But there was trouble now up on the top head of the reactor.  The very young engineer Harry Yip was complaining to Stellar, Miklush, and the rest of us that he was having trouble pulling down a vacuum on the low temperature adsorber [don’t look this up -- it’s spelled right] or as everybody else called it; the LTA. 

“How long have you been pulling down, Harry?”

“About three days.”

Harry had vacuum pumps attached to a machine that wasn’t more than 125 cubic feet in volume and he wasn’t getting anything near a vacuum after three days.  The low temperature adsorber is part of the helium purification train and is a necessary item for plant operation.  It really looked like there might be a hole somewhere in the LTA.  We needed to extract the long, cylindrical LTA from it’s liar within the prestressed concrete reactor vessel and, subsequent to the morning meeting, a number of intelligent persons from the engineering division back in San Diego worked out a couple of ways to do it.  One of the suggestions coming up the next morning was to use a three foot wide device that would look like an inside caliper to secure the outer shell of the LTA at several points and then use the overhead reactor building crane and a dynamometer [a scale] to measure the lifting effort of the crane.

GA mechanical engineer John Lake was up on the top head that very evening and all of the solutions sounded too complicated, expensive and time consuming to him.  He and a couple of crafts personnel measured the outer shell diameter of the LTA and its liner and found that it matched up pretty well with the wheels on one of the cars parked in the parking lot; a Corvair.  Lake and craftsmen took the tire up to the top head, deflated it, attached it to the reactor building crane, placed the tire in the PCRV orifice for the LTA within the outer shell, and extracted the entire unit within a few minuets.

George Block was the GA engineer in charge of plant testing at the site and George Colgan was the engineer in charge of operations.  The two Georges were up in arms about this entire affair since procedures were not written, there was no OK from San Diego, there was no sign-off from PSCCo, and there was no NRC notification to ask if such a procedure was alright.  Crnich overruled them bellowing out that “somebody got some kinda’ ’ problem with this?  We got the  thing out, didn’t we?  End of any visible argument from the two Georges.

Block and Colgan were what anyone would call real nuclear types.  George Block from the commercial/government side and George Colgan from the United States Navy.  I would learn to rely and listen carefully to both of these men.

But right now we had a real problem on our hands or, in a literal sense, hanging from the building crane.  The LTA was crushed and there wasn’t a spare one back in Sorrento Valley like there was for .  I got out of that morning meeting and immediately went down to see Jim Reader and Dick Dawes at Stearns-Roger.  I told Jim and Dick that we had to separate and segregate the costs associated with the LTA and document all charges associated with the extraction and eventual shipping to Sorrento Valley.  I then called Jeff Rigsby and asked him if he could set up charge numbers for the coming fix on the LTA.  All parties agreed enthusiastically and we were well on our way to making our first claim for a mechanical engineering accident to our industrial all-risk builder’s insurance carrier – the H. K. Ferguson Company.

I knew something about this from my subcontract audit work back at Raytheon.  GA was carrying a builder’s risk insurance policy for major accidents involving major items of equipment and the low temperature adsorber accident fit the language in the insurance policy almost exactly.  It was an accident since an improper valve lineup was done before Harry started pulling down with the vacuum pumps which caused the LTA to be crushed.  The valve lineup was prepped by Werner Astl on graveyard shift.  Werner had been associated with too many accidents and mishaps which wound up costing too much money and time.  Werner was a favorite of Crnich and a friend to all, but nothing could save him now.  He was sent back rather unceremoniously to the San Diego offices and we never saw him again. 

On an airplane not too far behind Werner’s was the LTA on its way to San Diego for repair.  I also hopped on a plane to assure all cost collection tools, documentation, and charge numbers were in place which was redundant because Bill Weber, Bill Davidson, and Jeff Rigsby had already done a good job at doing all of that.  By the time the repair and reinstallation was complete we had collected close to $425,000 and the H. K. Ferguson people offered us up an offer of just over $100k; basing their decision on the contractual language ‘replacement cost(s) in kind’ which brought their exposure down quite a bit.  After a little administrative hand-waving; GA’s legal representative Dick Yale said to “take that check out of their hands – and CASH it” meaning to get the money in a Gulf account as soon as possible.  Ultimately, the H. K. Ferguson check was hand-carried to San Diego by me and given to one of the controller John Framel’s senior managers, Dean Enterline for deposit and booking to the correct GA account.  The foregoing illustrates an important principle in gambling – make sure you pick up the chips that people put in front of you and argue about the rules of the game later.  It also underlines Bill Weber’s old axiom for keeping cash and costing segregated and separated from what we would call normal plant budget items.  Such things lend themselves better to explanation in latter years.  I could have really used the money from the transaction for a number of the things going on out there – but I would be making myself a cost center and a separate area of responsibility, not to mention severely muddying the waters regarding my own transactions. 

