Life in the Dump

[Josh]

Due to the insistent demand of the crowd of... well, Rhoenix, I present to you some of the tragicomedy of my last workplace.

As of August 1st, it'll be two years since I left that hole in the desert behind. Distance has not made the memory fonder. Working there was positively surreal.

I have worked for technically worse companies in the past- Werner Enterprises springs immediately to mind, a company that I saw actively put people's lives in danger and occasionally get them killed. While I have a lot I could say about the likes of Werner, what I can at least give them some minimal credit for is that they actually achieved tasks, albeit in perverted, unsafe, and negligent fashion.

The dump? Not so much. It was as though somebody set out to create the perfect amalgam, a combination of all the behaviors and shortcomings mocked in both government and private enterprises. It was the most fucked-up, shit-tastic place I ever worked. The entire environment was so comically incompetent and actively militant against even the most basic accomplishment. I kid you not- simply pumping a septic tank bogged down because the Operations Director, who had been deliberately removed from directing the other two major projects going on at the time, assumed direct control. Among other things, he rented too small a pump for the operation, then had a little hissy on the radio about how a bigger pump would've been more expensive.

As for why the Operations Director wasn't directing operations at that point, well, that's the subject of a future update.

Now, I would like to make the following things clear:

I won't be sharing confidential info in all this. Everything I'll be talking about is essentially public record. As such, there'll be omissions at certain parts of the story either because it's covered by the blanket NDA I signed or because it was covered in a private meeting.

Secondly, not everything was bad about the place and not everyone was a clusterfucked clown show. The environmental safety record at the site was largely exemplary due to the fantastic attention of the environmental department, well-crewed and managed by two brilliant folks who I'd work for, with, or over on any day of the week. It was a pleasure sharing the field with that crew. There were plenty of other upstanding individuals, often doing the best they could to just get along and fight the good fight in the face of cronyism, nepotism, political sewage, and in one case that I'm fairly sure of, out and out fucking graft.

That's why the place sticks in my head so much- it really was the best and the worst. I met people I still keep touch with to this day, and others who I'm quite happy to see. Nowadays when I see them and they haven't left already I ask when they're giving notice.

To give you an idea of what the place is about, it's a RCRA/Mixed waste processing and disposal facility. The mixed waste here refers to waste that has both radioactive and hazardous wastes in the stream, which means that the hazardous elements will have to be neutralized or diluted to a safe standard.

In thirteen years of operation, the facility has turned a profit precisely once- the year they won a lawsuit against a company trying to buy them out. The lawsuit went down because it turned out that the owner of the plant was actually also a minority owner of the company trying to buy them. How this works out to be lawsuit material I do not know, but billionaires play by different rules.

As the plant did not operate with a real imperative to make money for over a decade, it settled into a complacency that made it ill-equipped to handle actual, well, work. Promotions were given to people who had no functional experience in managing crews or actually accomplishing anything. I know that's a time-honored American practice and I've seen it plenty of other places, but this facility exceeded even the typical dysfunctional management culture, one that was utterly paralyzed in the face of concepts like 'planning', 'preparation', 'training', and other mystical arcana as employed by the functionally competent and non-vegetative.

When I started there, the disposal of radioactive material had not yet commenced as both licenses were still outstanding. So 'regular' wastes could be treated and disposed of (PCB-contaminated materials, acids, asbestos, etc.) while rad waste was processed and packaged, either to be shipped back offsite, or kept onsite for eventual disposal when the proper licensing came through and the landfills for said waste was constructed.

Actual processing of waste was primarily handled by two different crews, who worked at adjoining buildings whose names gave the names for the crews. For regular hazardous waste, it was the Stabilization (Stab) building and hence the Stab crew, and Mixed Waste Treatment Facility (Technically the MWTF crew, but because the building was originally the Permacon, the crew was the 'Permatards' and only management called it the MWTF.)

Me, I started out on Permacon with no feckin' clue what the hell that even meant. The HR director at the time was so oblivious as to the work actually being done in the Permacon that he told me that I'd move drums around and maybe drive a forklift.

Heh heh heh. Kinda true.

So, now for the project that would in so many ways encapsulate the experience of the dump: the TC Project.

Wikipedia says this about a Ton Container:

A ton container is a steel, cylindrical barrel equivalent in length and diameter to two stacked 55-gallon drums. A ton container weighs approximately 1,600 pounds and measures nearly seven feet in length.[1]

The United States Army has used ton containers to store and ship bulk chemicals, including chemical agent, since the 1930s.

Oh yes, yes they have indeed. My first week at the plant, I rode in with my shiny new carpool and we passed by a flatbed carrying a load of TCs. At the time, I had no idea how a bit over a year later my life would essentially revolve around the stupid things.

So the Army does indeed use them for the storage of chemical agents. CS and CN, Lewisite, and other agents. I don't know if they use 'em for VX and so on, supposedly nothing we ever handled was used for nerve gas. Supposedly, because as often as everybody involved in the project lied to us, I wouldn't trust 'em about sunrises and the law of gravity without verification.

The US government signed a treaty for the disposal of its chemical agents, so the Army got about the process by shipping TCs by the bucketload to Pine Bluff in Arkansas, where they would neutralize the contents of each TC with a process that's actually pretty cool. They hooked up an electromagnet to heat the interior to some cool-ass over-thousand-degree Fahrenheit temperature, thus breaking the agents down into their constituent and allegedly nonharmful parts.

From there, our task was supposed to be simple- use an automated plasma torch cutting system and an automated conveyor. Chop 'em in half, load 'em up, ship 'em to the smelter.

Where does all this excess process come in, you ask? Well, the containers were made in the thirties, yes, and therefore the interiors are relic steel. For those who don't know, relic steel is steel that hasn't been contaminated by the products of above-ground nuclear detonations. This is extremely useful for the creation of very sensitive measuring environments, such as body count testing chambers and the like. The testing facility we used in Carlsbad made the walls of its testing room out of metal salvaged from steel shutters buried in Dresden, for example.

Now, so far as the crew and apparently management had been informed by both the prime contractor (we were subcontract) and the Army, the contents of the TCs were totally inert and harmless. So... why would the work have to be conducted as a hazmat facility? Our management was so oblivious to things that I wouldn't be surprised that they never even stopped to ask themselves the question. Rather, they saw a decent-paying long term project that looked simple, with Uncle Sam footing the bill for any necessary equipment needed for processing. At this point the crew had been told it was a two-man job on the ops side- one man to run the equipment and a forklift operator to snatch away the cut pieces.

That ended when one of the guys slotted for the job went out to look at the newly arrived TCs. He was walking around the truck when he noticed something pooled in the lip around the bevels of the TCs...

(That part looks somewhat like this, only ours had all the paint cooked off.)



"By golly!" he said "That looks like mercury!"

To be continued...

[Josh]

So our man on the ground made the good catch that day. Everyone backed away appropriately, the lab was dispatched to gather samples and verify that yes, the substance in question was indeed elemental mercury.

For those who aren't familiar with the excitement surrounding mercury these days, it's a hot topic issue in waste management. Now that we no longer just let kids play with the stuff...

...something that might explain my own various disorders, as it happens...

...it's a big, giant scary hassle to deal with. It's poisonous, it's corrosive, it doesn't break down into simpler constituents that you can then pack in a landfill and pretend the whole thing never happened.

