some of it for use by some company in their process, like paving materials, or rubber manufacturing.)

One thing I always thought was real neat was how we managed to save steam, reduce boiling temperatures of the products, and move product, all with a simple device with no moving parts. I could make one of these in my shop, it is so simple. It was the venturi.

We used high-pressure steam flowing through various injectors (as they were also called) to created a low-pressure zone, that is, a vacuum. This was connected to the 3^rd evaporator and the 3 glycol towers. By pulling a vacuum on all the towers, we could reduce the temperature at which the product boiled. The result of this, was less heat needed to boil the product, the vacuum would "suck" product out of the tower (through the condenser), all the while reducing the requirement for steam. Man were they noisy! Extremely maintenance free, for the 3 years I was at EO , we never even looked at these things. They just ran and ran, no need for the Maytag man.

(Daniel Bernouli discovered this effect that led to the venturi invention a century or so ago. It’s the same principle that explains why airplanes fly and toast always falls on the floor jam-first.)

We added corrosion inhibitors, anti-foam agents, and dye to base blend, of course, to make antifreeze. The dye had other uses as well: sprinkling it around the toilet seat for some hapless victim was always good for a laugh, especially the red stuff: the guy thought he was dying (well he was dyeing…) This stuff was soooooo potent! Maybe a cupful is all that was required for a 4500 gallon tanker truck. And yes, the antifreeze was 99% the same, there was very little difference in GM, Shell, Canadian Tire, or Imperial Oil brands. Only the color was different. This isn’t to say there was no difference, but the differences were so minuscule to not care about. For example, the only difference between GM’s brand and any other might have been an extra cup of anti-foam, or a different pH level, indicating how much corrosion inhibitor was in the product. This was somewhat disconcerting to my Chevy-loving brother who always bought GM-brand anti-freeze as dictated by his owner’s manual. He paid about 3 times the price too!

The equipment at EO ran for years without maintenance. Unlike a place like Syncrude that has to pump sand-slurries most of the time, we pumped antifreeze which is slippery like oil. Pumps that had been working non-stop for 20 years were still going. So it was indeed a pleasure to work at EO, where pretty well nothing broke.

The process I mentioned was one half of the plant. On the other half was the amine process. The plant was really laid out that way: when I went out the control room door and entered the process area, on the left was glycols, on the right was amines. As I moved through one building to the next, the same pattern was followed. On the left were all the glycol pumps, on the right the amine pumps. This extended all the way to the loading ramps where I offloaded raw materials from tank cars, or loaded our products into tank trucks and tank cars. Never any confusion as to what pump or what tank belonged to what part of the plant.

Amine production was almost identical to glycol production, except instead of reacting ethylene oxide with water, we used anhydrous ammonia. We didn’t have the triple-effect evaporators, but we did have one column that did the same thing. All the towers on the amine side were smaller, because the production was smaller. In fact we ran glycols pretty well all year, but when the amine tanks were full, we would shut down the amine side for a couple weeks at a time.

Anhydrous ammonia was wicked stuff. When I offloaded this stuff from tank cars I had to wear a full rubber suit, goggles, rubber gloves and face shield. The ammonia was in pressurized tank cars, so hammer unions and large steel flex hoses were used. When I would drain the hoses after unloading the product, I would let the hoses dump out onto the concrete pad underneath the loading dock. The ammonia was so reactive, it would bubble and steam every time it contacted dirt, wood, rocks, water. Quite entertaining to see this stuff work: as good and strong as any acid I’ve worked with. Using a Scott Air Pac was too unwieldy and a waste of good air ( not to mention it was only good for 20 minutes), so I used a respirator, the same type used for chlorine.