“b” circulator was being buttoned up and it snowed asbestos down there from all of the insulation work in the area we called the “bottom head” which was where the four circulator penetrations and the bottom access penetrations were.  To access this area one had to take the catwalks down to the basement and climb back up inside the bottom head on a thirty foot steel ladder and then jump between the hot and cold reheat steam pipes which were angling out horizontal to the bottom face of the PCRV.  The place still had a closed-in, nightmarish feel with lots of temporary lighting, dust, people crawling over one another, and the sounds of machinery winning and roaring giving one the impression that this could easily be an added scene to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.”

I had grown comfortable with the plant by now and I was giving tours to visiting dignitaries; we were loading fuel and it seemed we were on the last lap of a long race.  John Crnich’s job was completed and he was leaving for San Diego for good and QA manager Dick Ayres would take his place as our new project manager.  John Crnich, Bill Budge, George Brown and I plus all of our associated ladies went over to Central City to dance and celebrate for half the night.  Crnich and my ex were particularly good dancers and it was fun for the rest of us to watch them in this old western bar setting.  Right above the bar was a no-nonsense notice for all patrons to be so kind as to “CHECK YOUR WEPONS AT THE BAR” which gave one a start when walking in to the place for the first time.   

Those GA managers are what one might refer to as “complicated heroes” – the twentieth century is literally full of complicated heroes.  Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles A. Lindberg, Douglas Macarthur, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton are all twentieth century complicated heroes.  John, Bill, and George were all from one of the GA  competitors called the General Electric Company and they brought their life-long construction and startup experience with them.  The shape and priorities of the startup program was largely their doing and they were not alone.  GA had quite a number of personnel from the larger reactor and/or component companies which was no surprise for a young rising star on the commercial horizon.  True, GA had invented [or almost invented] the better mousetrap with its thirty-nine percent thermal efficiency rating which was higher than any pressurized or boiling water reactor by a number of percentage points.  Just about all of us showed no doubt about the theory of increased production efficiency with the HTGR type of machine.  It was rumored heavily that subsequent to turbine roll and commercial operation at Fort St. Vrain; GA would start in on a Naderesque campaign [remember, it’s the ‘70s] against the competition.  From then looking forward we had the world by the tail and it was us on the frontier of a new technology [whew].  Understandably, the focus was now on running the Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Generating Station or all would be lost. 

Dick Ayres was a much more low key type of fellow and was real appreciative of good work on all of our parts.  Dick haled from aerospace [Aerojet General] so we had a similar background in management and administration philosophy.  When Crnich left for good I received orders to keep his new LTD and the White Tornado was back to being a full time Boulder pool car under the stewardship of startup engineer Dave Miklush. 

The daily updated punch list served as an inspiration for me to create the Fort St. Vrain Financial Action Items Punch List which all things pending were listed out with an explanation of their status and date of completion.  The crude hands-on financial systems I had devised were actually working rather smoothly and we had hired a local clerical person named Andy [who actually reported to Steve Stapleton] to handle the high volume of expense report approval and payments all subject to my periodic audit about once or twice a week.  It was fitting that some of the repetitive tasks be spread out since I was slowly and deliberately creating new hands-on management systems which ultimately gave senior personnel and auditors more visibility and accountability.  I kept on inventing these little systems and procedures and going on to the next problem area.     

Another Convair financial management training program person like myself was hired who would become one of the chief accountants and eventually comptroller.  I remember that John Driscoll was always helpful in explaining some rather difficult accounting practices and procedures in a very straightforward and simplified manner.  I never told him directly, but John’s explanation of the operation of accrual accounts and their effect on current month total costs was the subject of an engineering review meeting at the site where I conveyed this to the technical personnel using the blackboard.  Many of the engineers expressed a keen interest into how the money was being counted and how we were being scored by the people back home in San Diego and they inadvertently became experts in the booking of accruals.  

