There was a concrete batch plant located on the property just south of the switchyard to which had been sold to another division of Gulf for their upcoming mining work just down in the southwest portion of Colorado.  It was to be their responsibility to remove the plant in its entirety which was something that GA was obligated to do anyway.  This was something of a good deal for the Fort St. Vrain Project since EBASCO Services’ bid for the removal of the same was over a million dollars and the Stearns-Roger bid for the same scope was about two-thirds that.  GA had to remove the thing, too, since it was such an eyesore on the horizon and the removal effort was part of some contractual obligation, according to some sources.  Anyway it was it would be my job to supervise the removal of that batch plant and to get the previously agreed to forty large from Gulf Dravo.

We had two construction organizations at the Fort St. Vrain site, the both of which I knew absolutely nothing about.  EBASCO Services Incorporated operated out of Manhattan Island in New York and Stearns-Roger Construction Corporation operated out of Denver.  EBASCO actually stands for Equipment Bond And Surety Company and they are an old-line utility plant engineering & construction organization like Stone & Webster.  They were responsible for the original construction of the plant.  The photo in the Nuclear Engineering International add showing Fort St. Vrain being completed in record time in 1968 was partly PR from EBASCO – what they’re really saying is that it was only thirty-six months from groundbreaking to completion of what they called “major construction.”  Louisiana born Bobby Tatum was the very capable local manager for construction for EBASCO who looked as though he came out of Central Casting in Hollywood for the part of some skipper of a schooner plying the South Seas. 

Stearns-Roger was our local construction organization who had all of the labor agreements with the various construction crafts on the northern Colorado plains.  It was their task to provide the labor and construction services, GA authorized materials, and tooling needed to complete the plant.  A rather thorough, thoughtful, tall and lanky man from Farmington, West Virginia by the name of Jim Read was the site manager for Stearns-Roger.  Jim understood a whole lot about labor relations between the site and the craft and was responsible for the project not having more labor problems than it did. 

Our GA engineering people were not as gifted or sensitive: one young nameless GA engineer yelling over the GaiTronics that everyone had better get off their backsides or serious consequences would be in the offing--- [original quote not shown].  A bunch of us had to smuggle that insensitive individual off site lying down in the back of a pickup truck so the craft would not extricate immediate and violent revenge. 

Even as it was, the craft expressed their dismay by walking out for the day—sprinting toward the gate with their lunchboxes at breakneck speed eight abreast, and subsequently roaring down the access road four abreast in their cars on both sides of the road in a gigantic cloud of smoke.  The ever-present threat of physical violence and unauthorized labor action loomed over the site like a dark cloud.  Walkouts would occur over apparently minor grievances and fights among the craft personnel were almost a daily action. 

Our physical progress on Fort St. Vrain was actually accomplished by craft personnel.  For most large construction jobs, hiring of the craft trades is done out of the local union hall for electricians, carpenters, boilermakers, pipefitters, and the like.  The construction craft union personnel all wore red hard hats with the exception of their supervision who daily donned white versions of the same hats.  With craft numbering in the three to five hundred range of personnel levels, the construction trades were a significant part of the job and, consequently, the weekly costs.  The trades are extremely sensitive about what is their work – the combination of components, structures and systems believed to be their own territory.  That is, setting up scaffolding is pretty clearly carpenter work and working on a boiler feed pump probably belongs to the millwrights.  One simple act like meting out tasks for the morning or for the week for crews of craft could wind you up in a real-live labor dispute, the costs of which would be a walkout for one or two days.  The dispute would be resolved by negotiators from Stearns-Roger; who’s labor/management skills far exceeded GA’s area of expertise.  S-R’s Jim Read probably made his weight in gold in stopping, slowing down, and/or negotiating GA out of costly walkouts.    

The other union personnel were the Public Service Company of Colorado maintenance and operations people who belonged to a the utility-based organization.  Work rules were not as much of a problem with these people who had come from all over Public Service’s power system in Colorado.  In many cases, the PSCCo people seemed more familiar with the situarion(s) than any of the GA people, including above all; myself.

Since the reactor hot flow testing was now completed, the original contractor EBASCO Services was being phased out of the picture and would not be around much longer.  If one is ever in a position to ask, it’s a good thing to find out why major contractor-constructors were selected in the first place and by whom.