We made mono-, di-, and tri-ethanolamines, products used in natural gas plants for scrubbing the hydrogen sulfide out of gas. The worst job at EO was changing out the tri-ethanolamine absorber. This was a vertical tank about the size of a hot water tank with a large opening in the side, covered with a big steel plate. This plate and it’s 20 or so big nuts to hold it on was removed to give us access to the activated carbon inside. After filtering TEA ( pronounced "TEE-EE-AY") for a number of days or weeks, this stuff just reeked with a pungent odor that was barely bearable. We (I say "we" but after being told how to do it by the SuperTech, it was forever-after the job of the lowly operator) would scoop the gooey, smelly carbon out with a small shovel and dump it into a wheelbarrow. It was a real dirty job, and you couldn’t help but get some of that crap on your clothes. After cleaning it out, we washed the filter out, took the top off, added clean carbon and put some "angel-hair" on the top. Angel hair was very soft fiberglass material, and was identical to the stuff you used to be able to buy for decorating Christmas trees. In fact I took some of the stuff home for just that purpose. The angel hair, not the smelly carbon. The absorber was used for maintaining the color spec on the TEA: when it started getting too yellow, we had to change the filter media.

There was a large liquid nitrogen tank near the oxide tanks. We used this material for nitrogen-padding pumps and for purging. A nitrogen pad was a technique for a piston-type pump to smooth out it’s pulsations. A "head" of nitrogen was placed inside a pressure vessel mounted just above the pump output. On the "compression" stroke of the pump, the nitrogen would absorb some of the shock because it was a gas and was compressible, whereas the liquid was not. Then, when the pump was in it’s "suction" stroke, the nitrogen was allowed to expand, pushing out the liquid.

A doctor from the local medical clinic would come out about once a month with a thermos bottle (he called it a Dewar flask, but it really WAS a thermos) asking for a refill. They used it for freezing warts off people. Filling the thermos was difficult because the liquid would vaporize as soon as it hit the warm thermos so that you couldn’t see what was going on. A small thermos of liquid nitrogen didn’t weigh much, so about the only way you could tell if anything was inside was by shaking it. There were times where I’m sure I sent the doctor on his way with a thermos with only nitrogen gas in it!

As in all the other plants I worked, part of my regular duties was to do chemical analysis of our products. A regular routine was just at the beginning of the shift, getting samples of all the amines and all the glycols. One of the tests I did was boiling points, a procedure that involved putting 100 milli-liters of product in a boiling flask which was put on an electric heater. I had to watch for the first condensed drop of liquid from the boiling liquid and read the inserted thermometer to get the first "boiling point". If this wasn’t on spec, say too low boiling point, we would send the product to recycle or to base blend, depending on what the product was. Too low a boiling point meant we didn’t boil the product enough in the reboilers, or there wasn’t enough reflux. We made changes, then did the analysis again, continuing until it was on spec. If the boiling point was too high, that meant we were boiling it too much and we were giving away heavy molecules. It wasn’t off-spec, just too good a product! So we had to cut back on the steam to the reboiler or increase reflux.

I had to watch for the first drip, a drip half-way through to determine the "50% point", then the final point. The last one we always missed because we would try and have coffee or a smoke between drips, and just never got back in time. The first drip was the important one anyway…

One day a flask cracked on the heater, causing some of the liquid to drip through to the element. This started a fire which I quickly put out.

We had a fire in the TEA tar pot once too. Some product had come in contact with a hot steam trace around the pot and started the top of it on fire. I noticed it first and calmly said to Wes, "is that a flame I see on top of the pot?" He looked out and said yes indeed, it was. So he ran up there and put it out. No big deal. The supervisors thought it was pretty big deal because they didn’t see how "subdued" the fire really was. It was about as violent as those little methanol heaters they give you in a restaurant to keep the butter melted for your lobster. Considering how all the glycols are flammable, I guess the supervisors had some reason for concern.

