The TENS Device

 

Ever hear of, or use a TENS device? It stands for Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation, so I guess you can see why the short version is popular. They're an electrical device that have pads that you apply to an area of your body that has muscle or joint pain, and it applies a pulsating current to that area to help dull the pain and increase blood circulation.

They are an over the counter device now, but in times past, you got them by prescription (or so I'm told) from a doctor or chiropractor. I'm also told that the prescription variety really packed a powerful punch.

Which leads us to our story. This was related to me by one of the pilots that I worked with in the mid 2000's. He is quite a raconteur, and I hope I can do this some measure of justice. Also, I'm not naming any real names in this one, so what names you will see are made up.

My pilot friend had been having some back issues, and had been seeing a chiropractor on his days off. The doc had sold him the TENS to take back to the boat, to help out with his back issues while he was away at work.

So, the pilot is at the end of his watch one afternoon. The captain is in the wheelhouse, and the two of them are discussing what is going on and just shooting the breeze in general. Also noodling around up there is one of the deckhands, who is cleaning up and making coffee. Let's call him Jimmy.

Jimmy is one of those people that sometimes make you wonder how they manage to stay alive. You know the type; the “do before thinking” people, the “hold my beer and watch this” crowd. In the time that he worked with me, the props on our twin outboard yawl kept getting chewed up, and I kept replacing them, until the day we did a crew change, and I finally saw what was happening. We were in the crew van, getting ready to leave, and Jimmy was going back to the boat. He had the yawl in shallow water, the other two guys were trying to push with the oars, and Jimmy was still trying to power his way out of this; both outboards were bouncing up and down on the rocks... (He is also the only person I ever knew who talked himself into a speeding ticket.)

Anyway, pilot and captain are still chatting, and Jimmy is cleaning. He starts wiping down the desk, and spots the TENS device, so he asks, “What the heck is this”? The pilot gives him a short summary of what it is and what you use it for. Jimmy doesn't ask any questions, but as soon as the rundown is over, he starts attaching the pads to his upper arm to try it out. He twists the level control all the way up, and is looking for the ON switch. The pilot says, “I don't think that I'd do that, if I were you...”

Famous Last Words Department.

Jimmy says, “It's only a nine volt battery, how bad can it be?”, and he flips the switch...

WHAM!!

 

The first jolt of electricity arrives on the scene, and Jimmy has placed the pads in such a way that the electricity is passing through his bicep. The muscle does what muscles do when confronted with a blast of juice, and it contracts. Violently. Jimmy's arm flies up, and he hits himself in the face! WHAM! Another jolt, another hit! WHAM! Again! He lets out a yell, and the captain and pilot turn around, and goggle at what's going on, and they jump into action.

By now, Jimmy has punched himself in the face several times. He's staggering around, yelling, trying his best to avoid his own fist, and not always succeeding. The captain runs over, and grabs Jimmy in a bear hug, doing his best to get control of that zombie arm. He gets him partially pinned, and the pilot grabs one of the lead wires, and yanks the pad off of Jimmy's arm. He shuts off the TENS device, and takes off the other pad.

“Well, dumdum, did you learn anything? “Yeah”, he pants, “How the HELL can they make a nine volt battery do that to you??” The pilot replied, “I was hoping you'd say that you had learned to listen to other people when they were trying to give you a warning!”

Turds and Paper Towels

 

When I first started on the river in 1976, the toilets on older boats were still piped overboard. Part of the Clean Water Act was aimed at marine transportation, stating that by 1980, all boats had to have a USCG approved marine sanitation device (MSD) on board to process sewage. There ended up being a multitude of ways of dealing with the sewage, a fair number of companies wanted in to this market, so there were a lot of different devices early on, and a lot of them were problematic. The first boat I worked on, the Donald O'Toole, had a small holding tank, and vacuum toilets that only used a quart of water per flush, the tank was then periodically discharged to a shoreside sewage system.