The Sargent & Lundy Engineering Corporation out of Chicago was the engineer of record on the plant.  S&L had done some prestressed concrete work and had also had some experience with the freeze wall technique that we used in the original excavation and site preparation.  During those times, GA was fighting the high water table from the South Platte and no amount of de-watering was enough.  The surrounding dirt was therefore frozen with a system of liquid nitrogen tubing in order to excavate the some one hundred feet in depth needed.  Subsequent to the placement of concrete foundations and vaults in those lower regions, the freeze wall was removed and the residual flooding was to be handled by sump pumps.  The S&L people in Chicago considered themselves essentially out of the picture with the completion of the augmented bypass flash tanks located up near the plant’s refueling floor.  They’re responsibility, after all, was for the non-nuclear balance of plant which, in their opinion, was essentially completed.

This would be the first job in which I would be dealing directly with labor forces from the various unions and it all proved to be very enlightening since dealing with field forces is a whole lot different than working around any office.  It is also different from the many housing construction jobs that I was able to assist my dad on back in the late fifties and early sixties since many more craft skills were represented here. 

There’s a real cultural difference between those that actually do the work and those GA personnel like me over at the shantytown.  Most of us had never met people like these before.  Many chewed tobacco or used snuff or smoked some kind of awful cigars.  Most of us had been to some college and had generally led a life separate from anyone even resembling what we referred to as “those people.”  One had to learn how to earnestly communicate in a language that could be easily understood by the craft guys without being demeaning.  Some of the things that I would do that would help would be to hang out with them to eat lunch and talk about the subjects that they would talk about.  A California liberal stance on gun control or a stated political conservative position on labor will probably get you hurt around here. 

Locally it was believed that Crnich’s secretary had some kind of control of a petty cash account and checkbook that no one in San Diego seemed to know about.  I wanted to get to the bottom of whatever was out here in the form of local cash disbursements.  One of the more secret reasons for me going was the fact that Fort St. Vrain was leaking money and, unbelievably, no one really knew where it was going.  Oh, yeah; -- most   everybody knew the gross amount of bucks going into the program area and roughly what was being booked to the project, but these were very large numbers which did not lend themselves to explanation. 

GA’s controller John Framel told me that I was responsible for corporate cost reporting and budgeting for program area 197 which included the monthly financial comments, recommendations for accruals, revisions to budgets and cost forecasts, and detail analysis of overruns to whatever budget areas the costs were touching.  Everybody in other fields think that the accountants have things under control.  What we had up there was a situation where the numbers were flying everywhere from a whole lot of sources. 

Sometimes stuff was booked that had to be reversed out and a lot of costs were booked to the project that in my own statistician’s opinion had no business being there.  This was due to many factors: 1) the remote location of the project, 2) some early management confusion about exactly what costs were allowable, and 3) cost deliberately booked to get them out of the way for the new HTGR programs.  This wasn’t just some assumption of mine alone and the evidence could be seen from the lack thereof – gross totals with no details or explanation, nonsensical breakdowns of distributed costs from here and there, obfuscated cost categories which didn’t evenly match from time period to time period were much of what we were dealing with. 

To this day I do not know how much EBOR and Peach Bottom costs are actually in Fort St. Vrain.  From the time of my arrival, I decided to take the stance of one of my Atlas Weapon System project managers back at Convair:  nothing goes to the books unless it goes through me first.  Where and if the accountants had not been so particular, this statistician was going to be draconian.  Strangely, I was in a rather powerless but pretty much a kingbird position of being a gatekeeper of the current month costs going in.  As far as current month’s actual costing; the Project Manager and I were pretty much in control of what was charged to the job out in Colorado.    

I hadn’t been out in the plant much and didn’t know enough about the surroundings to assure that I wouldn’t become totally lost in the labyrinth of pumps, piping, catwalks, and components so my new office mate out in the trailer gave me a tour.  Many of the GA engineers had been through the plant countless times and were also, by now, giving me a lift to work each day.  Once past the main doors to the major equipment delivery side of the plant the picture changed from the Bullock’s Wilshire department store to what a power station really looks like. 

