1994 Toshiba and Milliken

I was finally back on the work list at the Hall! While I had been off for awhile I was finally working steady. In 1994, I worked two separate shutdowns at the Toshiba Plant in Horseheads, interrupted by a two month stint at Milliken Station which is a coal power plant on the west side of Cayuga Lake north of Ithaca. Our job was to replace the coal slurry piping. Most of this system is 10-12” pipe. Some of it is fiberglass and some is carbon steel. Both of them offer different challenges. Both are heavy and awkward to handle. Rigging is difficult especially because there was so much other piping still in place. To lift the pipe you use chain falls and slings. For you non-fitters, this entails climbing way up high to hang the chain falls. Then you pull on the chain for hours it seems. I have never measured it but it can take 30 minutes of pulling to lower the chain 30’. After that you have to pull it 30 more minutes to raise it 30’! In addition to this fun, I was literally covered in coal dust. I would have layers of clothing, bra, tee-shirt, sweatshirt, coveralls; but when I got home at night I had to strip standing on the deck. My skin was still covered in grime. I would run to the shower so that I could pick up my baby without getting her dirty. I was so exhausted that after making dinner, doing laundry, and bathing the baby, I would frequently fall asleep reading to her before bed. As the saying goes, the two best days of a job are the first and the last. I was thrilled the day I got laid off from there. Toshiba was much easier physically. There was still a lot of climbing but they had catwalks overhead that really helped getting around. It was also much cleaner. The challenges were more mental than physical. Some of the piping was metric and used a different International pipe thread compared to American (NPT) thread and standard sizes. We also worked directly with Japanese engineers which sometimes caused comical situations. One time I was sent with another journeyman up a three section scaffold to change some piping. I looked down to see the engineer arguing with my foreman. Apparently he had to explain to the engineer that when they asked for two “men” to do a job I counted as a “man”. The engineer was appalled that he had offended me. The next day he insisted I take some beautiful gifts from Japan as an apology. Mostly the Japanese seemed to really enjoy their time in the US although many missed their families and the food they loved. Some of our members had a hard time understanding them, but I figured their English was much better than our Japanese.