Phone calls are made. Panic descends upon the land. A reasonably profitable project hangs in the air! Zounds! The Army is all "Are you sure it's mercury?" and the answer is "Well, we do handle toxic chemicals like every day and we have this lab and shit, and yes, it's mercury you fuckos."

In the meantime, the truck gets turned around and sent back. Get that shit outta our parking lot.

There is hemming and hawing. Nobody can get the straight story, and honestly I don't know a lot of what went down at this precise point because I was learning the joy of suiting up and playing with glowy stuff, so I wasn't at all involved or plugged in. What did eventually filter down to us knuckledraggers was that the Army was all "Oh. Um. Yes. There's maybe a bit of mercury in there. Maybe some arsenic too. Those weren't parts of the agents, they were contaminants."

As an aside: the chemical recipe for Lewisite is patented and available in the public domain. One of the ingredients is mercuric chloride.

However, they assure us, it's such a minor quantity that it should be no big deal. Yeah, we'll have to modify process somewhat, add respiratory protection and so on, but it's purely precautionary.

In a rare lucid moment, plant management decides to take a 'trust but verify' approach to this. It was a remarkably sane step for them, given their general credulousness with regards to what generators of waste streams would claim they were sending. As my old boss in the safety department would tell people during their opening HAZWOPER training, 'Generators lie', something that our account people never seemed to grasp. The US military was especially bad at this, and at various points every branch other than the Marines would piss me off with some sort of fucked up bullshit. The Marines probably dodged my ire by sticking Navy labels on everything, though.

This involves building a sample tent, made of the cheapest 2X4s you can find at the most fucked-up lumber you can find at the worst lumber yard in the state, boards that are crookeder than a political stereotype. The closest thing we had to a carpenter got on the job, with me as the labor monkey. In the meantime, the project manager would hover around us in the background, watching and trying to 'help'. Hilariously as we went to staple up the plastic for the tent, we discovered that the project manager had purchased a staple gun and staples that did not agree with each other. When he tried to force them to work together, the staple gun jammed, leading one of my co-workers to sum up the scene:

"Multi-million dollar company owned by a billionaire. Project manager pulling somewhere around six figures a year, sitting on the curb prying out staples with his six-dollar pocketknife."

On the plus side they did get us a really nice pneumatic naildriver that we got to use once and then never, ever saw again. Always wondered what happened to that...

So they go to sample the interior of a TC. As we would later discover, they chose a fortuitous one because the mercury levels varied greatly by the container- some were positively laden with mercury pools, while others would have very little. The one commonplace was that they all had mercury, and the one they chose indeed was lousy with the stuff. Also arsenic, something that everyone liked to overlook because arsenic is commonplace as hazmat goes, while mercury is so very exciting.

Oho, says the Army, our bad. We had no idea. Really. Um. So. Plan C.

At this point, they decide to take one into halves and see how that works, as well as get some metal samples. At this point, I'm getting loaned to Stab crew regularly since Permacon is essentially shut down for the time being, so I actually come into the picture more and more as this is going on. I run outside support while one of our guys determines that a plasma torch is a lousy lousy way to open up one of these things, as the steel is so soft that it can barely be cut properly.

Hm, says the Army. Wellll, we have this bandsaw that we were using in Pine Bluff to cut these up...

...whoa.

Why really, this was already an ongoing process?

Well, yeah. They were cutting them up, but stopped because of, well, the mercury.

Oh really?

But they only cut a few. Really. Less than a hundred. Pinky swear.

Now, other than some regular incompetence such as the staple gun comedy, management had been unusually on the ball about this. Having the prime contractor and the military running about brought a certain focus to things. But this is the point where it all started to go to hell.

Firstly, around this time the head of safety quit for a while. Now, this is a man (my former boss) who pretty much managed to kill every company he worked for within nine years. Not because he was incompetent, far from it, but because he was a jinx. However, as ten years rolled around he'd not managed to kill the plant, so I'm fairly convinced he went to Houston to restore his touch. Once there, he would kill that facility inside of six months and within the year he'd be back and make the fateful decision to ignore my use of the overdone Kryptonite joke in an interview and actually take me into his department. Probably as part of his master plan to finish the job on the one company he still has yet to kill. (Well, he also didn't kill Canada's equivalent of OSHA, but government agencies don't count.)

Now, his replacement was the plant's industrial hygienist and an all-around great guy. However, after the old boss quit, the IH applied for and got the position while still retaining his old one.

And he flat-out melted. Too much work, too much ground to cover, a wife who hated living in the nearby town and would scream about it in public. He lasted about three months. The longer he went, the worse he got about the details and the more our supremely incompetent Ops Director (henceforth the OD) and blistering idiot of an ops manager (OM) took control.

The OD was a guy who never exhibited an ounce of talent in terms of directing projects, managing field personnel, or so far as I witnessed tying his own shoelaces.

(Though he never put his shoes on the wrong feet, drove sixty miles to work and then walked around in them for an hour before noticing. That would be our glue-eating head of security.)

What the OD was good at was skimping budgets. Furthermore, this project was starting to show some interesting and unexpected potential. The assumption, often repeated by management, was that the Army would leave whatever they used or built for the project on the site after they left. Now what was being floated was that the Army would build a brand new building, install a quarter-million dollar band saw, along with a half-million dollar air handler unit, all on the taxpayer dime. Then, after we faithfully chopped up all their TCs, they'd shake hands and waltz away, leaving us with some reasonably valuable equipment on top of the scads of money we were sure to make here.

Thus ground was broken on the TC building, and the winter of our discontent began...

[rhoenix]

Oh, man. A place like that actually makes me feel better about where I work. Thanks for starting the thread.

[B4UTRUST]

Well to be fair the notion of the army leaving the equipment to them isn't necessarily a bad one. It's been done before, though usually more overseas than stateside to my knowledge where it's more of a cost issue of dismantling/removing whatever than buying/building a new one. Of course by the same token if you're actually IN the service, you better have a copy of a DD Form 592-F.2 Rev C (All older versions obsolete) filled out and signed in triplicate stating you correctly disposed of one(1) ea. ball point ink pen, blue ink, empty. In Accordance With JG197-33-UC-3-A page 317 paragraph 2.1. God help you if you couldn't justify the loss of that pen.

[Josh]

Oh yeah, it wasn't an unreasonable assumption. The problem was, as we shall see, that they banked on this assumption. Given that at one point we also watched the Army burn 120K for absolutely no reason at all was also what inspired that sort of confidence.

[Steve]

The Marines probably dodged my ire by sticking Navy labels on everything, though.

I guess the Marines consider the Navy good for something?

[Josh]

The Marines probably dodged my ire by sticking Navy labels on everything, though.

I guess the Marines consider the Navy good for something?

Seriously, I snort when I hear about the diligence of Navy nukes after what they dumped in my lap one fine day. But that's another story that will come!

[Josh]

So when last we left, the project had continued its tortured evolution. From an easy, minimal-PPE process that would be almost entirely automated, our process now was going to involve a jumbo band-saw, a brand new building, and some serious ventilation.

Given a new process to design, management swung into gear and put their thinking caps on. This would lead to tragically hilarious results, as so often occurs when people who've never actually done a day of manual labor attempt to design an industrial process.

The crew was largely removed from the discussion, beyond being used as spare labor for the construction work. Somewhere around this time, I was transferred full-time to Stab crew as they were shorthanded and permacon was overstaffed. (There was some political nonsense to this- a crew that sits around all day turns into a catty gossip-fest and the lead hand for the 'tards and I fairly despised each other. We were both happy with this outcome.)