The track crew were the guys that actually blended the antifreeze. These guys were the ones that normally shunted all the tank cars around for filling or dumping. They worked with the railway when the big diesel engines came in to pull the real big strings of cars, but they had a Trackmobile that could move maybe 10 cars around at a time, empty ones that is. There were a few reasons why the track crew blended the batches of antifreeze. One was the fact that they weren’t always shunting cars around, so they had extra time. The other was that track was considered a more demeaning job than operations, and blending antifreeze didn’t tax the neurons that much. Wes and I often blended batches when the track crew wasn’t available. The blend was not a complete batch of antifreeze, it was just a blend of the additives mixed with a little bit of antifreeze. When this small batch of chemicals was warmed up and mixed, it was sent to one of the big storage tanks to mix with the much larger amount (usually a few tank cars worth). Then it was analyzed in the lab, some by me, some by the chemical technicians to make sure it met the customer’s specifications.

I would help out on track whenever tanks were coming in my area. I’ve had to hook up brake lines, apply brakes to a moving train, jump on moving cars as they passed by, and couple and uncouple cars. It was a dangerous job so one had to be careful, especially jumping on a string to apply the brakes. The little Trackmobile just didn’t have enough mass or power to stop a bunch of loaded tank cars, so once it got them moving, they were very hard to stop with the Trackmobile alone. The "Li’ll Engine That Could", couldn’t.

Most of the antifreeze tanks were 40,000, with a couple at 60,000 gallons. To pump from one tank to another or from blend tanks to any tank, or from any tank to the loading platform required some well-thought out piping and valving. Most of the pumps, had large manifolds with 4 to 10 valves mounted on them whose piping lead to the various tanks. I remember once having to get some material from one location to another, and was told by the SuperTech that it wasn’t possible, that I would have to pump to one tank, and hook up some temporary hoses to perform the transfer. I knew where every pipe went, so after a little survey, came up with my plan. I had to manipulate 22 valves and put flow backwards through a pump, but I did it. I pointed it out to an incredulous SuperTech who agreed then that it was possible. Ahhh…give me a challenge. Actually I was lazy, I just didn’t want to go through the effort of getting those big hoses hooked up.

After two years as an operator, I was made SuperTech Relief. I was paid more, and had an operator working for me. It was pretty neat. During a shutdown I was Relief, and because I wanted to impress my superiors, I made sure that we did as much of the task list that was given to us as possible. My operator was bitching and complaining that we weren’t supposed to work so hard on night shift, but I persisted. I had to kick his ass to do some work. I still had to do most of it because he was too damn lazy.

I had two accidents at EO, but was not injured. I reported both of these because I could have been killed on either. These types of accidents were called near-misses. The first accident was when I was at the top of the all-steel loading ramp and about to come down by the stairs. Because we always ran a steam purge on the loading lines to prevent freeze-up (this was the amine loading ramp: di-ethanolamine froze at 80 deg F.) the blowing steam had made the stairs a virtual skating rink on a slope. I had my hands on the handrail and took my first step, knowing that it was slippery. Despite my trepidation, I slid down that ramp with an acceleration of 1 G: "there weren’t no friction here!" At the very bottom, my right leg stuck out and wrapped around the bottom hand rail support. Luckily I didn’t get that steel bar up my crotch or I’d be writing with a small font like this.

The second "accident" was when I was inspecting a tank car for loading with antifreeze. As I bent over to look inside, the 3" metal loading nozzle, swung down and hit me on the back of my hard hat, knocking it off and into the tank. Had I not been wearing the hard hat it would have hit me right in the back of the head and probably knocked me unconscious. I would have fallen into the tank and been part of some guys car engine somewhere in North America! I retrieved my hat with some wire and then reported this incident. I fully expected to win the "Golden Hat" Award but they didn’t even consider it. Jerks. It was probably just a regular hard hat spray painted gold in the shop anyway.

The Golden Hat was an industry-standard award given out by various industries to employees who were saved from serious injury because they were wearing a hard hat. (In Quebec, they call it the Golden Toque, in South America the Golden Fedora…). I once saw one at Dow and it was actually a very nice shiny gold plated hat, it wasn’t spray painted. I wanted a hat and was willing to get a bump on the head to get one. I should have got the Golden Crotch award too.

