Don't Tell Mom I Work In The Plants

The pike stared balefully at me. Through dying eyes he accused me of his inglorious demise, choking on mud and chemicals. I grunted, seized him ‘round the middle and with one deft whack I ended his life on the concrete wall of the pump house intake tank.
That was me for 10 days in June, waist deep in river silt and dying fish at the bottom of a 65 foot crypt, clinging to the business end a 10 000 psi suction hose.
“Fuck, we’re basically giving this entire plant the world’s biggest enema!” I shouted over the roar of the hose to Matt, who just shook his head and pointed to his ears.
The DMI Peace River Pulp plant does a shut down for 10 days every spring, and this year I was one of the hundreds of extra worker bees hired to clean out the hive. It was my first experience with heavy industry, and having heard all the horror stories and read all the books, I was pretty excited to see it for myself. A friend set it up, amid promises of hard work and good pay. I needed good pay. After all, I have a number of expensive habits to feed. 10 days of 12-hour shifts, with only time to feed both the crock-pot in the morning and thus ourselves at night. And of course, to tend to the blisters…mustn’t forget the blisters. Apparently we were supposed to report every little scratch and boo-boo to Safety- Loss (ironic given some other glaring breaches in safety protocol… but I’m getting to those), but I’d be damned if was going to complain of sore feet in the midst of these hardened guys. And hardened they certainly are, though whether by a lifetime of toil or the booze that come with it it’s hard to tell. Never shy to speak their minds, these guys and girls exemplify the ‘work hard and party harder’ lifestyle. After 10 days of bad coffee and a cramped lunch room it will take me a while to decompress and regain at least parts of my internal censor.
Tina was my tank-watch. Twice a mother, she has the wiry, gray-shot hair and cantankerous demeanor of a badger. Her rough-hewn hands have claws to match. As quick to laugh as she is to anger, she entertained us with tales of a lifetime on rigs and plant floors, spewing mouthfuls of smoke and expletives around broken teeth. She’d seen it all, or rather she’d almost seen it all, until her second day with my crew. Until then, she’d never seen a greenhorned kid come so close to losing a hand (something that would make it rather difficult to type for a living). Remember that old YTV show, Freaky Stories, I think it was called? “This is a true story, it happened to a friend of a friend of mine”? We dubbed the vac hose Maurice, after one of the show’s hosts, a sightless worm, to whom it bore an uncanny resemblance. Our Maurice had a voracious appetite. Sticks, mud, boots, rocks…just about any detritus that happened to find itself in the path of his 4-inch maw was immediately ingested with a profound indifference and a slight shrug. We were supposed to be using Maurice to suck up the three or four feet of silt at the bottom of the forebay. Trouble was, the reason for the forebay cleaning was to allow a welding crew to get in and fix a leaking floodgate. This floodgate is the only thing that stands between anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves in the forebay and the whole of the Peace River, and it was leaking at around 100 liters a minute. Maurice, even with his awesome gulping power, could only do about 105 liters a minute. So there we were, waist deep the river’s effluence with our feet firmly cemented to the floor by what amounted to quick sand, fighting what seemed like a losing battle with a very big river. Now, Maurice was doing his best, but he was not what you’d call co-operative and he kept trying to eat things that he couldn’t swallow, like two foot dying pike and lost radios (which were useless in the concrete hole anyway). I was having an argument with Maurice about a particularly large branch when a rush of water pushed me off balance, and he decided to sample fleshier fare instead…my left hand.
I’ve known for a while that I’ve got a fairly loud voice. I can be pretty well heard when I need to be. It’s a good thing to, because at that moment I needed to be heard over 110 decibels of howling suction hose at the bottom of 65 feet of echoing concrete walls. I found out later that Tina had jumped so much when I started screaming for her to kill the vacuum hose that she fell our of her chair and tripped over Maurice in her rush to tell the vac truck operator to shut it down. By the time she convinced Maurice to go on a diet he had already ingested my safety glove and was working on my skin. He gave it up just as that scene from Star Wars where Hans is toying with Luke’s new robotic arm began flashing through my mind.