The petty cash account now had a value of twenty thousand dollars and Pittsburg changed my signing authority to five million dollars so I could sign off on invoices.  I could also authorize the opening of any purchase order or modification for $2 million.  Comptroller John Framel declared in an open meeting on the squawker that I was one of his “division controllers” which amounted to quite a promotion – without any paperwork or any money.  

I was still getting negative responses from San Diego.  I put in for some GA business cards to be printed with my name and “Financial Representative” for job title and my number out in Platteville and down in Boulder.  Undisclosed people in the San Diego office tried to block the printing of my cards stating that I didn’t need anything like that.  Like most everything else, we just found a local vendor and cut a purchase order to print those and other cards up at the Fort.  It seemed that some of the people in San Diego had nothing better to do. “CS games are all they’re good at, Jag  .  .  .”  Quipped one FSV startup engineer.

We certainly had problems getting personnel from San Diego up there to work.  Everyone was working furiously on what was known as the reference design or Standard Plant HTGR – which is management-ese for future business.  One person from the Bechtel Corporation told me that what you want are workers who are primarily motivated by money.  The one’s who are motivated by place of work [like La Jolla] are basically through being motivated once you move them there.  That person was right because most of the GA personnel wanted nothing more than to stay right there in America’s Favorite City and not become involved in some far-off adventure up in remote and inhospitable Colorado.  We often referred to the San Diego personnel as the “Invaders” which was in direct reference to a then-popular television show about space aliens who had to be “recharged” in order to stay on their present assignment on earth – the San Diego people many times wanting to take the first plane out.

Up at the Fort, these were easy days, though.  It seemed as though startup was assured once hot physics testing was completed and now that fuel had been loaded successfully.  In one of the Boulder carpools, we were riding to work with chemical engineer Tommy Stellar along the South Platte looking at the birds.  Tommy is a bird watcher and, all in all, we counted about seventeen species of ducks right on that one stretch of the South Platte never thinking once that we were acting in a bizarre fashion.  I remember thinking that to predict that I would be bird watching on the South Platte River would have been a real stretch back when I was in college.  The area here is known as the “Bob Persons gun club” – Persons being the then president of PSCCo.  The privately held land behind the plant was rich in all species of duck and one could shoot one’s limit in a very short period of time.

Ronny Fawcet, Paul Turmane, and Bobby Tatum, construction managers all, had also left --leaving another young person, William R. Gould, Jr. to complete the dwindling number of action items on the FSV punch list.  There were opportunities elsewhere in the industry now.  Paul was traveling up to northeast Colorado where they were building a set of twin 440’s [coal fired stations, like most of the west] way up in Craig, Colorado where we heard that there were only two seasons: winter and the fourth of July.  Bobby Tatum and his gal Dale were headed for the next big job at the EBASCO Services corporate offices in Manhattan where they would be able to rent an apartment large enough for their beds and their bikes. 

It’s hard to convey in any sort of proper and adequate fashion to anyone now, but the power industry was really booming in this the early nineteen seventies.  The resources actually did not exist to fill the resource plans of the electric utilities out there and nuclear power was a sure thing that was here to stay.  The load growth forecasts for practically all utility entity decision makers were indicating growth patterns of ten percent per annum onward to infinity; analogues to the internet and telecom growth forecasts which would mislead almost everyone at the end of the twentieth century.  We all felt by now that barring any major professional gaff we would all have careers past retirement age – which was the exact opposite of what was happening in the aerospace industry. 

It’s no secret that guns of all types are a part of life in this part of the world.  The new construction manager Bill Gould asked me along for some lunch time trap shooting with the rest of the guys.  The fellows would go grab a quick bite to go and go to one of the many secluded areas along the South Platte for shooting at clay targets lofted into the air by a launching device as though they were small frisbees.  We were allowed twenty launches where each of us would try to “powder” the clay pigeon and were scored accordingly.  I became a good sixteen shooter, never being able to match the more accurate marksmen such as my good friend Bill.  This was completely new to me since my family never had any guns at home and that night I was over to Crossroads Center in Boulder to buy some more boxes of twelve gauge trap load [as opposed to field load] shotgun shells.  Many of the shotgunners did their own reloads at home and were eager to pick up all of my empty shells, and I would give them a hand.  Bill Gould did reloads which were peculiar to him – having more recoil kick than the biggest field load ammo and I remember getting black and blue marks on my left shoulder as a result of the recoil snap from squeezing off “Gould Rounds.”