Shortly thereafter, the lead hand for Stab crew went AWOL for a while. As I recall, it was a weeklong drinking binge where he didn't call in, so when he returned he got into a big screaming match with the managers and got suspended for a while. However, since he was a drinking buddy with the OD, this was largely overlooked. However, the consequence of it was that being the last one to duck when 'volunteers' were called for, I got handed the clipboard and told to deal with the contractors as well as the Tech Services manager who was essentially the shadow project manager.

It was here that I learned firsthand what was stalling things out. First, we had a four-headed management hydra- the OD, the OM, the project manager, and the Tech Services Manager.

There is a special place of loathing in my heart for that last one. If you went to Central Casting for the Rock Steady Competent Management Guy, he'd be the first one cast. He had the look, and a practiced demeanor that gave the impression of being cool, calm, collected and in charge. Events would show time and again that he really wasn't.

Now of course I'm having to travel to these folks with my trusty clipboard, letting them know what's going on with construction and relaying their messages back and forth (I didn't see the OD much, I was working daily with the other three and the OD would express his gibberish by making the OM's lips move.)

There was a lot of 'He said what?' or 'We're doing what?' at this stage, leaving me filled to the brim with confidence as to our prospects for success. It only got better as we received our equipment.

Fast-forward. Building is constructed. Saw and air handler arrive. Both were gloriously large pieces of equipment, and both had been sitting for... fuck, at least two years and possibly upwards of five. So on the Army dime the manufacturers send us people to work on them and I'm tagged for escort duty on both of them.

Now, the saw guys were top notch, and I can't say enough for HE&M Saw company, if the father-son team they sent to work on the saw are any indication of their general standards in personnel. They arrived and promptly began tearing the saw down and rebuilding it with merry abandon. On top of that, they were interesting conversationalists, a major luxury when you're stuck on escort duty, which by policy meant you stood around watching other people work all day while not being allowed to assist. And then when they needed to go peepee, you had to walk them down to the nearest bathroom, etc. Yeah, escort duty blew.

Now, the air handler guy? Not so much, in terms of competence or likeability. His first task was the rather odious and menial chore of cutting gaskets for the 200 lb carbon HEPA filters that were the primary components of the unit. It was slow, tedious work that he took to with all the enthusiasm of a trip to the dentist. He would cut a gasket and seal it onto a filter bank, sigh loudly, then look at me out of the corner of his eye all "You wanna take a turn at this?"

Admittedly I was not particularly interested, but my first turn on escort duty a while before had gotten me a reprimand for jumping in and helping the contractors (in this case a couple of welders) do their job. As I was informed at the time, we were not to insert ourselves into the liability stream in any way, shape, or form. So I'd listen to him sigh for a bit, then go and check in with the saw guys, where we could talk about football, politics, the father's naval career, or their favorite topic, BIG HONKIN' JUMBO INDUSTRIAL SAWS.

But in the interests of fairness, I would chat up the air handler tech too. That's when I learned something deeply and profoundly interesting, a fact that would come back to haunt us on multiple occasions.

He had no idea how the unit worked. He had no schematics for the unit. He couldn't tell us one thing about the internal wiring. Why? Because the engineer who'd designed the unit and several other items for his company had quit a while back, and when he left he took all his schematics with him. So beyond the basic material in the unit manual, which concerned itself with such trivia as how to put the filters in and how to turn it on, we were flying blind.

I have to admit, this gave me a certain burst of kinship. It was almost "Hello, fellow brother in the defense contracting industry. We recognize your incompetence and treasure it as we treasure our own. If for some reason your company ever develops minimal standards, rest assured you will always have a home here."

So as the HE&M Saw guys were working with the totally bizarre efficiency and diligence that would result in them getting stiffed for over fifty grand by the parent contractor, the air handler was loaded with filters, connected to power, and then turned on with all the various managers in attendance.

BRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAATUUUUUURMMMmmmmmmmm........... *silence*

Tech: "I don't know why it did that."

Subsequent attempts resulted in the same event- twenty seconds of loud rumbling noises, followed by ominous unproductive silence, followed by the tech telling us that he didn't know why it was doing that. Management began to lose interest and wander around to look at shiny stones while the electrical supervisor was summoned. He cracked open the panel and began poking at the wires with his probe.

(At this juncture I will say this particular supervisor was competent at his job and we were lucky to have him there.)

As he poked at the wires, the tech would offer useful comments like "I think that goes to that readout" or "I have no idea where that one goes."

This went on for two or three days, as I recall, until the supervisor was finally able to make the air handler stay on so long as the switch was in the on position. I asked him if he'd gotten a handle on the system and he said yes, he could work with it and keep us up and running. This was all very reassuring.

A month later he would get into a dispute with the department manager and quit.

[Josh]

Unfortunately, this is where we get to certain items I can't share for various confidentiality reasons. Just rest assured that the stupidity here was in some ways just the tip of the iceberg to what was going on behind the scenes.

So! We have a functional saw. We have a (sort of) functional air handler system. For those that are curious, the purpose of the air handler system was to take the air that goes into the building and suck it out through a filter bank so as to keep contaminants from getting into the lunches of school children in the neighboring town. Also it creates negative pressure in the building, so when you open the door bad stuff doesn't just puff out at you.

Now is where things start to get interesting. Our new head of safety (of three months) has put in his notice, and is busy taking his last month to teach up a contractor brought in on the dash to hold down the fort while the plant tries to find somebody to work for what amounts to minimum wage in the field. In the meantime, we get brought in for the first of a series of meetings to get the plan and then get any input we might have to offer on a process that was ninety percent finalized before we were even consulted on the matter.

Now, funny moment. The lead op for Stab was another guy I didn't get along with, and for once I can even say that it wasn't in the least due to my tendency brush some authority figures the wrong way for treating them like obstacles and roadblocks. Nah, in this case I will actually claim innocence and say that the guy is a born asshole.

SO. When we go into a meeting where the operating schematic for the process is laid out and we both immediately tear into it for being a stupid, convoluted process, it's a sign. Then when we actually, miracle of miracles, agree on a more sane and efficient way to get things done and back each other's points, well, planets must be aligning as cats and dogs march hand in hand through the streets.

Put it this way: other than agreeing on our mutual loathing, I can think of one other time in three years that he and I agreed on something so instantly and thoroughly.

That we were right was of course irrelevant. We were quickly told that despite the invitation for input, the process was finalized and because it had to go under a special permit that had been acquired specifically for the process, it couldn't be changed. Changes, it was alleged, would cost ten thousand in lawyer fees and processing alone.

This was later disregarded when the process was scrapped and revamped on day one, bringing it slightly in line with our suggestion while still leaving it overly dangerous and strenuous. The truth of the matter is that they sat down with a small committee of people, one of whom had actually done any sort of process work, and drew the plan up. Mere operators who lacked the constellation of degrees and credentials these fellows had should shut up and know our place.

(To that one former operator's credit, he later admitted that it was one of those 'seemed like a good idea at the time' things and apologized for it. He was an ace dude and one of the few competent people in management.)

So what was our bone of contention? The horseshoe. Each TC was to be cut into three parts. Under the original design, there would be a horseshoe, prongs turned away from the rollers on the saw. On each side of the saw would be a cleaning station with an operator who would clean the toxic scale from the interior, then shoot it in a straight line down toward a roll-up exit door, where a variable-reach forklift would snatch it off and take it to a waiting storage container.