There were lines upon, over, around, and through other lines -- all insulated with asbestos and silver metal lagging connected to indescribable huge machines as big as a house.  The plant components were dressed incongruously in colors upon bright colors; seeming more from a child’s kindergarten playground than one would imagine in a nuclear industrial setting.  There is this thing that looks like a great big green house with large pipes coming in and out of it – that’s a condenser [??].  There are silver torpedoes all located in a row up in the mezzanine – those are all feedwater heaters [??].  There are huge out-of-world machines up on the refueling floor – those are the fuel handling machine and the aux transfer cask [ok].  You can lean over the railing and look straight down the equipment hatchway to the basement at level 4704 from the refueling floor at 4881 [eyow!].  The “levels” or floors in a power station represent levels above sea level.  An old hand at one of the costal stations explained to me that this system was originally for plant safety – knowing where you are with respect to sea level.  Sargent & Lundy just applied that same system to this plant which happened to be nearly fife thousand feet above sea level.

The craft construction labor – the redhats – were everywhere.  They were crawling all over the machinery with their tools and lunchboxes.  They would gather in the hallways near the elevators waiting, swearing, scratching, spitting, etc. while an elevator was coming.  The redhats’ mouths yawned open wide when the plant service elevator momentarily jolted with three foot jumps while slowing into position and for all the noise pollution I couldn’t tell if those craft personnel were openly cheering loudly or screaming for their lives. 

The din of high speed rotating machinery was constant with punctuation from large reports from unknown things going right and wrong.  I walked by one of the feedwater heater twenty-four inch diameter lines which was emitting the sound of medium sized boulders bouncing down right through it [“cavitation” said my GA scientist/engineer tour guide in a casual manner].  I could not help but think of what would happen to us if there were a power outage or some other type of emergency where we would have to find our way out quickly.  By the time we reached the basement and had climbed up near the helium circulator penetrations, I got the sinking feeling that I could never find my own way back to daylight even if my life depended on it.  Going up the vertical ladders and crawling across the hot & cold reheat piping to get to the base grating for the helium circulators was a real existential trip.  

We crawled from the small area of the helium circulator penetrations on up to the expansive and industrial-modern turbine deck which was a relief to the tour team since this was an attractive, large, open space area with a reassuring aura of outside light shining in. 

The GE steam turbine-generator topside was there, looking every bit like a huge grey whale and making a barely audible sound as the machine’s shaft on its turning gear motor [this would keep the large shaft from developing a bow or flat spots, we were told].  One felt that we were always going up or down stairways and catwalks; this space was shared with welding machines and other tooling necessary for the completion of the plant.  There was power-plant grating everywhere so one almost always had the vision of the next couple of floors down below the one you were walking on presently.  Large gaps in the grating were marked by yellow warning tape and orange safety ropes where some unknown piece of machinery was being worked on by an unknown crew.  

I admit to being significantly intimidated by that first experience since and it was only with trepidation that I put on my newly acquired hard hat the next day and ventured out there by myself with as much of a determined look as I could muster; clipboard in hand as though I were still a confident young aircraft estimator on the ramp at Lindberg Field.  I held my breath and went into the large plant service door looking, I thought, as out of place as a live chicken in a modern super market.  I still must say that for those first few ventures into the plant I was really scared – but after daily exposure I was able to climb to any catwalk, fit through any tunnel, and/or walk any [well, almost any] steel at Fort St. Vrain.  Much later, I would reflect on this time as I would walk the corridors and tight spots of other many other larger stations many miles west of here. 

The new boss John Crnich is a strong man though not large, a muscular man though not stout.  He has died jet-black hair and a persistent assortment of muscular ticks that keep him in constant motion as well as emitting various indescribable sounds.  It’s really not disconcerting once one gets over the initial prejudice that most of us have over people who have even slight tics in their communication skill sets.  I have a lot of muscular problems and tics myself, largely due to a traffic accident I had back in the sixties so I know what its like to have to live with this kind of stuff day in and day out.

Crnich has many of the qualities of my previous bosses such as a hair trigger temper, an almost permanent state of recalcitrance, a mercurial and volatile nature of a Caesar, and, at times; the petulance of a Navy officer who’s never been to sea.  Sadly, I am to find that these and other various aspects of Crnich’s behavior had a not so positive effect on some; including me right now.  Because now he grills me about the million dollar invoice from Stearns-Roger with questions from out of nowhere -- which are actually points well taken since he’s going to be the one to sign the document giving approval for ultimate payment by Accounts Payable way down in San Diego.  I’m at my wits end when I find myself by chance re-writing a short memo that Crnich was going to ultimately sign and give to Fred Swart over at PSCCo. 