Carol Gould and the kids went down from their little house in Longmont to visit my ex-wife Judy at the University of Colorado lunchroom and those two women became fast friends.  Everybody was really happy to have Carol and the little ones there and they all seemed to fit right in the university atmosphere.  Bill and I were real happy about this since we were now working a lot together on a number of action items and the prospects of some social life away from the plant with our respective families proved to be of good value.  Systems engineer Dave Miklush and wife-to-be Cathy were close friends also.  We would sometimes all go on picnics up to Estes Park or have dinner and one or another’s house and I’m happy to say that these have been friendships that has lasted for the last thirty years which originally came about because of that original encounter with an electrical generating station out there on the Colorado plains.  Like service people at a remote military base we tended to stay together for social activities which were many and often.

The whole bunch of us took up horseback riding and we would go out on Sunday mornings in the greenbelt around Boulder and wind up somewhere eating somewhere nice for Sunday brunch.  Dave’s wife Cathy and some of the others were by far the better riders since they had a lot of previous experience and Dave Miklush and I were just along for the ride.  The rolling hills of the greenbelt with the backdrop of the Flatiron Range were like something out of a 70 millimeter cinemascope movie and the colors of just about all of the seasons including winter were astounding.  This was the life, I was thinking, and the idea of permanent assignment to the Fort St. Vrain area was playing on my mind more and more.  The point here is, though, that lifetime relationships among these individuals and myself were established and we would communicate on many matters over the future years of our lives.

Like the Colorado weather though, things were about to dramatically change.  In the morning meeting it was reported by the shift supervisors that we couldn’t get actuation pressure on the bellows seal on b circulator.  This meant that the bellows was not extending and the seal between the circulator machine and the interior of the vessel could not be made.  It was a maddening fact that we had to get the “b” machine down in a hurry to in order to see what was happening.  The important part about this juncture in the story of Fort St. Vrain is that this was no accident or error in judgment; this was a bona fide engineering design problem which never should have been there to begin with.  This unpleasant fact did not hit us right away but the gravity of the situation hit me as much as anyone else since [by now] I was able to understand every technical word and expression in any of the meetings we had. 

One needs to at least partially understand the tremendously complicated nature of the helium circulators.  The helium circulator is designed to provide for the flow of helium from the reactor core to one of the two primary circuits or loops, as they are called, thus transferring the heat from the reactor fuel elements to the shell side of the steam generators.  The four circulators at Fort St. Vrain are steam driven from 100 per cent of the cold reheat steam modulated by the four circulator speed control valves with water drive backup from Pelton wheels which are located on the same shaft.  The ends of each circulator shaft are marked by a buffer area called a labyrinth seal, which is a complex toung-and-groove slotting in the material just like you would see on any steam turbine.   The shaft ends have a set of blades that are halfway between being a fan and a compressor – hence the name “circulator” which is a technically a more precise description since the delta pressure [difference in pressure in vs. pressure out] was relatively low. 

Engineers and physicists feared the possibility of an accidental incursion of lubricants into the reactor vessel so the circulators were designed to ride on a water bearing rather than the usual oil-based product that one sees in high-speed rotating machinery.  Water is also a smaller molecule than most oil-based lubricants so there’s a bit of a mechanical advantage there, too.  Bottom line, though, engineers and physicists were worried of a repeat of what happened at the EBOR site when the lubricants for the circulation system accidentally filled up the primary loop and got into the core.  All of this is why there is a complicated system of drains and separators for steam, water, and helium.  When the proper balance of variables was achieved, the circulator would “float” on the water bearing in a condition that came to be called “self-turbining” – the buffer helium system carrying away the water which would try to mix with the gas flow at one end of the shaft and the steam water separators carrying away the residuals at the other end. 

There was design and licensing pressure at the time to have the circs located within the primary pressure boundary along with the steam generators and other auxiliary plant equipment so that’s how the four machines wound up being located within the prestressed concrete reactor vessel.  Many people [even the Price Waterhouse accounting partners] wondered why such mechanically delicate machines were sealed far and away inside the concrete vessel.  This thinking comes from the original idea of avoiding the cost of a containment building by stating that the primary boundary for the nuclear fuel was the fuel kernel itself, the secondary was the each graphite fuel element, and the third was the pressure boundary within the PCRV liner.  That idea gained acceptance back in 1965 when partial funding was obtained from the then AEC to build and license Fort St. Vrain without a containment building around the nuclear stuff (?) but, as was seen later, all future orders unambiguously included a vessel for containment in the proposal.  The Fulton Nuclear Generating Station for Philadelphia Electric, the Vidal Nuclear Generating Station for Southern California Edison, and the single 770 MWe plant for Delmarva all had modern reactor plant containment buildings just like the PWR’s.