I climbed the mono-ethylene glycol (MEG) tower for the hell of it. It was 113 feet high. I remember that because when we had our Family Day at Dow, we ran a contest to guess the height of the tower and I had to look it up on the drawings to get the exact height. This was an easy climb, because for every 20 vertical feet climbed there was a landing half way around the tower. So I could stop and look around on my way up. Never took any pictures. What a fool.

I also went IN this tower, just for the experience. The plant had it’s annual "turnaround" and the tower had been opened for inspection and moving of some of the trays inside. The tower was about 4 feet in diameter with an open 18" man-way. Since it was after hours, I asked the Super Tech if I could go inside to check things out. He said, "Sure, why not. The tray you’ll be stepping on supported a 220 pound millwright, so you should be okay". So I crawled in, looked around, pushed up on the bubble-caps in the tray above, pulled on the caps on the tray I was sitting in. How many people do you know can add that to their resume?  (Addendum April 2006: I write about a 220 pound millwright like they are a special breed of person that weighs that much.  Today, I weigh that much!  Obviously I was skinny in my youth, to cast that disparaging comment).

When Henderson scored the winning goal for Team Canada in the first Russia-Canada hockey series I was standing at the window in the lunch room with Wes, having a coffee and a smoke, listening to the game on the radio. I remember Wes saying "It’s all over, they’ll have to settle for a tie, they can’t win". Ahhhh. Famous last words. We all know that with only a few minutes left in the game, Henderson scored to win the game and the series. Wes and I were hootin’ and hollerin’ like we had won the lottery. The war was over, and Canada won by beating the Russians. Man, the pride we felt. That 1972 team did more for Canadian unity than any government ever did. My little hockey-player-son was born in 1972, so obviously I was elsewhere in ’72…

When I worked at EO as an operator, it was also my duty to go to the Water Treatment Plant to check it out because there was no longer operators there. One time on a day shift, I had to fill the brine tank with salt for regenerating the Zeolite softeners. Simultaneously a number of 4500 gallon tank trucks were lining up for loading, so the SuperTech had to do that job while I worked at Water Treat. He didn’t like this at all. Not so much that it was an operator’s job, but because he couldn’t watch the plant. In those days all the control instruments were pneumatic, not electronic, and the alarm panel was not too sophisticated. The latter was relay-operated and the unit failed continuously. Nowadays with distributed control systems that are all computer-controlled, and with solid state electronics for alarms, there is much flexibility in how a plant is run and controlled. Alarms are easier to prioritize so that only the important ones sound in the plant, and they can have different tones for different emergencies. Now, too, if such a situation arose, the operator can walk up to a computer terminal in a remote area and see just what the problem is.

I carried a radio so that I could be contacted in emergencies. One day, Tricky Dicky, the plant manager, called me on the radio in a most asinine and confusing way. We used to follow a certain protocol to call someone so there would be no confusion as to who wanted who. Sort of like the military using the phonetic alphabet to eliminate any ambiguity in the transmission. Instead of saying "Bob Found, are you by?" which was standard, he said something like "Dick Wilson for EO operator". What the hell was that about? I didn’t answer because I didn’t know if it was for me, because there was another operator on shift at the time. He called again and again until I finally answered. He gave me hell for not answering, I defended myself by telling him he didn’t use the radio correctly. When I got back to the plant, all the guys in the control room were snickering when I entered, so obviously they heard both sides of the conversation.

Shortly after this fiasco of me operating Water Treat while my SuperTech did the operator job at EO, management decided to put one person in Water Treat, on day-shift only to take care of the menial tasks. Then we only had to check WT once or twice a shift to make sure the alum feeders weren’t plugging up, or the chlorine ran out.

Wes and I were having lunch one day, when this fly started buzzing around us, and flying erratically like it was drunk. I said "Geez fly, you having an epileptic fit?"

To which Wes replied, "My son has epilepsy".

Man did I feel stupid or what. I felt about 1" tall. It sure taught me a lesson.

Our boss at EO was a fairly smart engineer, older than both Wes and I. Dick was a small fellow with gray/black hair and thick eye brows of the same color. He looked creepy and had a temper, so