Sunday, March 7, 2021

Fire

 

 

Me (rear) and my relief, John Sayres, in better times.
 

So, it's January of 1988, and I'm running chief on Valley Line's M/V Valley Transporter. We are on a coal run for Florida Power & Light that loads at a dock seventy five miles upstream of Cincinnati, Ohio, and terminates at International Marine Terminals, an ocean-going transfer dock fifty five miles below New Orleans. Not a bad job and one round trip was pretty much your thirty days on. Thirty loads down to NOLA, and the same thirty empties back to the Ohio River, with waiting on loading and unloading at either end. A nice mix of scenery, too. It helped offset the monotony of the Lower Mississippi.


My helper and I are chatting at watch change one day. Dan is new to the engine room, and he was engaged and eager to learn. I don't remember exactly what the general topic of conversation was that day, but upcoming events permanently burned this question of his into my memory, and the question was, “What's the worst thing that can happen back here?”


I answered him without hesitation. “A base explosion. That happens when something inside the crankcase gets hot enough to ignite the oil vapors in the crankcase, or a large amount of oxygen is admitted into the crankcase somehow.” He asked what happened then. I told him, “If you're lucky, the engine just “sneezes”. The explosion doors on the crankcase (on the outboard side of the engine) do the job that they were designed for and relieve the overpressure in the crankcase and close, without admitting any additional air. At any rate, if you get an alarm for crankcase overpressure, you're in a dangerous situation, and you have to get that engine shut down right away before you have another, worse explosion.”


Little did we know.


A few days after this conversation, we are on our way back north with thirty empty coal hoppers, blasting along at a pretty good clip about twenty five miles above Natchez, Mississippi. It's afternoon, and I'm off watch, catching a nap in my cabin on the second deck. It's about 1600, and I'm barely awake, just laying there when the alarm panel in the room goes off and then goes silent. I remember laying there, thinking, “Shit. Now what? Suppose I better get dressed and go find out.


I had just pulled the covers back to get out of bed when a frantic hammering on my door started. It was the mate, Vernon, and he was screaming, “GET UP!!! GET UP!!! IT'S BURNING!!! IT'S ON FIRE!!! THE WHOLE FUCKING ENGINE ROOM IS ON FIRE!!!


Richard Pryor was right about fire being a powerful motivator. I think that I made it into my jeans in one jump, and a ratty old pair of running shoes just as quickly, and pounded down the stairs with no shirt or socks.


When I threw open the door to the main deck and looked aft down the port side, it already looked bad. There was thick smoke rolling out the forward engine room door, and I could see fire through the partially open ventilation panels level with the deck. As I watched, one of the deckhands staggered out the forward door with a spent fire extinguisher, hacking and gagging from the smoke he had ingested from futilely trying to put the fire out.


At that point, I turned around and ran upstairs to the wheelhouse. Hitting the top of the stairs, I screamed at the pilot, “You better find a place to beach this thing NOW! It's bad, real bad! We're about to lose everything!”, and didn't stick around long enough to see his reaction.


Returning to the main deck, the first thing was to make sure that the engine room was clear. I hollered at Vernon, and he said that everybody was accounted for, so I went into the CO2 room, and pulled the release for the stationary firefighting system. Nothing happened. Shit.


Getting back outside, Vernon was mustering the deck crew and rolling out the fire hoses. We were going to start at the forward port engine room door (it was the port engine that had blown up), but the engine was still idling and feeding the fire.


There was no such thing as outside manual shutdown pulls back then (things like that were not mandated until inspected vessel status was looming years down the road), so there was no choice but to go in and try to hit the shutdown button on top of the governor. We had pulled the emergency fuel shutoff, but the engine was continuing to idle on the fuel in the lines.