The system on the O'Toole provided me a foretaste of what the most disagreeable part of an engineer's job would be when one day, the system would not build vacuum for a flush. Pete, Twin Cities roving engineer/mechanic dragooned me into helping, and we ended up in the bilges, disassembling the vacuum pump to remove a paper towel that someone had flushed down a toilet. This was just the beginning, issues like this were to dog me for the next forty years...

Any time a new person came on board, part of their orientation was “The Talk”. This consisted of what could and could not be flushed down a toilet connected to an MSD. To make it more memorable, I had condensed the stock speech down to this: Other than bathroom tissue, if it didn't go all the way through you first, never flush it down a toilet. Most took it to heart, a persistent small percentage did not.

Which brings us to the M/V Rusty Flowers, sometime in the late 1980's. Originally, the Rusty had been built with one of those early systems that were nothing but trouble (It injected ground up sewage into the engine's exhaust system!), but it had been replaced with what became the gold standard of MSD's, the St. Louis Ship FAST System. These were (and still are) the best out there. Sewage goes in, aerated bacteria inside the system digests the solids, clear processed sewage flows through a chlorinator and is then pumped overboard. Easy peasy, but that rule about what couldn't be flushed still applied.

I'm in my tiny little office on the Rusty one morning, doing some paperwork, when one of the deckhands steps in to let me know that the toilet in the deck locker was plugged up, so I followed him forward to look at it. Yep, sure enough, it's stopped up, and the water isn't going down at all. I tried the other main deck toilet, the one in the bathroom that I shared with one of the deck crew, and it's backed up, too... Hmmm. The line to the MSD has to be plugged, not just the toilets....

The most likely spot was the emergency three way valve, it was there to keep toilet service in case the MSD was not usable by valving the line overboard. The issue was this; the four inch sewage line was narrowed down to a passage an inch wide and three inches high through that valve, so that was the first place to check.

To do this, the big P trap on the MSD inlet had to be removed. Of course, that's full of sewage, so once it's removed, all of that mess has to be dumped in buckets so it can be flushed again later. Fun...

Taking a flashlight and looking into the valve, sure enough, there's a wad of paper towels stuck in the valve passage... OK, knowing that the line behind this is full of sewage and two toilets are full of water, the immediate problem was how do you unclog this without standing in front of it? The answer was a long piece of copper tubing with a hook bent on the business end and the handle bent 90 degrees to keep me out of what was going to happen. When I connected with the clog, a fat jet of sewage shot across the engine room (missing me), splattering all over the centerline bulkhead. The clog was gone, nothing for it now but put the trap back up and clean up the mess. The wad of paper towels was saved as “Exhibit A”.

We had a meeting with the crew, reviewing what couldn't be flushed and emphasizing that that included paper towels. I wasn't convinced that this was the end of the problem, so I ordered the supplies that I needed to build a new four inch P trap with a cleanout on it, so the trap didn't have to be removed, and a clog could be raked out of the valve and everything would go in the trap, and then into a bucket.

Things went along swimmingly for a few months, and then it happened again. The new trap made this time a much less unpleasant unclogging, but again, it was paper towels. Obviously, the message was not getting through. We had another meeting about it. Of course, this is one of those things that the guilty party will never admit to, and I was fairly certain that this wasn't going to end until I could figure out who was doing it.

Thinking on this for a while, I finally came up with a way to narrow the suspects list. There was a roll of paper towels in each bathroom on the boat. Most were shared between two staterooms, and the cook had a bathroom to herself. Back then we simply got our paper towels through the boat store, and they were commercial stock, not plain ones from a supply house as later was the case, these had printed patterns on them. Hmm! Going through our stock, I came up with a half dozen different colors, and we had a total of five bathrooms on board.

So. Each bathroom got a different color pattern roll of paper towels, and I kept a list of which ones went where, and then I sat back and waited. Sure enough, three days later, we're clogged up again. It was near to lunch time when this happened, which made it all the more perturbing, as I was missing my lunch for another one of these stomach turning excursions. I went at it, but this time with a bucket below the P trap so whatever I raked out of that valve would land in a big galvanized steel pail. When the valve was cleared and the debris checked, lo and behold, the paper towels recovered from the valve were the color pattern on the roll in the shared bathroom between the captain and the pilot!