Anyway, back to the circulators.  The brake and seal system consisted of 1) a helium actuated plunger type brake and, 2) a bellows seal which would seal the circulator from the rest of the reactor vessel and 3) all associated nuclear-class pipe, valves and fittings.  The piping & instrumentation diagrams of the helium circulators located on the site stick files were very complicated and only the one engineer Irv Mayer, who had been with the machines since the test tower days, really knew where everything really was. 

When one of the new engineers pulled the P&I diagram for the helium circs, literal amazement and instantaneous humility could be seen in the face of the uninitiated individual.  It was as if never had anyone anywhere seen such a complex diagram of lines, drains, check valves, throttle valves, strainers, separators, seals, bypass and isolation systems, gauges and other measurement devices, and a mountain of miscellaneous hardware for every imaginable mechanical engineering purpose.  Never in anyone’s experience had anything like this been seen before; not in engineering school, not in experimental reactors, not in nuclear submarines, not in a complicated process factory [i.e., a dogfood plant], and not in any other commercial nuclear power station on the face of the planet.

After a couple days of cutting and hacking, we brought down b circ on the Rucker Unit.  The Rucker Unit was a high-powered hydraulic ram device which could be positioned in any quadrant of the basement for the installation and/or removal of major plant equipment.  My friend from the little town of Frederick, Dennis the operator, would stand inside the Rucker Unit and operate the beast on direction from others, much as one would do with a crane.  The first ten times that I visited the “bottom head” of the reactor vessel I thought that the hydraulic device was a fixed piece of plant equipment: much like one of the boiler feed pumps.  I was surprised to find out that the thing was articulated and actually moved in many directions and was the focus of activity as the primary tool for working on large pieces of equipment in the bottom head area. 

When we had problems with the Rucker Unit and the plant hydraulic power system we went to an engineer named Will Childs.  Will is one of those engineers who, although small in stature and soft spoken in tone, everyone in the room listens to.  It was really amazing when Will would sit down in the engineering bull-pen and just begin to talk.  All working papers would be briskly put aside, all telephones would be quickly hung up, all conversations would cease, and all technical heads would turn to listen to this one knowledgeable man talking.  This engineer never once made claim to being any sort of expert, never made mention that he knew probably than the whole collective of FSV experience on the subject, never got into an argument; he just talked an all would listen.

Anyway, b circ was down and folks back at GA’s Sorrento Valley facility wanted to inspect and evaluate the bellows on the helium wheel end.  It turned out that the metal bellows had become de-formed and axial cracking had resulted in a materials failure in the form of a slit opening along one of the volutes where all of the helium was leaking through.  The Sorrento Valley people would disassemble the circulator [which looked to be about the size and form of a jet engine] and form a further evaluation on the bellows seal and other mechanical components as well.  Meanwhile, back at the Fort, copious quantities of water were pouring out of the penetration which once was the home of b circulator at a rate of over 20 gallons per minute. 

A number of us went down to the basement, crawled up the catwalk ladder, and made the transition over, around and through the cold reheat steam pipes to the circulator maintenance deck; the scene made all the more ethereal by the view down almost four stories through the rather transparent power plant grating.  I remember thinking that I used to be afraid of heights but there wasn’t time for that now.  Bill Gould and I hung from two of the reheat lines while trying to look up for the source of the cascading water, obviously coming from the reactor internals.  Tommy Stellar acrobatically hung him self out by one arm and got a 500 milliliter flask under the stream of water for chemical analysis.  He later said that this can’t be correct since all of the metal in the liner and penetrations was indeed mild steel which would undoubtedly suffer the effects of corrosion which could have untold consequences.