I had Vernon use a fog spray to knock down the smoke and flames as much as possible, and went in on my hands and knees with an ice chipper to reach in through the raw water piping around the front of the engine to hit the shutdown button. As I was maneuvering the ice chipper, I could see what had happened. The airbox door and the crankcase door at the #11 cylinder (first cylinder on the outboard bank of an EMD 20-645 engine) had been blown off by the force of the explosion, and as the engine sat there idling, there was a five foot long flame the diameter of the airbox handhole coming out of the side of the block, Furthermore, the three flexible fuel lines for the engine were right there, just ahead of that flame, and the return hose had been burned through, adding some fuel oil to the fire. Shit... Anyway, I finally managed to connect with the shutdown button and hold it down till the engine quit running.

#11, Port Main Engine. The burned fuel hoses are lower left of center, the missing handhole doors were blown off by the explosion. Governor shutdown button is upper left of center. 


This was all that we found of the airbox (left) and crankcase handhole doors. Both were made from cast aluminum (later production engines have ones made of steel, this is likely why), and the crankcase door is also the old style explosion door with not enough area to relieve pressure and no flame screens to keep fire trapped inside the engine.
 

 

Great. That fire source is gone. Vernon jumped right in and put out the fuel fire with water fog, and then he and another of the crew started extinguishing the paneling while I gagged the smoke out of my lungs outside for a few minutes.


Grabbing another hose, I started helping. The engine room on boats back then was almost universally paneled with Masonite pegboard that was covered with many layers of paint, and had been cooked by the heat of the engine room and absorbed gawd only knows how much oil vapor over twenty six years. When the flames from the base explosion hit this stuff, it went up like a box of excelsior that had a blowtorch tossed in it.


As we were trying to extinguish the paneling, a roaring noise and a “wind” blew through the engine room. The heat had raised the pressure in our compressed air storage tanks so much that the safety valves popped, and the rushing air from the tanks made the fire worse.


That was bad enough, but it was compressed air in the clutches that kept the starboard engine pushing ahead and giving the pilot at least some control. With all the compressed air gone, the ahead clutch deflated, and the port engine oversped and shut itself down. Now, we were at the mercy of the current, but there was still a fire to deal with, and I couldn't restore propulsion.


Since this started close to watch change, the whole crew was engaged in trying to save their “home”. Most were on hoses, but Clark, one of the deck crew, was circulating around the boat, looking for other problems, and he found a big one. At the aft end of the second deck companionway, there was a storage room that held some cleaning supplies and the second deck HVAC air handler. There was a small door and a window there too, leading out onto the second deck. 


Clark had found his way up there, and when he looked in through the little window, he could see smoke coming out of the supplies cabinet! The heat from the fire in the forward engine room was transferring through the steel and had risen high enough to light off the paper goods stored in that cabinet. Luckily, there was a fire station nearby, so Clark charged the hose, took the fire ax and smashed the window, and hosed the steel cabinet down to cool it off. He stayed with it, giving it periodic splashes of water fog while we were working on the fire below it. His action kept the fire from spreading to the second deck and likely the wheelhouse. This was to be the first of two big saves for Clark before we were done.

The second deck companionway, looking aft. The flaming locker is just behind the brown door. The lifted floor tiles show the limit of heat transfer from the fire below.
  

Meanwhile, in the course of fighting the fire, I happened to get a glimpse of what was going on outside. Looking out the starboard door, I had a good view of us going backwards down the river at about four miles per hour, cutting down willow trees with the starboard stern corner of the tow. Interesting... I didn't know it at the time, but the captain, Kenny Blankenship, had been busy on the radio. He had contacted the boat following us up the river, the M/V John Paul Ekstein. They were on their way to us. They met us, and maneuvered their 1200 foot long tow of thirty empties alongside, matched our backward speed, and tied off to us. That was one helluva feat of boat handling! They then came ahead on it, and eventually got us stopped and pushed into the bank. Another big issue was solved.


Meanwhile, we had worked the fire down to a blaze on the port aft side, and forward around the load center. This was a large bank of motor contactors that controlled all the big electric motors on board, and water was the enemy here, but we had no choice but to continue to use water fog on the fire here.