I'm pissed. The idea that one of the two people on board who certainly knew better (and I had a good idea which one it was) were responsible for this made me really mad. Following the old adage that drastic situations called for drastic remedies, I marched up the engine room stairs, into the quarters, and into the dining room with a seven gallon pail half full of sewage, turds and paper towels.

Barging right up to the captain's end of the table, I started yelling. “LOOK AT THIS! THIS IS INEXCUSABLE! EVERY ONE OF YOU KNOWS THAT YOU'RE NOT TO BE FLUSHING PAPER TOWELS! LOOK AT IT!”

Dead silence, and that smell is filling the space. One deckhand finally blurted out the inevitable question. “What is that?!?

“WHAT IN THE GODDAMN HELL DOES IT LOOK LIKE! IT'S SHIT AND PAPER TOWELS! QUIT FLUSHING GODDAMN PAPER TOWELS DOWN THE GODDAMN TOILETS!!!”

Bam. That was the end of lunch. Never did I see a dining room on a boat empty out faster.

I clomped back down to the engine room, fished the paper towels out of the mess, cleaned things up and flushed the paper free remains down the toilet, and headed to my cabin for an afternoon nap.

Dinner that night was eaten in silence, and nobody was looking my way. Later in the evening, I went up to the wheelhouse to have a chat with the captain about it. He actually admitted to being the one who was doing it, even admitted that he knew he should have been throwing them in the trash and not flushing them. I was tempted to tell him if it happened again, I'd empty that bucket on his bunk, but settled for describing in detail just how unnecessary and disgusting it was to have to deal with other people's carelessness, and offered to let him do it next time.

He declined the offer, and it never happened again.

Losing It All

Way back when, in the early 1980s, I was a newly minted engineer, having passed the exams and being issued my Coast Guard license at the end of January of 1982. The company ran me as an assistant on big boats for two trips, and then a few trips on smaller boats as chief on the Illinois River, and then I was assigned as the engineer on the Valley Voyager, a sister ship to the 7000 horsepower, two hundred foot long Valley Transporter that I had been the striker on for six years.

I was familiar with the two boats, all of their quirks and bad spots (many of both, they were both a grand OJT school). Back then, the company was spending as little as they could get away with on maintenance. So, as a consequence of this, the engineer had a full plate. There was plenty that could be dealt with while underway (subject to how much they were willing to spend on parts and materials), but a lot of the problems needed the boat to be lifted out of the water so hull work could be done in a shipyard.

One of these issues was water leaks into the fuel tanks. A boat's fuel tanks are not like the tank on a car or truck, they're not a separate entity, they are simply a partitioned off part of the hull that's welded up to be oil-tight, and equipped with the necessary piping to deal with handling the fuel; high suction, low suction, return line, fill line, etc., and most of their surface is in contact with the water.

We had one tank that had numerous leaks below the waterline, the #1 tank. It was the biggest of the boat's tanks, a large, T shaped tank aft of the engine room that extended aft almost to the flanking rudders, and the lowest part of it was a fairly small, deep area right at the aft bulkhead of the center lower engine room, so this was where the water from the leaks gathered.

We only had to burn fuel from #1 for part of the day every other day or so. If I used the boat's built-in equipment and piping every morning to suck the water out of the tank, it was safe to use what was called the high suction line to burn fuel out of this tank. That way, the water level (water is heavier than diesel fuel, and collects on the bottom under the fuel) stayed low enough to not be a problem.

But dealing with this is a pain in the butt, and potentially a danger. The captain and I discussed this and decided to see if we could shame management into docking the boat and fixing the leaks. So, each morning, on morning traffic, we started reporting the amount of water we were stripping out of the #1 tank; 7,000 gallons, 6,000 gallons, 9,000 gallons, 8,000 gallons... 

This had gone on for a couple of weeks, and not a peep about it from the office in St. Louis, so the captain and I shrugged our shoulders and carried on as we had been.