If Matt hadn’t been down there with me, I likely wouldn’t have been able to keep my entire arm from ending up inside the hose. If that had happened it would have been off to the emergency room for sure, and probably the end of my guitar playing, typing, bike riding, or anything else that requires more than five digits. As it was, our combined strength was just enough to keep my hand out of Maurice’s esophagus for the two minutes that it took to kill the suction. As close a call as I’ve ever had, that’s for sure.
For all her jagged edges, Tina was wonderfully concerned for me, and my continuing dexterity…more so than anyone of the safety staff, who all seemed more concerned with the flesh on their behinds than what was very nearly torn off my hand. The whole debacle exposed not only some major breaches in protocol with regard to Maurice, but with just about every aspect of the job itself. Later we joked that we should have filed two incident reports…one for Maurice’s appetite, and a second for the chair tipping and tangled hoses, among other things. As it turns out, messy ropes would be the least of our paper work concerns. By the end of two days of digging, we’d uncovered site hazard assessments that were six years outdated, lots of the ‘if I don’t see it I’m not to blame’ game and proof positive that when it comes to the bottom line, a few hundred dollars is worth more than workers safety to the hire-ups. Eveready, the company that owned the vacuum truck, had refused the job I was doing because DMI wouldn’t spend the few hundred dollars a day to rent a proper safety tripod and rig to extract workers in case of an emergency, say if that already broken floodgate had failed completely. No one really knew what was making it leak, or keeping it from leaking faster, and if my pike’s buddies had decided to pay us an unexpected visit we’d have drowned to death about half way up 65 feet of slimy, caged in ladders. As well as refusing to rent the safety rig, DMI had us (the hired help) in the hole running equipment for which we had no training or real understanding. Eveready’s policy states that only their employees are allowed to use their equipment, but when push came to shove and the boss wasn’t around, that didn’t seem to matter. After Maurice tried to eat my hand, all the companies’ safety folks sprang into investigative action, and commenced the single biggest jurisdictional cluster fuck I’ve ever seen. To their credit, Eveready and Bison (my company) were the most concerned with figuring out how to prevent something like this from happening again, even though they were both absolved of any wrong doing.
As I sat in the break room, surrounded by a mounting pile of papers and nervous officials, I was thankful for two things. First, that the people I was working with directly had been on the ball enough to keep all my fingers attached, and second, for the illegibility of the notes I was taking in my chicken scratch. I couldn’t help but wonder whether their knowledge of my journalistic tendencies had anything to do with all the hand wringing and finger pointing. After all, nothing bad actually happened; it only almost did. If I was just another grunt, would they have been so concerned, or was all this apparent contrition for the benefit of anything I might write about the incident (like this blog, for instance). With the exception of my fellow laborers, everyone was playing enough pass-the-buck to rival a parliamentary question period. As Paul Carter says in his book Don’t Tell Mom I Work On The Rigs, “everyone seemed more concerned with the legal implications of opening their mouths than solving the problem”
I guess that’s the nature of an industry that employs hundreds, and yet answers to only the a few shareholders. The hire-ups want results, and they push their managers, who in turn push their foremen, who in turn push the area operators, and so on down the line to the temporary grunts like me. With so much vertical pressure, it’s no wonder that you often do end up getting blood from stone. But still, I can’t help but wonder when I’ll be back. Matt’s will be back for sure, and Tina does shutdowns and site medicals for a living, traveling wherever the work takes her. I’m already looking forward to trading stories of toxic ponds for those of frantic deadlines and media scrums this time next year amid the ordered chaos of a lunchroom jammed with former strangers. That’s the flip side of all the bullshit and pay-grade tectonics…the pressure is enough to bond even the most unlikely of people in a surprising way.