Meanwhile, Vernon and I were aft on the port side, each of us on a hose, on the main deck just outside the big engine room aft door, trying to extinguish an acetylene bottle that had cooked off and melted its fusible plug. This was a huge problem. There was a bright white blaze of venting acetylene coming up from this tank, about four feet in diameter and about ten feet high. It looked like a blazing bright white Christmas tree. There was also another acetylene tank and an oxygen tank tied off to the handrail close to the venting one that was burning. The last thing we needed was to have either of those to cook off, too, so Vernon was attempting to control the blazing bottle and I was cooling off the other two. I kept the hose stream on them for a while after they quit steaming, and then moved the hose stream to the burning bottle. With two hose streams, all we could do was get it down to a small wedge of fire, but we couldn't put it out. We stood there for a bit, looking at each other, wondering what more we could do when Clark showed up. He took a quick look and ran aft to the crew's quarters. When he came back, he had a CO2 fire extinguisher. He jumped in between us, and blasted that little bit of fire that we couldn't put out with the CO2, and out it went!!


Another win for Clark!


The acetylene bottle was now sitting there, flameless, but hissing as it was still venting the extremely flammable gas. I turned towards Vernon, starting to say to him, “Let's throw this damn thing in the river!” when I noticed that he had a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth! He quickly got rid of it, and we tossed the hissing firebomb into the river.

The charred, warped hatch above the acetylene bottle fire.

While we were busy with that, the crew of the Ekstein and a few of our guys had been busy running two hoses over from the Ekstein to help in the effort, and not a moment too soon, as the fire fighting water used around the load center had finally taken its toll and we lost the use of our fire pump. The last of the fire was finished off with the help of the Ekstein's hoses.

By a little after 1800, it was all over. The chief on the Ekstein came over, along with a couple of the deck crew to help with finishing up and to stand a fire watch. He took a look at me and said, “Come on over, I have some coveralls that will fit you.” He had taken a look at my shirtless, raggedy, dirty self and had mercy on me, clothed me, and pointed me in the direction of the galley, and said to get a cup of coffee and take a break, he was going back over to the Transporter and would cover for me for a bit.


I got a mug of coffee and went to the TV room to sit for a while, and that was when the adrenaline overload started burning itself off. I sat there and vibrated for a full five minutes, slopping half of that mug of coffee all over my hands and the floor before the shaking finally ran its course. If you can hold off the shaking till the crisis is over, you probably did OK.


The Aftermath

The next morning. Doesn't look all that bad from the outside.

The John Paul Ekstein stayed with us the next day, till the company could get another boat to us to take our tow and bring us up the river to a company office in Greenville, Mississippi. While we were being towed north, we started an initial cleanup, shoveling up all the debris on the upper deck and on the engine catwalks. 


As “luck” would have it, the chief on the boat taking us up the river was Mayfield, the horse's ass that I had had little luck getting away from as a striker. He was having problems of his own and wanted me over there helping him. I had had no sleep for a day and a half with my own problems and told him to go back to where he belonged and deal with it himself, I was going to take a shower and get some sleep. He left in a 20 cylinder huff (who cares? :-) ), and I later found out that he whined to the office about it, and they told him to stay on his own boat as well.

The upper deck, before any cleanup, looking in from the starboard aft door. Behind the port engine, you can see the remaining oxygen and acetylene bottles.

When we tied up in Greenville, I headed up the hill for the question session. We gave them the rundown on what had happened, and Dan and I headed back to the boat to pull the #11 cylinder from the engine for a better look at what caused it. Once the power assembly was out of the engine, it was obvious. The cylinder was scuffed so badly that the piston stuck in the cylinder. An EMD has a two piece piston, the piston shell, and the piston carrier, the former fitting over the latter. When the piston stuck, the carrier was pulled out of the piston, broke the piston skirt, and uncovered the inlet ports. Then a huge volume of air rushed into the crankcase and we were off to the races...

The culprit. An intact EMD piston on the left, the piston from #11 is on the right. The broken piston skirt uncovered the cylinder liner's inlet ports, and introduced air into the crankcase.


 
Not too much later, I had a phone call from Chuck Miller, our purchasing agent. My relief and I had started a project some time back of replacing all the worn out hoses on the front end of both engines. John, my relief, had found that Aeroquip had a fire resistant hose (FC 234) that was Coast Guard approved, and that was what we had ordered in the various diameters that we needed. What we got was FC 300. We shrugged, and went ahead and replaced the hoses with it.


