Mayfield and the Fired Striker

 

We've met Chief Mayfield earlier, and it was alluded to that he was a thoroughly unsavory character, so we're going to do a deeper dive into that cesspool today. The mean-spirited tricks played on him were nearly endless, and they were all earned “benefits”, so here's a few that he had served up.

He annoyed our cook one trip to the point that Bill was dipping his coffee mug in dishwater and letting it dry that way without rinsing the detergent off. A week of this, and Mayfield went home with dishwater dysentery.

He used to leave his work boots outside the door to his cabin. After a dustup with the crew, someone installed a raw egg in the toe of each boot. :-)

His cabin was over the starboard side of the deck locker. For part of one trip, the deckhands would wait till he was asleep (after 1200, or after midnight!), and take a ratchet turnbuckle and hammer the steel right under his bed as hard as they could, and then run back to the lounge and resume their card game as nothing had happened. I never did find out what brought that one on.

The previously mentioned incidents of being locked in the tool crib, and having his pants legs tied into knots that could not be undone.

Although I never had it verified, it is almost a certainty that someone added urine to his Listerine bottle at some point.

He had the habit of leaving his coffee mug on a filing cabinet out in the engine room, and it sporadically made the trip to the lounge head, had the rim “petered”, and then put back on the filing cabinet.

 

One afternoon, the deckhands hung a work vest over the handrail outside his cabin, right near the head of his bed, where the wind blew the metal buckles against the steel.

Like I said, these and others were earned benefits. The following tale is representative of the way that he earned them, but it's especially egregious.

In “Floyd and Mayfield, Part 1”, I told about having to meet the boat early at a place where we did not normally do crew changes because Mayfield had fired the striker. This is the rest of that story.

I got on the Transporter at Greenville, Mississippi that time, and at the first watch change, Mayfield was regaling me with how he had to fire the striker because he partially flooded the lower engine room with fuel. I listened to his rant with a few nods, but silently withheld judgment based on his reputation for underhandedness.

A week or two passed, and I was up in the wheelhouse one afternoon visiting with the pilot. Curly was a friend, and the conversation drifted around to the striker that Mayfield had fired. I made a doubting comment on it, and Curly asked, “Did you hear the whole story?” I had not, so he proceeded to relate it. 

The trouble had begun while they were southbound. They had changed oil filters in one engine while doing tow work at Cairo. The filters had been draining while the boat was southbound, this was something that you had to do before either burning them or disposing of them with a vendor, as the individual filter elements were the size of a grown man's leg and there were nineteen elements in the filter tank that had been changed out. Each one held a lot of oil, so if you didn't drain them, they made quite a mess. Even afterward they were still very oily.

As the Transporter approached New Orleans, Mayfield decided that the nineteen filters had drained enough, and he ordered the striker to toss them in the river to dispose of them. Now, this had been technically illegal since the 1890s, and since the passage of the Clean Water Act, that was illegal and prosecutable. The striker knew this and refused to toss them in the river. He told Mayfield that he would burn them instead (Still legal at that time, but is not now.), but Mayfield said either throw them in the river or I'll fire you! The guy stood up for what was right and still refused, and told Mayfield that his first stop was going to be the Coast Guard Marine Safety Office in New Orleans to turn him in...

Curly said that the next thing was that they were having a powwow with Orval, the captain. The outcome was that the filters were burned and the striker was not fired.

For the time being, as it turned out. As the boat headed back north, Mayfield set the striker up with so much cleaning back in the rudder room that the man was out of the engine room most of the watch, far enough away from the engine room that he could not see or hear what might be going on up there. His only notification of a problem would be either other crew members or the alarm siren.

To understand what happened next, you need a little background on the boat's fuel system and the way the boat itself was constructed. Fuel tanks are built into the hull, with two tanks outboard of the engine room, one on each side. Fuel tanks have a stripping valve; the purpose is that the valve and piping is set up in such a way that you can use them to check the tank for any accumulated water and to drain it if you find any.

The Transporter and her three sisters were also double bottom boats, very unusual for a towboat. Normally a towboat is a single bottom, meaning that there is open space between the bottom of the boat and the deck plates, this is the bilge. In a double bottom boat what is normally the bilge is sealed off and made into tank space, so other accommodations have to be made for the assorted oily “drippage” that happens with the machinery. In this case, these boats had small pits called rose boxes equipped with a bilge pump suction at the back end of the engine room. There were three on each side, as the engine and gearbox structures (the stringers) divided each side into three sections, so each needed its own drain setup. The fuel tank stripping valves for the side tanks were located on the outboard side of the engine room and were serviced by the far outboard rose box and bilge suction.

Mayfield's “story” was that he entered the engine room at about 1430, and smelled fuel. Looking around, he found the outboard area of the port lower engine room flooded with fuel to a depth of about one foot. He then went back to the rudder room, collared the striker and showed him the internal fuel spill, and fired him again. This time it stuck, as there was no way for the captain to verify what Mayfield was telling him about how it happened. 

What he was telling Orval was suspicious on a couple of counts. Number one was that the chief normally didn't visit the engine room while off watch unless there was a machinery alarm or a crew member knocked on the chief's door and told him about a problem. Neither one happened in this case. The other thing was that Mayfield's official story was that the fuel valve had vibrated open and that the striker didn't catch the problem. Those stripping valves were gate valves, and they didn't just vibrate open; they required, let's say, manual input to open. Furthermore, these were small valves and pipes, and that stripping valve had to be all the way open to spill that much fuel in a short amount of time.

Curly and I discussed it, and we were both very certain that Mayfield had shown up down below and had spun that valve open, waited till a good amount of fuel had accumulated, and then started his revenge plan for having being threatened with the Coast Guard, truly the actions of a five-star rat, but the firing stuck anyway. At least, at that time, we were hiring through the NMU hiring halls, so the firing did not affect the man's ability to stay employed.

Fast forward less than a year. Mayfield and I had had another argument. The next night, on the midnight to six watch, he set me to work back in the rudder room. Being suspicious of him, I'd scoot up to the engine room to check in frequently. Sure enough, about two hours into the watch, I went forward for a check and smelled fuel. And once again, there was fuel in the same area, just not as deep as the last time, and the stripping valve for that fuel tank was wide open. I closed the valve and used the bilge pump to pump the spilled (and now contaminated) fuel to the slop tank.

Shortly after I was done, he showed up in the engine room and yelled at me for not being in the rudder room. I told him that I found the starboard outboard lower engine room flooded with fuel from the stripping valve again, that the valve was wide open; I flat out called him a rotten son of a bitch and said that he was trying to set me up the same way that he did the guy he fired. He wildly denied everything, but I kept after him on it till he left and went back to his cabin. This time at least, nothing more came of it, but he confirmed through his actions what he had done to my predecessor.