Fast forward a week or ten days. Things are going along as they had been, running and still stripping the river water out of the #1 fuel tank. We had left Cairo southbound with thirty five loads of grain destined New Orleans, so we were running “southbound speed”, with the engines running about 700 rpm instead of the usual 900 for full load.

It was the end of my evening watch (midnight), and I was talking with Gary, my assistant, bringing him up to speed on what needed to be done on his watch that morning, which was primarily cleaning the fuel centrifuge.

Time to go technical here, so you can better understand what's to follow. Bear with me...

A boat's fuel system has two parts, the primary and the secondary systems. The primary system gets the fuel out of the boat's tanks, gives it a first cleaning (either by filter or centrifuge), delivers it to the day tank, and returns the overflow to one of the tanks in the hull. The secondary system then takes it from the day tank to the engines and the generator, where another filter on each piece of equipment cleans it again before it's injected. The secondary system returns any fuel unused by the engine back to the day tank.

Both of these systems consist of piping, pumps, filters, and valves. In the hull tanks, you have high suction and low suction in each tank for the primary fuel system. You only use the high suction when you are running; the tank space below that is where the dirt and water accumulate in a tank, so the low suction would only be used in an emergency, or to drain the tank for work.

The primary system on the Transporter had both a pump and filter and a centrifuge. The centrifuge was what you used when running, the pump and filter were there as a backup, and to supply the day tank while the centrifuge is being cleaned. 

If you think of a cream separator, you will understand what the centrifuge does to the fuel, the same company makes cream separators. “Dirty” fuel (and possibly small amounts of water) go in and are spun at 7,200 rpm in a “bowl” that accepts a continuous flow of fuel. Cleaned fuel comes out of one discharge, water comes out of a different discharge, and the dirt is retained in the machine, so the centrifuge has to be shut down every so often for cleaning, which took about an hour.

I told Gary to go ahead and clean the centrifuge. We were drawing fuel from the #1 tank high suction (above the water in the tank), so all he had to do was switch to the pump and filter, shut the centrifuge off, and have at it. He was good with what needed to be done, so I headed off to bed.

I was laying there reading before shutting off the light when both engines went to idle. Nothing too unusual there... But then Gary started beating on my door, yelling something I couldn't quite make out. I hollered at him to open the damn door. He did, and blurted out, “Get up! We're about to lose everything!”

Well, that worked. Pulling on my clothes, I ran down below. When I got to the engine room, the starboard engine was running way below idle and misfiring badly. Gary yelled that he had accidentally spun open the LOW SUCTION valve on the #1 tank when he turned on the pump! So, here we are, with the day tank pumped full of WATER....

It is an established fact that diesel engines do not run well on water. We had spun the drain valve on the day tank open and shut off the pump, but it was too late. The secondary piping was already full of water. As we were flying around, double checking valve lineups, the starboard engine died. Then, the port engine started clattering, and it died too.

A couple of minutes after that, the generator died, and the lights went out.

Just for the record, there is nothing as silent as an underway engine room that has just died and gone dark while you are faced up to a tow and underway. It is truly an experience to never have. The obstacles to getting power back are formidable and time consuming, and you are out of control.

Gary made a move to start the offline generator. I stopped him because we had not yet drained all the water from the day tank. It would just run for a couple of minutes and then die as well. I told him, “Round up the deck crew! Have them go get that new trash barrel on the stern and bring it in here. Set them to filling pails of fuel from the stripping valve on the #2 tank, and filling that barrel! I'll rig a temporary fuel line!”

So, off everybody went. I got out hose and fittings, disconnected the generator from the boat's piping and set up a fuel suction line into the barrel, removed the two water filled fuel filters and replaced them with new ones full of water free fuel and the deckhands formed a bucket brigade, bringing up water free fuel from the lower engine room and filling the barrel. While all this was going on, we were still 63,000 tons of grain and steel, floating down the Mississippi out of control...

When the barrel was about three fourths full, I crossed my fingers and tried to start the generator engine. The air starter groaned and quit. Not enough compressed air; the leaks had robbed us of it after the generator died and the compressors were no longer running. 

Shit... 