It was utterly asinine. When you're designing a system, the last thing you do is add unnecessary bends and curves to a process. It's true in ventilation, it's true in plumbing, it's true in industrial processes. Now these bends and curves are often necessary and therefore you engineer for them, but when you can avoid them? Do so.

The issue here was the material being handled. As the above quote notes, the average TC clocks in around 1600 pounds. When cut into three pieces, the ends are where all the weight is, to the tune of somewhere over five hundred pounds each (this is estimated from handling them, not from ever getting to properly weigh them.) To facilitate turning them twice, transfer tables were added in the midst of the rollers, consisting of projecting dinguses with free-rolling ball-bearings sticking out of the top. The lead op and I both identified these transfer tables as a weak point in the system and suggested doing a straight-shot off the saw table with clean-out states located on either side of the roller line, allowing cut pieces to be snatched off with relative ease and then rolled straight back onto the rollers for evacuation from the building.

That we basically cocktail-napkined a better design in an hour meeting did lead to some hilariously nonplussed expressions from our betters, which is sort of amusing in retrospect.

But nope, the horseshoe had to stay. The special permit was in place and we couldn't afford to change it.

So back to work we went, having given our input as requested and having had the input ignored as expected.

Aside: the OD later admitted that his concept was to not use the transfer tables, but rather use a flat steel sheet for each cleaning station, with the cut pieces to be rotated around by use of a lever.

"It would've been about two hundred pounds of shoving, but you guys could do the work."

I could've punched the dumb bastard. As it was with the twisting and torquing we were having to do in there it was a miracle we didn't get a blown back. If we actually had more than four months or so of cumulative operation we would've. More on that later.

So, funny episode. As we're merrily installing the rollers, one of the prime contractor's personnel sticks his head in the door and compliments us on the great job we're doing. Then he asks what we'll do if 'this' happens and kills the lights.

Naturally, with a non-windowed building with no emergency lights and no exit signs, it's kind of dark in there. Which is the sort of thing that happens when you have no safety department because you mushed the guy who was on the job into quitting and he's trying to retain some vestige of his sanity while training up the new guy. Also the other people in charge of your construction have no clue about things like building buildings.

"Well, we'll all die screaming in the dark."

Score one for gallows humor.

Go to see the Tech Services Manager about the issue. He's busy having a meltdown because the transfer table delivery came out all wrong and the tables are not load-rated and god this project is a nightmare and he wishes it would go away.

Well, so do we but we're all drawing paychecks here so about emergency lights?

Oh, they'll get on it!

Well hey, while we're at it we need more than that! We need a red flashing light inside the building on the ceiling, so people will know that the saw is in operation. And in case they miss the red flashing light, we'll add an alarm buzzer that stays on all the time with the light. Plus we'll add a flashing light outside the building to let everyone else know it's in operation.

Few points to consider here:

This is an industrial band saw. When it powered up, you could about feel it in the soles of your feet. You certainly didn't miss the loud roar. You also didn't miss the distinctive scream when it came down to bite into metal.

What you did miss was the loud buzzer, which was completely drowned out by the roar of the saw. Which is a mercy because that thing would've been fucking annoying to listen to for six hours a day of processing. The buzzer ended up being the thing we used to prank outsiders who came into the building, like the maintenance guys. Let 'em suit up, go in, then hit the switch and watch their eyes get all big behind the lens of their mask.

Yeah, we were a bit juvenile.

As for outside, there were no less than two personnel orbiting the building during processing, and typically three. There was one path in if you actually suited up the way you were supposed to before entering, and you could hear the roar of the saw from the changing area. Basically, if you had any business suiting up and going in, you knew when the process was going and you had to give the supervisor outside a good reason for your presence.

But hey, flashy light, whatever, it's the Army's dime right?

Heh. Not entirely, as we were to discover.

So... rough spots in the operation and potentially life-threatening omissions in our basic safety procedures, we've got a saw, we've got tables, we've got a half-assed operational pattern likely to get somebody hurt, we've got a lead op with a dubious back injury that he claims came from installing the tables (a statement directly contradicted by the two people working with him at the time.)

We are so good to go.

[Josh]

So, final prep to actually starting. We make the final touches of getting the building ready, go through an interminable series of further briefings, determine a few more systemic flaws to the setup.

To wit:

The building had no breezeway. Briefest of primers on how hazardous waste work works to follow.

First, you have the hot zone, or Contaminated Zone as the current terminology has it. This is where the bad shit emanates from. In a cleanup, that'd be where the drum tipped over and spilled its shit everywhere.

Then you a contamination reduction zone, where you're cleaning shit up back toward the center. Not totally applicable here because we're not dealing with a disaster, this controlled introduction of hazardous material into an enclosed environment.

Then you have the corridor by which you exit, which didn't have a name under the old setup and has one now that I can't remember off the top of my head. Now, this is an area that is theoretically contaminated, or if it does get contaminated by stomping in there in contaminated PPE it isn't the end of the world. This is where you start peeling off your gear- overalls, etc, and either disposing of them or just moving them to the place where they can be decontaminated and removed if the setup swings that way. By the time you're done, you should be down to your mask, innermost pair of gloves and a single pair of protective booties. Then you hop around on one foot, peel off a bootie, and step to the clean side, stand on that leg and peel off that bootie, then dispose of your gloves, then you're free and clear. (Depending on the nature of the work. Some stuff requires that you hop into a kiddie pool next all nekkid and get brushed and hosed. Fortunately we didn't have to go that far.)

Well, we didn't have that. For whatever reason, they decided not to use that honkin' Army budget, instead having us doff our PPE inside the building we were working in, then step-off straight out the door.

What was so spectacularly idiotic about this would be eventually revealed when we had observers. When management or contractor or Army personnel would come in to watch, we'd suit them up, watching carefully to make sure they zipped everything they were supposed to zip and taped everything they were supposed to tape. Then they'd step in the door and watch for however long pleased their souls before they'd stand right where they'd been that whole time and start peeling off their protective gear.

So why did we have them suit up in the first place? Yes, the argument could be made for minimizing airborne exposure while they observed, but in truth it showed no respect for the material we were working with and created potential contamination vectors.

Top it off, they didn't provide a handwashing station anywhere near the work area, because that would've cost more and also created a potential mercury-contaminated water stream, which would then be expensive to dispose of... on the Army dime? I never really understood the logic behind where the money was spent, unless the probable kickback situation I later found was way more widespread than I thought.

Instead, we were given hand sanitizer, which is a major no-no in hazardous waste work. The entire concept of a rinse is that you, y'know, rinse. You don't press the skin, you let the water take anything it can off. Using sanitizer or wipes means potentially pressing anything you have on you straight into your skin.

I can say at this juncture that we all did get access to our exposure data collected via specimens, and none of us blew hot for merc or arsenic. But numerous contra-reg situations such as these created that possibility and again if the project had lasted a while it could well have become an issue.

Finally, the Tech Services Manager had one last hilarious tidbit for us during the final pre-operational brief- "Do not shout at the saw operator." Then he told us this sad sad story about how his brother was working a saw at a shop and somebody yelled and he got distracted and cut off his hand. Given his general lack of credibility by then combined with what we'd see as the miraculous ability to pull out sad, emotional stories for any given hazard (kid got run over by a train, etc.) it got to be a running joke. "So when his brother got his hand cut off and sprayed me in the face with the blood and then I run into the kid who derailed the train and then everyone in town died."