Plant manager Fritz Swart’s office at PSCCo was a swarm of engineers and one financial person.  One conclusion voiced early was that the water must be from the PCRV cooling system since there was no presence of the chemical hydrazine in the collected samples and that was a normal additive to the helium circulator bearing water makup.  Hydrazine always acts as an oxygen scavenger in closed systems.  Knowing a little something about chemistry, Fritz yelled that all of the [*#*] hydrazine would be GONE after the first few seconds of exposure to ambient atmosphere so the bearing water was still probably the cause and culprit.  He was right.  The seals which were intended to stop this from happening weren’t working properly and bearing water was going into the reactor internals.  How many times had this happened when no one knew because the liner was sealed? – no one yet knows today. 

But what was even worse was in photographs the Valley made of the Curvic coupling where the Pelton wheels were mated to the main shaft.  “Insipient cracking” was present indicating a materials situation with the existing Pelton wheels.  All of these problems were of a basic engineering nature calling into examination all of the previous research and testing.  The highlighted photograph of the Curvic coupling at a depressed angle showed the cracks as gleaming fissures indicating materials failure in a primary article of safety equipment.  The reactor could not be cooled in the case of loss of reheat steam combined with the loss of the Pelton wheels. 

What’s more; the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission was on board and looking at these same photos.  Making things even more noticeable than they already were, GA San Diego presented a paper called “Insipient Cracking in Pelton Wheel Curvic Couplings” to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.  Now everyone in the known Western world knew that we had “insipient management problems” at GA.  The doctors are sitting around a large table talking about the rather remarkable condition of their common patient who is suffering a number of ills – all that the can remark on is “how very interesting this all is” as they prepare their papers for the next AMA conference.  Meanwhile, the patient is dying.

Since those days I’ve often compared and contrasted other organizations’ response to specific technical problem.  At both utility organizations and in the aircraft industry I’ve noticed and inherent longing to talk about and solve technical problems.  Not so in other industries like the automotive industry – seems like one or two of the American  auto manufacturing  people can’t get enough shoe leather between themselves and the latest outrageous and costly problem created by one or more of their stable of denizens.  The guys taking a close look at the Pelton wheel Curvic couplings were only trying to be better engineers and scientists and to help our understanding of the situation.  The nuclear industry certainly doesn’t need some kind of a representative from one of the courageous domestic automobile producers telling them to not look at things because of the potential product liability.     

The leaky seals, cracked Curvic couplings and other circulator woes caused the unanimous decision to be made to extract the rest of the circulators and change out the troublesome items with other re-manufactured components hopefully better suited to the task of running in the plant for a number of years.  For the first 1974 circulator change-out; Bill Gould, construction manager for GA and his immediate staff would be in charge.  This would be a big order for twenty-eight year young Bill but he had some excellent assistance.  Brian Tarrent was an immigrant from England who was a master machinist and welder in his quite vast previous experience.  Brian once offered to fabricate a bicycle frame for me from the various exotic materials that he had at his home – an idea that I never took him up on and probably should have.  Also on the team was Dick Evilsizor who was of similar experience quality.  Dick was one of the company divers who pulled the pilot of the Convair XF2Y-1 Sea Dart out of the cockpit after the airplane exploded and crashed into San Diego bay back in 1954.  No construction team can be complete without a scheduler so Mike Manion was sent up from San Diego; actually flying up to the site in his Piper Tri-Pacer.  Mike was to scheduling what a fellow named Disney was to cartooning.  

It was with a strong team in place that the first a, b, c, and d circulator change out began and was carried through.  Detailed shift by shift scheduling and coordination with specific craft labor elements such as pipefitters, millwrights, insulators, as well as carpenters, electricians, and laborers acted to prevent the usual interferences and jurisdiction problems and kept the critical path in a controllable position.  By the second week in, it was clear to everyone at Fort St. Vrain and to the management at the GA offices in San Diego that the circulator change out effort was going so well that indeed other off-site tasks may well become the critical items.  Bill Gould and all the aforementioned others on the new construction team were more in contact with the day to day efforts and problems that the craft were themselves experiencing and were thusly able to direct and control the work with focus placed on the proper areas. 

I have found over the years that there usually is a palatable resistance on the part of construction management to be involved with the direct supervision of labor forces.  Management wishes to be separated by many degrees from the workers by office doors, complicated organization charts, and even physical distance; if possible.  The way to success is often through the sometimes clumsy and complicated art of communication.  For those who are looking for pointers on how to handle a segment of a construction/mechanical repair job on a large scale – dig up the records and find out exactly what these aforementioned intelligent personnel did to achieve a three week turnaround on what could easily be estimated to be a three to six month job.

Traveling to Fort St. Vrain

Part 4