Chuck was calling to apologize, and he was pretty abject about what had happened. He had turned the order into our supplier, and they had called him back saying that they did not have it, but that FC 300 was the same thing. Well, the inner tube in both hoses was made from the same material, but the FC 300 was not fireproof, and that burned through fuel return line had added quite a bit to the fire. Evidently, Chuck had words with our supplier about it, as we never had a problem with getting FC 234 again.


This fire also ended the practice of each boat being responsible for major maintenance of the firefighting equipment. An outside firm that specialized in fixed CO2 systems was engaged for doing this, usually when the boat went in for an overhaul.


Long afterward, we found out that our last overhaul was the last one that the company's Cincinnati shop had done before it was closed. This was back in the day when Valley was notoriously cheap, and our overhaul had consisted of whatever used parts that they could round up that was roughly within specifications, with a new set of piston rings on each piston. They may have gotten away with this on a blower EMD, but not on high output, heavily loaded turbocharged engine. Outside engine rebuilders started doing our overhauls after this, and with new EMD made parts, too. The upside about this (besides no more fires) was that the engines were much more reliable and we had a lot less downtime. Duh... That was the end of the cheap days, with Bill Robertson and Chuck Miller in charge, it turned into the best job I was ever to have.


Dan and I were talking about it later on, and I had asked him what the start of it was like from right there on the scene. He said that he was in the booth when the alarm went off, and when he saw what it was, he immediately called the pilothouse to get them to kick it out of gear, and he ran out there to shut it down, and that was when it blew for real. He said that he instantly had a fire for the full length of the engine, and six feet high, and he couldn't get near the front of the engine to shut it down.


The Transporter remained burned out and laid up in Greenville for years after this. Valley Line never ran it again, when we were sold to ACBL in July of 1992, the Transporter went over to them. At some point after that, they sold the boat to an operation out of Alton, Illinois that fixed it up and put it back in service. Still later, when I was with AEP, we leased the boat and renamed it the Hank Tulodjeski. While we had it, it suffered another base explosion, this time it was the starboard engine blowing up and setting the engine room on fire. 


Go figure.

 

Saturday, March 6, 2021

Swiss Cheese

Over a long career, i had the misfortune to work for ACBL twice, and not by choice either time. However, it did at times provide some comic relief. A little background is necessary here.

Since we're on the move all the time, our groceries are ordered ahead and brought out to us by a "boat store", different ones are located at various places along the navigable waterways. It works like this: the cook fills out an order form of what they need for the next several days, it's turned over to the captain, and he sends it in (in this day and age) by email, the boat store fills the order and then runs it out to you when you go by.

Now, that "captain" bit... Some let the cook run the galley, some don't, and micromanage by striking items off the grocery order. That's neither here or there, but it brings us to our main character

On one particular boat, the cook could not get Swiss cheese. Could. Not. This went on for some time. The cook got tired of it, and finally asked why. The reply, believe it or not, was this: "No I'm NOT going to order it! You know why? Because of those holes! There's nothing there, and you have to pay for the holes, so I won't order Swiss cheese."

OK, one major flaw in that "thinking"... Cheese is sold by weight, not volume, and... The bloody holes weigh nothing!  Some people's kids...

Fast forward a couple of years, and this minor genius is running captain on my regular ride. The forward watch guys (me included) are having lunch. As lunch winds down, as often as not, the remaining time turns into a gab session. On this occasion, conversation turned to the odd behavior of some of the wheelhouse people. It went around the table for a while, and finally one of our guys threw this one out: "I've heard that there's some dumb son of a bitch here that won't order Swiss cheese because he thinks that we're paying for the holes!" 

Wow! 

All you could hear was the engines running. We all shot him a hot look and he clammed up. Cappy excused himself, got up and left. After enough time had passed to let the captain get up the stairs, one totally mortified deckhand blurts out, 

"Oh Gawd. PLEASE tell me that that isn't the Swiss cheese dude."

 

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