Sad story if true, but we weren't giving much credence to anything anybody was saying by then. Top it all off, we were working suited up next to a roaring bandsaw, the only way you could get somebody to hear you is to about scream at the top of your lungs.

Of course, in that sort of work you develop all sorts of intricate sign language, mostly useful for indicating who would be on top of who during a theoretical carnal act, the gestures for "You suck good dick" being a favorite. Naturally such sign language is totally useless for communicating anything useful like 'Hand me that wrench', which necessitates grabbing somebody by the vest and going mask to mask and yelling.

It's during this phase that we learn about our new friend, the eductor tube. What's that? That's the tube that curls inside the bevel on the end where the gas is sucked out, and for whatever reason (that was never clearly explained) the Army wanted those cut out and disposed of separately. Which would turn out to be a royal honkin' pain in the ass.

Nevertheless, the day arrives. We go out to the building and discover that they've so very thoughtfully given us our new HQ- a tent. With stakes set in cement feet. Now, aside from the fact that we were looking at a pretty feckin' cold winter coming up, the site sits at what is generally considered to be the windiest spot in the damn state. Even better, given the position of our specific worksite, it was one of the windiest spots in the entire damn plant.

So. We point out that this whole 'tent' thing has been tried a time or two in the past, and always ends with the tent taking a trip somewhere to New Mexico or Oz. But hey, once again budget.

WhatEVER, let's just suit up and get this shit on.

Day one, we fire up the saw. Our saw repairman is also our saw trainer, and he suits up to make the first cut. We pretty much immediately learn a few things...

Small hand saws about the length of my hand are shitty tools for cutting steel, so the eductor tubes become a royal pain in the ass. It is quickly determined that it takes long enough to cut the tubes out that two cleaning stations are a waste of time, so one cleaning station is shut down and repurposed strictly for cutting tubes.

And the horseshoe that couldn't be changed therefore goes out the window like that. We eventually removed the rollers and used them for spare parts, turning the horseshoe into a still-jackassed 'ell'. Funny how that worked.

In the meantime, we have no other tools for cutting the damn tubes, so we keep using the stupid hand saws. Which burn out a blade at least once per tube, and generally lasted two tubes tops on a single battery before needing a replacement. So the whole operation slows down over those stupid tubes. Cleaning? We can do that good. The scale is ganky, but doable. The bandsaw takes the TCs and cuts them not quite like butter. So other than one major hang-up in the process, we can do this.

A day or two later, we have a major windstorm. We're delayed for... something... so we're just chilling down the hill waiting for word to go up when the landfill guys (the landfill was just over a slight rise away from us) come over to tell us that our tents blew down and all our gear is scattered into the landfill.

...great, so that's a lot of write-off for anything that landed in the CZ of the landfill. So we head on up to salvage what's left and immediately regret not getting another smoke.

Because the tent is still there. Sort of. It's fully inflated and the edge has caught on the inbound roller from the saw outside the building. As we watch, the edge is fraying. It's aimed right at the vent stack for the air handler, and past that for the main electrical lines that bring power into the plant.

Admittedly not my best moment. I went for some rope to lash it down, one of the other hands just ribboned it with a knife. Either way, if we'd just waited a few minutes more we very likely could've seen a spectacular lightshow that would've ended the entire project and shut the entire place down for a week or so. Later on during our various interminable shutdowns we'd rue our fast actions that day.

Can't say they weren't warned about the tent, right? Although never in our wildest dreams did we think it'd go that way, since the prevailing wind usually ran in the opposite angle.

So now they decide to cut loose with a Conex to let us base out of. Not as good as the heated doghouses crews usually got, but at least the walls were wind-proofed.

With that resolved, work resumes at its usual torpid pace for the plant. The labor itself wasn't physically killer, mostly being an exertion for the clean-out guy while the saw operator had the easiest gig- feed 'em in, sit on the stool and watch 'em cut. The forklift jockey usually ran pretty steady, and somehow it always seemed to be raining on my days on the VR.

Then came the transfer table drama, which I don't have time to cover today.

So until next time...

[Josh]

Okay, quick couple of tidbits before I pick back up on the feckin' TCs.

The Story of the Sniffling Welder

As I mentioned above, at one point I received a bit of chastisement over helping the contractors. Well, it happened with the sniffling welder about four or five months into my time at the plant. I'd been assigned escort and overwatch for the addition of a catwalk to one side of our silo system.

Now, an aside about the silo system. You've seen those big grain silos where grain is stored, then dispensed down into waiting vehicles or whatever? Like three stories tall? That's what we had next to the STAB building, and they held tons of portland cement and flyash for mixture into the processes. Problem? These were honest-to-god used grain silos, instead of specialized silos for the handling of very fine material like portland or flyash. Which meant they clogged constantly. If we had a downcycle where they weren't used for a month or two (not at all uncommon) then be guaranteed when we needed them they'd clog. Hence the need for another catwalk to make full access more reasonable since the maintenance crew would always have to be up on the damn things.

(Even briefer story about one notable unclog coming.)

So it's a Tuesday and whoever got stuck on escort duty the day before managed to wangle out and hand it off to the FNG, being me. Escort duty in these circumstances can be toxically boring. You watch people all day, make sure they don't break any plant or OSHA rules or whatever, you take them to the bathroom, you take them to lunch, you can't go smoke until they go to the bathroom or lunch or whatever, you're fucking stuck and bouncing off the walls.

So the welder shows up with his helper, and the welder is an interesting cat. He has a custom-designed mask that he obviously tacked together himself and then stuck the dark glass in, and it's squared off on the side where he's festooned it with a Jesus fish. Okay, even for around here that's a bit overt, but whatever.

Tuesday is the one and only day that he stays the full day while I'm doing escort. Now, since nobody told me 'don't help the contractors', I'm right in there with 'em. Need help rolling out? I'm there. Man, that grate's heavy? Let's get it together, boys!

I'd hear about that later. But in any event, I notice a couple of things... off... about this guy. He don't eat, he don't drink much, but about every three hours or so he'll go to 'take a piss' for fifteen minutes in a toilet stall, and when he comes out he's snuffling mighty fierce. This snuffling is always accompanied by a very fervent "ALLERGIES, MAN!" to which I nod sagely. Uh huh. I didn't bring that up front because the old 'never snitch' is still a pretty strong impulse, and it wasn't impacting his production or, as it turns out, lack thereof.

Because after lunch on the first day, he stops working. Too windy.

Okay, plausible. This is the windiest spot in Texas, after all.

So we basically hang around the silos bullshitting all afternoon. Now, the silos along the side of the STAB building that faces our main administration building, and being a 21st century kind of outfit we had numerous women employees. And this guy notices every one of them that passes by, and comments.

Normal-ish, yeah. Obnoxious, sure, gets old. But here's the thing: every woman that passes by, he asks very specifically "Is she single? Is she a good Christian woman?"

Not cool. So after the third time he asks (and bear in mind that I was still relatively new and both the marital and moral status of most of the women working in admin were mysteries to me) I just start making it up.

"Oh yeah, she's married. Husband's a Marine." "Yeah, she's married, husband's in the Army." "Her boyfriend is a Texas Ranger. The ones who carry guns, not the baseball team." "Her husband has worked at the post office for over thirty years after the Spetnaz kicked him out for being too violent. Mail order deal but the love is real."