We grabbed a CO2 fire extinguisher and some pipe fittings, disconnected the air line from the starter, and piped the hose from the extinguisher to the air starter. A gentle squeeze of the handle easily rolled the engine. I spun it gently for a while, using the engine's fuel pump to clear the rest of the water from the internals of the engine, and mentally praying that no injectors had been ruined by the water. and she took off! The lights came back on, and the deckhands started yelling! We did too! Woohoo, this just got a bit better! We had to keep the bucket brigade going; the fuel level in the barrel would drop fairly quickly, as the fuel return line was still piped up to the day tank.

While the rest of the guys were still schlepping fuel, I set about getting the water out of the line to the off line generator. Once the water was out of the day tank, it was a matter of running water out of the generator fuel line into a bucket until the water was cleared. When I got clean fuel out of the line, I motioned to Gary to start up the other generator and put it online, We then shut down the one running on the fuel barrel, and reconnected it to the fuel system.

This was w+ell enough in hand that I could take a minute to check in with Grady, the pilot, and let him know what was going on, and that we were well on the road to recovery. After getting to the wheelhouse, I looked around. We appeared to be aground on the outside of a bend just below Richardson's Bluff. I told Grady what was happening, he was grinning all the while. So, I finish, and he tells his side of the story. When everything went to hell, and before the lights went out, he called traffic: “Motor Vessel Valley Voyager, about to lose the plant. Thirty five loads and one boat in tow...”

He then told me that we had topped around (did a 360 degree spin!) two times, and finally landed on the sand bar at the bend. Keep in mind the size here. The tow was thirty five barges, configured five barges wide by seven barges long, so the tow dimensions were 175 feet wide (53.3 m) by 1,400 feet long (426.7 m), and add another 200 feet (61 m) to the length for the boat... 

At one point, he said that the barges had the stern of the boat aimed right at Richardson's Bluff, which is a sheer, crumbling sand bluff, created by the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812, with very deep water at the base of the bluff. If we would have hit that way, it would have sunk the boat very quickly. Grady said when we started to get aimed that way, he, the captain, and the mate had gathered up their luggage and set it out on the barges. He had started rotating the deckhands out of the engine room one at a time, so they could do the same! They weren't going to throw us to the wolves, however. They had Gary's bags and mine gathered us up as well... Thankfully, it wasn't needed...

I went back down below, and started the task of clearing the engine fuel piping of water, and getting it out of the engine fuel manifolds as well. It took a couple of hours, but eventually, we had both engines running again, and we were headed southbound, not too much the worse for the wear, just a bad scare and a little broken rigging out on tow.

After traffic the next morning, when the office learned of our “little adventure”, we received a message on afternoon traffic that we would be drydocked in New Orleans for tank repair. Yes, we'll only fix something after we've had a close call.

When we got to the shipyard, they lifted us right away, it was about 2000 hours. As soon as the yard crew had the ladders in place, I went shoreside to find a pay phone and call home. On the way there, I was looking over the outside of the hull where the #1 fuel tank was. I saw several steel and epoxy patches, and a couple that had fallen off. I could hear the tank cleaning crew getting started, and finally found one hole that was big enough that I could see the tank crew's lights. Everything was repaired properly before we went back into the water.

Scatalogical Pistol

So it's 1993, and I'm running chief on the M/V Rusty Flowers. This had been my regular ride since early 1988 after the Valley Transporter had burned, and I had been fortunate enough to hang on to the regular chief's slot on there after ACBL had bought Valley Line in July of 1992.

At this time, the regular cook on the Rusty was a guy named Jeff. He was a big, tall dude, and in a prior life, he had been a Navy Seal. Jeff was a little on the crazy side (expected, considering his background), one of his favorite stunts was to use large amounts of gasoline to light our homemade BBQ grill. He used enough that it always went up with a big WHOOSH!, with flames as high as the second deck, and there was a big sooty smudge on the white paint of the deckhouse up to the second deck from these antics.