That did it.  Crnich comes out to my trailer [he found me!].  I grimaced for more than a few seconds while he held the memo and paced up and down my little trailer and then said “. . . this is pretty good, Jag!” and then he just turned and stomped out into the cold.  I just sat still at my desk for forty-five minutes in one position.  Unknowingly, I’d just promoted myself to a new job as a ghost writer.  I’m deliberately being a little tough on John and his idiosyncratic behaviors but in the end I’m really saying that none of that matters when you’ve just been handed one of the grandest complements of your career one really feels the impact, especially over the years. 

John was good, I rationalized, because he knew what he wanted and had no fear about saying that something was of no use to the project.  I was still afraid about my future here and unsure of what was to happen.  Perhaps that is the way dramatic change becomes manifest in our own heads; even when we are resistant and wanting the security of the constancy of not taking any risks.  We are, after all, pretty dishonest to some extent.  Like Andy Rooney said in one of his books, we all want bosses to lie to us.  When I do something or write some piece that’s not very good, I actually want the boss to say “Oh . . . very good!” The aerospace musical chairs game that had played for so long was now far behind me and I realized that I had to get my feet on the ground in order to move anything forward.  

The very next day John grabbed me by my right shoulder while I was sneaking in to work from my back way through the cornfields.  I was heading for the snow shed passageway to my little trailer and John insisted that I sit in on a meeting with his staff.  I was once again amazed.  I had heard the other end of the famed “morning meetings” back at San Diego while walking down the hallway by Gene O’Rourke’s office and listening to the eerie hallway echo of his speaker-phone but I had never imagined that I would somehow be a participant. 

The morning meeting was an important interface for all disciplines and all were represented – each engineer queuing up to present plant problems, startup testing and so on.  The morning meeting always took place in the big conference room right next to Crnich’s office and was lined at least two-deep in personnel who all had at least a facsimile reason to be there.  At the other end of the squawker in San Diego was the unmistakable voice of Gene O’Rourke and almost always one or two interested GA personnel.  Conversations on our end were held to one technical subject matter at a time like “b circulator is self-turbining at 8,300 rpm, all of the rest are above ten thousand this morning, PCRV cooling water chemistry is 45 ppb total suspended solids, of the total number of system 91 hydraulic control valves, eight have been taken apart to inspect the poppets and seals, we gotta pull the Y-strainers on  .  .  .  .” and so on and so forth for about an hour.

I stopped taking notes suddenly when I was asked a direct question by Mr. O’Rourke , I  offered some rather guarded comments and gave oblique references to the 1973-4 budget and operating plan [just like I knew what I was talking about].  It was just after  this first meeting when just a few of the managers were left that I was asked to give some input to upcoming personnel actions for some of the individuals out there.  I was flabbergasted.  These private personnel decisions on people’s monthly salaries were made right there with me in the room.  I had at that time crossed some kind of career rubicon but I didn’t yet understand the full meaning or consequences. 

John and Dick Ayres [then site manager for quality assurance] asked if I would like to participate in tomorrow’s morning meeting.  I just swallowed hard and said yes.  The morning meeting, after all, was the kickoff or tailboard for each day at the site and the seats available in the small conference room were limited in number.  All of the attendees were technical types representing construction, engineering, control & instrumentation, operations, and now; finance & administration.  All of the day’s events, intended actions, and what they called “punch list items” were discussed with the San Diego management.  With the same confident action of the other engineering and construction professionals, I scooped up copies of the plant schedule and the punch list and put them on the wall of my little construction trailer – that schedule still showing the March 1974 commercial operation date for the Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Generating Station. 

I had some good company.  Doug Powell was hired on as one of the GA shift supervisors and we were office mates out there in the little construction trailer that had become my home.  Doug had a gold ring from his college which he called “The Academy” and had served as propulsion engineering officer on nuclear submarines.  This made us friends right away since I had worked on some undersea projects back at General Dynamics and Raytheon.  Powell gave me a good introduction to some of the engineering aspects of the plant: from the piping & instrumentation diagrams to the architectural drawings and actual hands-on experience out there.  I came back from the morning meeting one cold day excitedly telephoning San Diego with bad news about not being able to get helium flow through the hydrogen getters.  This was an essential element in the helium purification system that would severely slip the commercial operation date unless resolved.  After all, the way the plant ultimately works is the transfer of heat to the helium medium which is then transferred to the feedwater in the steam generators to make steam for the turbine. 