He never did quite get the 'Quit mentally stalking the local women, you creepy fuck' message, but we did eventually run out of women for me to fabricate potentially dangerous and potentially violent SOs for.

So Wednesday, and he doesn't even make half a day's shift before he makes up a bullshit excuse and cuts out.

Thursday, he doesn't even roll out the gear before he gets 'called away'. At this point his helper confides to me that because the guy is a fully certified gas-line qualified welder, he makes a hundred bucks an hour and is perfectly content to do about four hours a day, then find an excuse to cut loose. Now being as the helper was making like twelve an hour, this job is not working out for him.

Friday! Welder shows up, but no helper. He's whining because the kid didn't give him any notice, just called and told him he quit. So now he actually rolls out and tries to get to work. About three hours in his machine dies on him and no amount of swearing or praying will resurrect it.

Now every day I had been giving an honest report on the day's activities to the maintenance supervisor who'd hired this guy's company, and the day before it had been pretty obvious that the supervisor had come around to the fact that the guy was a royal dogfucker, and apparently the guy had figured out he was on some thin ice. So then when his machine breaks for really reals after all his fucking off, he's seeing some writing on the wall.

So we sit for a spell. Guy whines about how much this sucks because he was just out for six months with an unspecified illness and now just as he's coming back he'll have to get his welding machine fixed and the guy charges a hundred bucks an hour for repairs.

I'm not pretending to commiserate, I'm just nodding as he talks but apparently he's taking that for a sympathetic ear. So then he asks me if I know any good Christian women. I say something to the effect of how that's pretty much the opposite of what I'm looking for (sure, the sex is often great but the conversational part can be too damned awkward) and he just sorta shrugs at me. Then he claps his hands and tells me that it's all okay, because even though he's fucked up on this job and his welding machine is fucked and it's going to cost him an arm and a leg to fix, it'll all be cool because "God's got a plan!"

Of course that's not my thing but I distinctly remember thinking at the time "Hopefully it's to send us a real fucking welder."

So off he goes and I go back to see the maintenance supervisor who is understandably livid. What do I think? Sure, the machine was legit busted this time, but it shouldn't have been an issue because the job should've already been done.

So I go home Friday night thinking that I've seen the last of that dogfucker.

NOPE. Monday rolls in, but thankfully my regular job needed me so I got to go scrub radioactive shit or something. Anything beats sitting around watching the welder fuck off. I did get the inside scoop, though- around eleven, the guy's boss shows up and jumps straight in his shit, telling him that he's sick of the four-hour day bullshit. Welder gets pissed off, says he doesn't have to take this shit, and stomps out.

So we get a new welding crew in and three days later the job is done, almost entirely from scratch. Yup yup.

***

Mt Saint Helens comes to the Dump

So move ahead a year or so. I'm permanently over to STAB now, and the silo system is fucked up yet again. This time, they're trying to drain the silo of its entire load of flyash before they go to work. So they cut a hole in and run a funnel up into it, dropping down to a roll-off truck with an empty container.

Maintenance is working up there and I'm the ops guy they send along for... fuck if I know, ops expertise? All we were allowed to do with the damn system was turn the knobs and push the buttons and if any of the lights did or didn't come on or stuff didn't come out the chute in the building we were supposed to call maintenance.

Nevertheless, there I was leaning on the rail listening to the plumber and the mechanic trying to get the funnel to feed out. There is a complication, however- something is obstructing the chute.

So... what do we do in this circumstance? Try to fish out whatever's lodged in there? Might be a good idea. Or, if you're the mechanic, you'll activate the compressor and pressure the silo in order to shove the obstruction out.

And when it doesn't come out? Keep turning up the pressure... closer... closer... maximum. Mind you, I find out that's what he was doing afterward.

I hear the plumber saying "I don't see anything... I don't see anything... I don't see anything..."

I've got my back turned when this is going on, I'm leaning on the rail and looking out at the very interesting construction work next door with like fifteen heavy lift cranes. It really isn't very interesting at that distance, but anything beats watching a couple of guys shake a funnel and comment on how nothing's coming out.

Suddenly the sky goes black. I mean, everything goes black for a second and I'm hanging onto the rail for dear life because WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE.

Then the wind catches it and starts moving this giant black cloud across the site. The OD's office was centerline on the building and gave him a great view of the STAB, so when the sky started darkening outside his window naturally he gets up to look. The plumber and the mechanic are reeling around like drunks and I'm heading for them to make sure nobody goes over the rail.

Strangely enough it wasn't hard to breathe in all that. I mean, it got all up my nose and in my throat and I spit black gunk for the better part of an hour afterward, but still it wasn't hard to breathe.

The OD is on the radio going nuts trying to figure out if he's going to have to actually muster the ERT or some shit and generally losing his shit like he usually did when he wasn't sure what was happening.

(Thank god that idiot never had to respond to a real disaster.)

I get to the mechanic and the plumber and they're coughing a bit but settled down so I have to give the plumber some shit:

"Hey Clint! I see something!"

"Fuck you, Josh."

He said pretty often for some reason.

[Josh]

Y'know, I never did think to inquire if they went ahead and called the town in New Mexico that we were right next door to. For some reason people do tend to get excited when large clouds emanate from the radioactive waste treatment/disposal facility.

[Josh]

Again with the quick hits:

The security boss.

What to say about our glue-eating security boss. I mean, those were some abyssal depths of stupidity to plumb. At a plant that often seemed to collect very special individuals, our security boss was the most special.

My first introduction to the Big Head was a radio conversation. We'd just had an ERT drill (emergency response team.)

Now, little aside about the drill: it wasn't specified as to what the nature of the drill was before they hit the siren. Instead, they just announced the drill and hit the evac siren. So naturally the office staff starts pouring out of the building and heading for the gate. However, that particular day we had an aberrant wind that would've put them dead in the path of anything we had on plant that could go wrong enough to cause an evac. Nobody on the admin side noticed this, nor did they ever come up with a good answer to my later questions about alternate rally points in the case of the wind putting our regular rally point out of service.

Anyway, with the admin crew halfway to the guardhouse, they hurriedly announce that this is an ERT muster drill, not an evac drill. So the admin staff head back to their offices, disappointed with the loss of the opportunity to stand around smoking on a mild day for an hour or so while all the ERT people run about pretending to assemble decon tents and so on.

Our head of security, who was on the ERT, was at the guardhouse when the drill commenced. He was getting ready to leave for some family thing or another (so he later said) but when the drill kicked he... just sort of sat there at the guardhouse rather than heading to the ERT muster. The muster being, I shit you not, about fifty yards from the guardhouse.

So the ERT musters, the idiot OD goes around telling everyone whatever it was he told them when he was in charge, then sends them back to work. Over and done in about twenty minutes.

The whole time the head of security has been sitting at the guardhouse. So the OD, in his completely typical radio-indiscreet fashion proceeds to call him on an open channel and ask why he didn't come to the ERT muster. Head of security mumbles something about how the drill started just as he was on the way out to go do his thing. OD growls that that's not an excuse. Head of security mumbles some more. OD snarls and snaps and then orders him to meet in the office.

As I was to learn, this was a good day for the head of security.

When you first showed up, you might have heard that the head of security was a former Federal Marshal. He certainly encouraged the propagation of that myth. As it turned out, he drove a prison bus as a contract employee. The company newsletter, printed by a very very nice lady who gave most everyone the benefit of the doubt, once ran one of his columns with a marshal's star next to it. I expect somebody told her that was in grotesque stolen-valor-esque error because the star disappeared from subsequent columns.