We were sitting in the galley one afternoon trading stories, and Jeff was telling me about one he was directly involved in, one that concerned a captain named Windy Howard. Windy's fame had preceded the telling of this tale; after ACBL bought us, various crew members would relate tales of Windy's “exploits”.

To wit, here's three, just for background.

Deck crews hated working for him. Hated working for him, hated him. One of his favorite things while building tow was to arrange the barges so all the cover tops were matched by color instead of by tonnage and where they were to be dropped. He would build tow this way even if it meant that that barge in the middle of the tow had to be dropped ten miles up the river. He would even do it in the winter, in the ice of the Illinois River, when the weather and the ice make everything done on tow much, much harder and more miserable.

He had been detained at O'Hare Airport by security once while on his way to the boat for impersonating a naval officer. He was on his way to work, and he was dressed in the khakis and full insignia of a captain in the US Navy, and he was not, and never had been an officer in the navy. A real naval officer spotted him and struck up a conversation, and it didn't take him any time at all to figure out that he was talking to someone who was only dressed like a naval officer. He promptly reported Windy to security, who hauled him away for a little question and answer session. In the course of this, the office was called. They vouched for who he really was, and he was let go on the condition that it would never happen again.

My mother even knew about this clown, even though she didn't know his name. Mom lived on the South Side of Ottawa, Illinois, a block back from the top of the south bluff of the valley. She had a scanner at home and liked to listen to the marine traffic as both I and my brother-in-law worked on the river. Windy was the regular captain on the Thurston B. Morton, and during the bitterly cold winter of 1976 – 1977, the Morton spent a stretch laid up in the ice near Marseilles, Illinois. Anyway, mom hears the Morton making a radiophone call to the office one morning, on marine channel 26, the Ottawa operator. The captain was calling to tell the office that the whole crew, including the chief engineer, had jumped boat in the middle of the night, leaving him alone on the boat! You have to be an enormous jerk for things to go this far, even back then before Human Resources (ever think of how cannibalistic that sounds?) had sway over everything. This was the only instance of the whole crew going that I ever heard of. He was whining to the person on the other end of the call, “I don't know what happened! I don't know why they would do me this way!” And the person he was crying to in Jeffersonville replied tartly, “As I recall, this isn't the first time that this has happened with you, is it!?” Mom said that there was a mumbled reply that she couldn't decipher. The call ended shortly after that exchange.

Now that the stage is set, on with Jeff's tale. He was cooking on the Thurston B., and Windy was home on days off. The crew had been talking about it for a while, and they had decided that a gas grill would be a nice addition to the boat. They had pooled their money, about $200, and bought a grill through the boat store, and it had been on the boat long enough to see some use but was still basically new. The relief captain went home for his days off, and Windy came back. While taking a walk around the outside of the boat, he came upon the new gas grill sitting outside the galley door, and he promptly kicked it in the river!

Why? Who knows. Likely because if he didn't approve of it, nobody was going to have it. No matter what his flawed reasoning was, this was an action that once again, infuriated the entire crew. After all, this was their pooled funds, and they had only had very few meals from it! Their reaction was entirely understandable.

A few days after The Almighty Kick, the after watch deckhands were in the galley talking with Jeff, expressing their anger at the whole episode. Jeff had a flash of Seal-inspired skullduggery and asked the guys if they would like to get revenge on Windy for the grill.

”Oh HELL Yes!”, was the reply.

So he sat the two of them down and laid out a plan. Windy and Jeff were due off the boat when it got to Saint Louis in a few days. Jeff rummaged around in the pantry, and handed a roll of heavy duty aluminum foil over to one of the guys, and told him that the next time he had to use “the facilities”, to do his business on a big piece of the foil, wrap it up tightly, and then to bring it back when nobody was around.

By the next afternoon, the deed was done, and they brought “the packet” back to Jeff. He wrapped a few more layers of foil around it, and then he smooshed it around until it was roughly in the shape of a pistol. He put it in a paper bag and told them that when crew change came around, one deckhand should distract Windy, and get him away from his briefcase. At this point, his partner was to slip the ersatz “pistol” into the captain's briefcase and go far away.

