SEND IN THE CLOWNS

This story describes some of the unique cooling towers we sold during my final years of employment. They often produced clown-like effects. 02/29/2019

SEND IN THE CLOWNS

In the summer of 1961, Angie and I spent my two week vacation in NYC. During our entire stay, the temperature topped 90 degrees F. and the humidity edged even higher. We cursed the weather. However, our relatives loved seeing our four children, especially my mother. She died later that year, but I took some solace knowing she had spent time with them, ever so briefly.

When we returned to San Mateo, I began to worry even more about my future in the cooling tower industry. Over time, cooling tower designs had changed from forced draft to induced draft. Cooling tower fans that normally rotated in a vertical plane now had to spin horizontally. A rash of induced draft fan failures began to occur that culminated when one of FWC’s steel fan blades broke off from its hub and flew some distance before crashing through the roof of a power plant building almost killing a worker. As a result, the company decided to discontinue making its own fans in favor of purchasing them from other suppliers, including the Moore Fan Company. Later on, this firm figured in my life in an interesting way.

FWC managed to sell a number of cooling towers that had to meet strict or unusual operational conditions. Many failed to meet specifications.

As an example, we built a very large tower for Dow Chemical Company that had to cool exceptionally hot water. Our design incorporated the use of forty-foot long polypropylene ropes intended to hold in place a multitude of redwood splash racks. We had never sold a tower that incorporated this feature, nor had any other company in this business.

The rack suspension system required us to insert one smaller diameter rope inside a slightly larger diameter one. Every two feet or so, the inner rope had to be pulled through the outer one, forming a two-inch loop. Rather than perform this work on site using carpenters, we contracted with the State of California to utilize patients housed at the Napa State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to handle this task. I considered this to be an act of sheer brilliance bordering on madness. It spoke volumes about my days in this industry. Much to my surprise, the locked-in work force did a great job for us, completing the work on time and under budget.

Once the ropes arrived at the job site, carpenters encountered great difficulty in attaching the looped ropes to the wooden splash racks. There were hundred and hundreds of racks that had to be hung in proper alignment. Eventually, the work force managed to complete the tower’s construction.

As soon as Dow put the cooling tower into service, disaster struck. The ropes began to stretch due to the extreme heat of the circulating water. As a result, some sections of splash racks collapsed. Hot water streamed directly down to the concrete collection basin, hardly cooled at all. Dow had to stop their manufacturing process in order to fix the tower, which they chose to do without our help. They removed the ropes and resorted to conventional wooden structural members. I could never understand why they didn’t sue. Perhaps they did. If so, no one told me.

Later, Southern California Edison awarded us a contract to build two identical towers to cool condenser water at their Fontana Generation Plant. Each measured seven hundred feet long and stood seventy feet high. By any measure, these units were very large. To transport hot condenser water along the length of the towers, our design incorporated a four-foot diameter wooden stave pipe, or flume. We had never built a tower incorporating this feature.

Bechtel Engineering, representing SoCalEd, thought water in the flume would impose a live load we had not accounted for in our earthquake design. We stumped their Ph.D. Structural Design representative by alleging the load would not affect the tower, claiming the force of surging water would break the end plate of the wood stave pipe, dissipating its energy. They could not find a flaw in this logic and let us proceed.

When the first railcars arrived at the job site, our industrious field superintendent started erecting hundreds of columns without bracing them adequately. A Santa Ana windstorm roared through Fontana that weekend and knocked down what he had put up. We had to replace the damaged lumber which set back the construction schedule.

After the plant went on line, true to form, SoCalEd claimed the towers failed to meet performance design criteria. This did not surprise me. Measuring cooling tower performance is not an easy thing to do because there are so many variables involved and steady-state conditions are not easy to maintain. I don’t recall the outcome of this dispute. Customers wanted cold water not hot arguments.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company asked for bids to build a cooling tower to serve a new power plant at their Geyser’s geothermal facility in Northern California. We were the only bidder. The sulfurous atmosphere surrounding the site destroyed many of our tower’s metal structural parts. In addition, the tower did not meet its cooling performance design guarantee. Where have I heard that complaint before?

Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) bought a twenty-cell tower for use at its Vera Cruz refinery. Each of its twenty fans measured twenty-eight feet in diameter, the largest fans our supplier, The Moore Fan Company, had ever made. The blades were made of Monel, a very difficult alloy to weld.

A year after we shipped the unit to Mexico, we began to get heated letters complaining that the fan blades supplied with this tower were failing at weld joints due to excessive vibration. Also, the mercury switches we had designed to shut down the equipment when excessive vibration occurred had failed to operate. In addition, the towers were not providing cold water at the specified conditions. We dispatched representatives there, on two occasions, to assess the situation. Nothing had been resolved when the company decided to send me there, perhaps just to show PEMEX we still loved them. I had never been on a field trip, and had absolutely no idea what to say or do when I got there.

FWC authorized me to bring Angie along, giving us an opportunity to combine business with pleasure. We got our immunization shots but at the last possible minute, all four kids came down with chicken pox forcing Angie to remain at home.

Upon my arrival in Mexico City, a company representative and interpreter met me. He toured me around this fascinating city. The following day we boarded an old DC-3 and flew to Vera Cruz. On the flight, a male cabin attendant dispensed bottled Mexican beer.

PEMEX officials met me at the airport and took me immediately to the cooling tower to inspect it. Dutifully, without knowing exactly what to look for, I entered every cell while 90 degree water rained down on my noggin. It would have been easier for my lungs to absorb oxygen from the ocean than to obtain any from the 95 % humid air in this tropical environment.

To keep the towers in operation, PEMEX's employees had re-manufactured the vibration switches and re-welded broken fan blades. Some of the fans were new ones they made themselves, copied from the Moore Fan Company design. They had more confidence in theirs than Moore’s. It may have been illegal, but I found their decision understandable.

After inspecting the towers, they took me to lunch at a beachside cafe that looked uninviting. They served me the house specialty, red snapper. Despite my disdain for fish, this one tasted great, as I took a slug of beer with each mouthful, swallowing both as quickly as possible. The spicy snapper did not heat me to the same level as the ordeal that followed.

After lunch, officials escorted me to a large conference room filled with PEMEX engineers and operational personnel who began grilling me, asking me question after question about the tower’s mechanical faults.  

After a few minutes of dreadful silence, my voice whispered truthfully, “I have no idea why the vibration switches and fan blades failed.  From what I could see, everything is working properly now.”   

A PEMEX employee said, “Tests indicate the tower is failing to meet its design criteria.”

No kidding? How odd.

“Please send us your data and we will report back. The tower appears to be functioning properly now.”

The torture ended when it became apparent that my inspection had been a farce. I slunk out of the refinery and returned to Mexico City where I stayed at a high-rise American hotel in a room that provided me with a spectacular view of the traffic. Buses crawled along the streets in every direction, so densely packed together that they looked like a series of connected train cars, crammed with people. That evening, my interpreter took me to dinner. We took a “peso” cab, so called because that’s all you paid no matter how far you rode. Our taxi had to stop every so often to allow the driver to pull up the hood and fill the cap-less radiator with water from a supply he carried in another container. Not a car in town appeared to be newer than thirty years old.

I felt equally as old and worn out. This experience in Mexico made it self evident I had to find a different job.

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