This was a guy who constantly tried to get his security armed, so he could be like the security next door with their MP-5s and M-16s. This is also a guy I wouldn't trust with a rubber band gun to be quite honest.

This was a guy who got the idea that a coyote was stalking him. Seriously, he thought when he was making his external circuits on the back wilderness that was our extended property that there was a coyote that had it out for him in particular and was just waiting for him to get out of his pickup in order to pounce on him. This belief led him to request a paintball gun on the company dime, so he could mark said coyote and then call animal control out to collect it.*

This was a guy who requested tasers for the guards, so they could use them against rattlesnakes. As I said when I heard that one, I'd pay to see that pulled off.

These requests were denied.

I always wondered who could look at this guy during an interview and say "Yes, this is our man. This man is management material." Then I found out that he was literally the only one with the requisite certifications who would take the job for the pay offered.

He was the kind of guy who, after a brief conversation, left you feeling stupider than when you started. It was like his idiocy was contagious. It was as if the effort of deciphering his statements made your own brain seize up.

He was a guy that, if you arrived at his office between one and three in the afternoon you could scare half to death by loudly banging on his door. Why? It's a jarring way to get woken up. Seriously.

(Naturally in the course of my later duties I did this every time I could find a legit reason to do so. Having near free run of the plant and an excuse to be practically everywhere had its perks. Of course it also meant I was required to be most everywhere and occasionally in multiple places at one time, too.)

He was a guy who would get a lame lame political joke from one of those FWD FWD FWD emails and then travel down the hall telling it at every office. Which meant of course that by the time he arrived at any given office the occupant had heard the joke at least twice already.

He was very, very Republican. I had the misfortune of being stuck next to him at a safety meeting one fine day, mostly because everyone else had won the musical chairs competition of not sitting next to him.

(I had a slow day okay)

So I got to hear his virtual recitation of what had to be either Hannity or Limbaugh's take on some Obama speech. The exact same recitation I'd heard him make twice before around the office. Then he repeated it to the next person who accidentally wandered into our vicinity. He was like the Venus Flytrap of Stupidity that way.

Once, when my boss was feeling particularly sadistic and I'd made one too many 'old buzzard' jokes, he told me that the head of security was having to make a full inspection of the fenceline (we had sixteen thousand acres) and it would take two days and that in good conscience he (my boss) couldn't send the head of security out there alone because he might fall down a well or something, so I would have to accompany him for the journey.

This was perhaps the only time I ever, ever humbly apologized to my boss and perhaps even groveled a bit.

He took the very simple visitor policy to the plant and rewrote it. Then, just as it was getting functional, he completely revamped it to the point of not being able to explain it at all. It was a 23 page procedure and nobody could make sense out of it. When his boss called him in to explain it, he couldn't articulate what he meant in each section. Yet this was a passed procedure that they actually tried to make security work under for a while. Finally his boss had to step in and assist the rewrite in order to get something sorted out of the mess.

There was another time when we had a heart attack case on the grounds, one of the admin staff. I was out wandering the free range (probably fucking off on a slow day) when I came back to the guardhouse. The guards were in a tizzy because we had an ambo coming and nobody was telling them precisely what to do, and they had three different people at admin claiming authority and giving them no real directives. In the meantime their boss had gone totally dark.

So they were asking me if it was okay to shut down all inbound/outbound traffic to keep the road clear for the ambo. Uh... yeah... sure. I mean, totally not my authority to direct, but I had to concur that they were doing good in the absence of coherent higher authority.

So when the ambulance finally did get there, THEN he pops up and runs right out of admin to play traffic cop. I mean, he was seriously doing honest to god textbook police traffic direction with the circling arm and everything. This helped the ambulance that had already had somebody pointing where they should go right as they came through the gate. Also, the local EMS worked the occasional drill with us and knew our layout and had been directed specifically to the point. But hey, he got to direct an ambulance and that just made his day.

Two weeks or so later we had the stupidest response episode of the entire time I was there: the maintenance manager was scoring points with a newly arrived VP by offering to move a new chair into his office. So she grabs the chair and starts dragging it along, it hits an obstruction in the floor and causes her to trip. As she goes down her leg strikes the chair and gruesomely dislocates her kneecap.

PANIC.

Now me, I have no idea of what's going on. I'm up the hill working a safety gig when I get a call on my cell from the second in command (our boss was on vacation) that she needed me down the hill now.

That's never a good sign. Then when I get there I got people telling me if I need any help come to them, etc. But nobody's telling me what the fuck happened until I get to one of the plant EMTs, who tells me she's got a blown-off kneecap and maybe a broken leg.**

So somebody decides this is a case for chopper evac.

Ooooooookay.

So because the second in command is heading to the hospital to be the company presence, I'm going to be in charge of the safety stuff, hence why I was getting all this 'if you need any help' reassurance. (I was pretty junior at the time, third or fourth month on the job and first time to get the ship in the middle of an emergency.)

Well, the ERT has the drill down for chopper evac, so I really don't have anything to do but go stand outside their perimeter and eyeball it myself and help them keep any gawkers from getting in the way. Of course most of admin is shut down so everybody can watch the chopper come in.

So they've got the situation under control, chopper is inbound to our designated landing area, and the head of security rolls the gate. His guards come running out of the guardhouse waving and shouting to alert him to what's going on, but he just smiles and waves and keeps going.

Then he drives right into the middle of the landing zone.

That's when Teddy got hold of him.

Teddy was a special case- old Army vet, Abrams gunner in the First Gulf War, lived in Germany for a while after he mustered out (I think he briefly married local but I could be mixing him up with some other old Jayhawker.) Teddy worked maintenance and was somewhat appreciated and generally reviled for his tendency to tell you exactly what the fuck he was thinking, usually in fairly profane terms.

(I loved Teddy even when he was being a pain in my ass. We had some go-rounds but I treasured his honesty.)

Teddy was on the perimeter and got hold of our head of security and proceeded to profanely ream him for getting into the landing zone. Tires squealed as the head of security realized he had caused serious offense (fortunately that being the worst of his potentially dangerous sins.)

So peeled out, zipped into a parking and...

Went back to his office and locked the door and stayed there until the end of his work day. Seriously.

One final story that just sums the guy up so perfectly.

He lived about sixty miles from the plant, so he had an hour-long drive to work. SO!

One morning he comes in and heads to his office. About an hour later he called one of the guards in to see him. Just as she enters, he's busy taking off his shoes.

"You'll never guess what I did!" says he.

"Uh huh," says she.

"I put my shoes on the wrong feet. This is what I get for dressing in the dark! I was wondering why my feet were hurting."

...

So basically he put his shoes on the wrong feet. Then drives around an hour without realizing it. Then goes to work. For another hour. Then he finally realizes he wrong-shoed himself.

Now... I've had occasion to tip a bottle or two, as most here know. I've gotten downright plastered as it happens. Woken up in strange beds and even the occasional strange alley.

And never once, as drunk as I've ever gotten, did I ever not realize when my shoes were going on the wrong feet.

The sad thing is that I'm sure there's a story or two that I've missed. The guy was the horn of plentystupidity.