I was noticeably excited about all of this and Doug just told me to shut up and put down the telephone.  He said that getting stressed out about normal everyday mechanical difficulties would eventually drive me and the people around me crazy and that if there was a real problem with the getters, we would chip them out of the concrete they were in and rip them out for repair.  He backed up his words with another personally guided plant tour, pointing out just exactly how this would be accomplished if indeed this was the action needed.  I would carry this new view on with me to much larger facilities many years later and I’m forever grateful for learning the relative importance of things going wrong at this early stage of life.  More important for now, the hydrogen getter problems caused my involvement again as a ghost writer. 

I had a hand in drafting a memo to Fritz Swart over at PSCCo which partially outlined the engineering nature of the problem along with recommended actions on the site’s part.  I got to work with many of the best GA people on this action item.  The problem with the hydrogen getters not permitting proper flow had to do with design operating temperatures not being met by the current method used for heating the titanium sponge inside them.  After a couple of engineering fixes to heat the getter sponges to 700 plus degrees F, success was ours and normal flow was restored. 

Our only problem right then was the writing.  One needs to write about what’s there and the truth about what’s there.  I was talking to a high school class of young people just a couple of years ago and I told them that you don’t really have to ever write with all of the flair and elegance of many of the great writers.  You [and I] just have to be able to tell someone else who probably doesn’t know us from Adam what the heck happened here.  More than half of writing is being able to tell some one [on paper] where we are now, how we got here, and where we’re going.  If you’re good enough to talk and say all of those things, then you’re good enough to write.  A lot of my writing involves trial balloons of sentences and paragraphs which are edited up and down, back and forth.  Playwright Neil Simon always drafts his stuff on large 18 x 24” sheets of quadrille so he can stand back and “see the music.”  I never wrote a play but I have a feeling for what Mr. Simon is talking about.

I was riding to work with the same guys and it was through the carpooling that I met more and more of the engineers working on the plant.  Pete Peterson from engineering, Tommy Stellar from division chemistry, Charlie “Foxboro” [don’t know Charley’s real last name], Newt Wattis from Foster-Wheeler, Pierre Barber from Electricitie de France, and Dave Miklush, a mechanical engineer and former attendant at his dad’s service station who would eventually be on the management staff of the Diablo Canyon nuclear units on the California coast and an old friend.  The engineers were patient in explaining to me all of the intricacies, eccentricities, vagaries, etc. of the plant many of which, according to my later telephone conversations, were completely unknown to the people in San Diego.  I remember one of the San Diego auditors asking me why the plant had steam generators since a turbine generator was already present and a “whole lot of money” could be saved if we could eliminate the unnecessary mechanical apparatus (woe!).  If you’re at a certain level of knowledge – don’t bother to ask questions – they’ll probably just confirm that you don’t know enough to be asking the questions you’re asking.

Part of the landscape for the trip out to work in the mornings was the ever-present aroma in that section of the country.  Now only in the background instead of the screaming foreground, the smells of animal dung now took on different intensities and colors; and one now knew instinctively when to hold one’s breath and for how long.  Another cross-country unpleasentry peculiar to this part of the world was the almost constant presence of large truck-type vehicles hauling [you guessed it] some diabolical mixture of fresh hay and excrement – undoubtedly mined locally.  The trucks were loaded above the gunnels with the vile stuff which would fly off the beaten up carriers and splash on the windshield of whatever car was unlucky enough to be traveling behind.  Winter season only meant that the flying smelly debris would be frozen onto your car windshield and front facing areas to the dismay of anyone who had the delegated task of cleaning the unsanitary and revolting stuff off.  Many unsafe passes on the two-lane highway were attempted by irate drivers following these large and slow trucks on the highway between Longmont and Platteville. 

When queried about their language expanding experiences in America at in particular at the Fort St. Vrain Generating Station; the French, Germans, and Japanese all said that one expression they would take back home with them would be “sheet trok” [always followed by “Ha, ha; Ha, ha].”  One day all of the traffic from eastward was stalled on the account of an accident.   Some local farmer had tried to beat the little red lights at a railroad intersection and had lost out to the oncoming speeding train.  When the news reached the GA engineering block table that a railroad locomotive had taken out one of the local farm manure transfer trucks – it may sound cruel but everyone laughed.  It sometimes makes me wonder about the kind and character of stories that were brought back to foreign nations from this little place on the Colorado Plains.

Traveling to Fort St. Vrain

Part 2