They docked at ACBL's St. Louis shop that afternoon, and Windy and Jeff caught a cab to the airport. Windy's flight left first, Jeff's a couple of hours later, so Windy headed straight to security. Now this happened in early January of 1991, and Operation Desert Shield was going to turn into Operation Desert Storm before the end of the month, so airport security was ramping up with each passing day, and Windy Howard had no idea of what he was about to walk into.

Jeff said that he followed him at a distance, and hung back a good bit away from the security checkpoint, but where he could still see what was going on. Windy put his coat and briefcase on the belt of the x-ray machine, and got wanded through with no problem, and was waiting on his stuff at the far end of the x-ray station, when all of a sudden, three more security types hustled over to look at the machine's monitor with the first guy. They all looked at the monitor, and then at each other. Words were being exchanged, but it was too far away to hear what was going on, Jeff said. The group approached Windy and asked if they could look in his briefcase. He said OK, and one of them opened it up and was shuffling the contents around, till he found what he was looking for. Jeff had sidled over nearer, so he could hear what was going on. The security guy was holding the “pistol” by the “barrel” with his thumb and first finger, and it was visibly deforming where he held it. He said to Windy, “OK, cowboy. How about you unwrap this for us?” Jeff said that Windy then took it and that you could tell by the look on his face that he had absolutely no idea what this thing was or where it had come from. He started unwrapping it and had gotten three or four layers of the foil off when the smell escaped. The boss said loudly, “STOP! STOP! Don't unwrap any more of that! Come on mister, you're coming with us!” Windy said, “But my flight is boarding!” “It doesn't matter. You're coming with us.” And they hustled him off in the middle of a security phalanx, not to be seen before Jeff's flight left.

The two of us have been sitting in the galley while he told this, I'm laughing, he's smiling. “So, what was the outcome on this?”, I asked. He said, “Don't know. Nobody ever heard a thing, and the next time Windy caught the boat, he acted like nothing had ever happened, except for looking daggers at everybody on board for a while. It was beautiful.”

 

The Far End Of The River...

 

At about 1130 on December 13th five years ago, I walked off a boat for the last time, quitting ACBL, a company that I had worked for twice, neither time by choice. The two periods of employment was separated by twenty years and the amazing thing was that in that amount of time, only the faces had changed, it was still a terrible place to work, and both times when we were bought out by them it ruined an already great place to work, Valley Line in 1992, and AEP in 2015. When it was announced in early 2015 that they were buying AEP, my wife and I set and executed plans to have our properties upgraded and for me to be gone by the end of 2016.

 

On the day that I walked off the M/V Cody Boyd for the last time, I stood on the dock at Hennepin and fished this ACBL challenge coin out of my pocket, and challenged it to swim. 

 

It didn't.  :-D

 

I burned my work clothes when I got home.

 

At the day and time that I would have been due back on board, I was sitting in the local Social Security office, getting signed up. So ends 41 years.

 

Since then, I've met and talked with many people that have retired out of a work life in transportation, and the common thread that seems to bind almost all of us together is that we do not miss the job after we leave. Some aspects of the job? Yes, of course. Some of the people that you worked with? Absolutely. But nobody seems to miss the job and especially not (mis)management.

#noregretshere

 

 

 

 

 

DAMMIT!!!

On one of the boats that I worked on, I had a helper who was somewhat below par. He was far more interested in his phone than he was in the workings of the engine room, and I don't think that he ever saw the various piping systems of the boat as complete systems, but just as a collection of random pipes and valves.

Anyway, at noon watch change on the day in question, I had a few small jobs lined out for him, the primary one being to change the filters in the potable water system. We had a great filter setup on the water system by then, it delivered first-rate water quality and required little maintenance, mostly just changing the four 20 inch particle and carbon filters monthly, and that took about half an hour to forty five minutes, tops.

Changing the filters was a straightforward job. First, you opened the system bypass valve so that the supply to the boat was uninterrupted while you were doing the filter change, and then you closed the inlet and outlet valves to isolate the filters from pressure so that you could remove the filter housings and change the filters.