* In fairness, we did have some weird coyote shit go on around the place over the years. We had one coyote that used to find ways into the LSA pad where we stored heavily containerized radioactive material. Now, there was no way the coyote could get into those- these were the high impact containers that you could wrap a car around without making a dent. However, that coyote did undoubtedly get a pretty good dose from all the time he spent in there. Then after we buried those cans, he started hanging around our PCB removal job. Poor damn thing would drink from probably-PCB contaminated runoff in order to mark our mining trucks that we used for disposal. Marking those trucks (tires taller than me) took a lot of water, so he'd start a piss run, stop and refill, then start pissing again.

Also the facility next door sent us a bulletin that they'd had two people bitten by coyotes in the past year. Now growing up in coyote country, it's like unheard of for people to get attacked by non-rabid coyotes. Coypups, sure, but not coyotes. Near as we can figure, the various out-of-state imports that place was covered under with were probably feeding the coyotes and then cornered them to try to 'tame' them or something similarly stupid. That was our best guess, anyway.

** The ER popped her kneecap back on with an aircuff, gave her painkillers and sent her home. She clocked as work from home the next day so we didn't record a lost-time accident and the bigwigs had a lot of fun trying to generate a lessons-learned sort of thing from how to avoid blowing your kneecap off while dragging a chair. She made a full recovery and was walking fine inside of a couple of months or so, as I recall.

[Josh]

Funny note about the ERT: the whole time I was there I was never on it and never tried to be. I honestly have no idea why I wasn't on it when I was in safety, but both I and the second in command were never put on there by our boss, who just handled the safety end. I have my suspicions about why that was that I won't discuss here.

But it was always funny that during an evac drill the two of us would just head right down out of the gate with everyone else. Whenever somebody would ask about that, I'd point out that by the time the plant was exploding, safety's work was pretty much done and so we would be better off checking the job listings on Monster on our cell phones.

Edit: I also knew at least two guys who were on it who bribed the EMTs to show them as having high blood pressure during any drill so they wouldn't have to suit up. That was among the many jokes of the ERT when I first got there that I hope the later ERT boss (who was actually the most competent ops director the place has ever seen and a damn good man) fixed.

[frigidmagi]

Whenever somebody would ask about that, I'd point out that by the time the plant was exploding, safety's work was pretty much done and so we would be better off checking the job listings on Monster on our cell phones.

Okay... I laughed.

[Josh]

Ran into one of my old crew buddies from back when, got me remembering some things so I decided to drop them in here.

Even if you don't always get along with a guy, you bond with people in shit like that. Folks who've done anything dangerous get what I mean, it's that thing you get when you stick your face in the fire with a guy.

Or in our case a drum with hexfluoric acid. It was a small job, a simple disposal process for some byproduct from the environmental department.

Environmental used a fluid called optimer for whatever strange testing and incantations when they were out in the field. Our brief on the stuff was that it was pretty much harmless, but it still constituted a waste stream that we had to dispose of in our landfill, and reg was that we could not dispose of free liquids in the pit. Everything had to be solidified, with liquids we typically used portland cement or fly ash for the job. The problem with optimer was that the stuff was by design completely nonreactive with most anything, which meant that to dry it up with fly ash meant dumping a hugely disproportionate amount of fly ash onto it, and shit costs money yo.

So the lab geeks got the bright idea of taking something that reacts with almost nothing (optimer) and blending it with something that reacts with almost everything (hexafluoric acid.)

So this dude and I were on the disposal detail, which involved taking a half-full drum of optimer and blending the acid in using a mixing tool running off shop air. During the brief, our ever-perky R&D chemist is walking us through the mixing process and she gets to the money part.

"Then you'll blend in the acid, and we hope it will react with the optimer to crystallize it."

Okay, when you're sticking your face over a drum of reagents, 'hope' is a four letter word when it comes from the mouth of your lab geeks. So we're all like "Um. Have you tested this?"

"Small scale!"

So yes, we were the working quantity test. We were even more studious with our plastic suits on that outing.

The results? Not quite what they were hoping. We introduced the acid, stuck the mixer in, and fired it up. The acid did indeed crystallize the optimer, but almost immediately before it had an opportunity to blend. So instead of dispersing the acid through the mixture, we ended up with this rubbery glob on our mixer that bogged it down and eventually overwhelmed the shop air's ability to spin it. So... plan B from the lab: pour portland cement into the drum.

Which promptly sank to the bottom and formed a gooey lump and threatened to overflow the drum and also resisted all attempts at mixing.

So we broke for lunch, came back, and handled it the old fashioned way: dumped it in the mixing pan, dumped a ton or three of flyash on it and gobbed it around with the excavator until it was good to pass the paint filter test that all waste streams had to pass before going into the landfill.

Then there was the early run on the GE fiasco, a story I really need to tell in more detail at some point. To make a long, long story very short, GE was doing a superfund cleanup on the Hudson river to dredge out all the PCBs they dumped in there back in the day, while fighting all the way through to try to come up with a cheaper method or avoid doing it altogether. Failing at that, they were going to ship the waste to us to bury.

The whole thing was a massive cocking mess end to end, but this is the start of where things went awry on the ground. Our initial disposal plan involved getting a gondola tipper (gondolas being train cars loaded with sealed packages of waste) that would snatch one car at a time, tip it over, and dump the hundred tons of waste down a chute into a hundred ton mining truck.


Like one of these bad boys, except I'm kind of jealous because ours didn't have that super-handy stairway on the grill. Could've used that when I was climbing up one truck after another to inspect the fire extinguishers.

Anyway, so we bought the tipper off this company that bought a defunct fertilizer outfit in Oregon, who broke it down into parts and shipped it down to us via rail and truck. I was working STAB crew at the time and since we were kicking loose when it arrived (and had the plant's sole qualified crane operator at the time) we got tasked on the unload. This was a big mother, particularly the two counterweights that came by train. One counterweight was like 48,000 pounds, the other was 52,000, and they were somewhere around forty foot in length. So we put the crane in, put crew in the gondola, rig up, and start bringing the lighter counterweight out. I'm standing on the bed of a flatbed trailer running the tag line to guide the big mother when it clears the gondola, but it doesn't quite make it that far. It got about two foot up and slipped the shackles on the rig, slopping back down into gondola. Rigging fuckup.

When 48,000 lbs comes down, it makes a noise. And even standing outside on the trailer bed the ground shock threw me up in the air. Not bad, maybe six inches or so and I came down clean, but when I came back down I was sure that both our guys in the gondola were dead. I'm coming off the end of the trailer to survey the damage when I heard one of them laugh (the guy I ran into at dinner tonight), then the other one (our supervisor) sticks his head out and gave the big white grin he was known for (dude had impeccable dental hygiene and a big smile.)

That was the most dramatic part of the unload, thankfully, and we load all that shit and roll it across the back way to the eventual planned site for the dump-off zone.

Then it sat there. Far as I know, it's still sitting there. When the company that took over the fertilizer plant broke it down to ship, they just took the torches to it to make it fit into the train cars.

So... yeah. Once it arrived, the assembly contractors took one look, told us it had been chopped to pieces and there was no way in everloving hell they'd ever tack it back together and certify it as safe to use. So something like twenty million down and more importantly to me we nearly killed two members of our crew for a turkey piece of shit that's probably still rusting on the back lots out there.

That was just the start of the fuckups on GE, but that's a whole series of stories to tell there. Chief Bob, the old salt that is in the pics thread, was fond of saying that 'engineer' was also a four-letter word, and GE vindicated his views quite nicely.

[Josh]

Also before I moved to safety I was initially tabbed to drive one of the Komatsus. Given the clusterfuck that ensued with those things I'm so glad I missed out on that.