I went over it with him and didn't think too much about it, as I had done an OJT training on this with him in the past for doing the complete job, including the bypass and isolation valves. A leisurely lunch was next, and then six hours off watch for me. This included a shower and a nap, and the shower was first.

We had a communal shower on that boat. Jeffboat, the builder, must have believed that towboat crews had enlisted in the navy as they only built boats with navy style communal showers. You didn't linger in there, you scrubbed yourself and moved on as other people had to use the shower stall or the toilet.

I gathered up my kit and went forward, got undressed, and the water temperature adjusted, and stepped in the shower. I got myself wetted down, and started soaping up my hair with the shampoo, and I had just got to the point of rinsing out my hair when the shower head let out a sigh, and the flow dribbled off to...nothing.

WTAF?
I had a good idea of what had just happened, and I knew it would be a half hour wait if I did nothing, but right then, a wet hen had nothing on me in the mad department. Groping around, I found my towel and wiped as much of the lather out of my hair and eyes as I could manage, wrapped the towel around my middle, and stomped off to rectify the situation so I could finish my shower.

This involved going aft through the quarters companionway, through the upper engine room, and then forward on the port main deck to the deck locker and then down the stairs to the forward hold, where the water system bits were located.

All three of the deck crew were in the deck locker when I stomped in, in bare feet with my hair still soaped up and the towel around my middle, and no glasses. They took one look at me and fled, figuring that it was going to be a bloodbath that they did not want to be witness to down below when I made it to the foot of the stairs.

I made the 180 degree turn at the foot of the stairs, and when my helper saw me, he turned grey. I didn't say a word, just motioned him out of the way, stepped around him and set the valves for bypass, turned the pump back on, and went back to the shower.

Not a word was said about the whole incident at evening watch change, and the problem was never repeated.

I found out that it's hard to stomp on a steel deck in your bare feet and get any effect to speak of, and this illustration sums up the whole situation nicely. :-)
(Thanx and a tip of the hat to Bill Watterson.)

 

 

Rail And River Transportation Meet

This is one of those things that sounds just a little bit too outlandish to be true, but it is. Back in the 1990s, I rode the M/V Rusty Flowers with the mate and the relief captain from the M/V Clyde Butcher, they told me of their experiences, but the outlandishness of the accident had reached me long before I worked with them. If you doubt me on this one, do a google search for “train hits towboat wisconsin”, and you should get a short Journal Of Commerce article about it. I can no longer find the accident report on the NTSB website.

Anyway, here we go...

Towboats regularly have to wait their turn for lockage. Above and below each lock, there are agreed-upon areas where they can push or back their tow into the bank, and wait on traffic and their turn at the lock. This brings us to the star of this tale, the Motor Vessel Clyde Butcher. The Clyde was owned by the American Commercial Barge Line and had been built by their subsidiary shipyard, Jeffboat, in 1966. Back then, it ran the Upper Mississippi through the navigation season, and elsewhere during the winter.

This tale takes place on the Upper Mississippi, upstream of Lock 5A, near Fountain City, Wisconsin, early on the morning of July 8, 1991. The dam spans the river, and the lock is approximately in the middle of the river. As there is no place for southbound traffic to wait immediately above the lock, they back in along the bank on the Wisconsin side of the river to wait. That side of the river is also the Burlington Northern (now it's BNSF) railway's mainline between Chicago, and Saint Paul, Minnesota, and this line sees a considerable amount of train traffic.

The Clyde was southbound with a full tow of fifteen loaded barges, and they had to wait on northbound boats to complete their lockage, so they backed in along the bank by the BN trackage on the Wisconsin side of the river. When the northbound boat cleared, the Clyde attempted to back out into the channel, but couldn't. They had developed a bank suction.

This occurs when a tow of fully loaded barges sets tightly against the bank, and then, when the boat tries to move the tow away from the bank, it can't develop enough “twisting force” to overcome the weight of the water on the outside of the tow to allow the water to flow in on the side facing the bank.

A good way to overcome this is to knock out (i.e. disconnect the boat from the tow) and move the boat to the channel side stern corner of the tow, put a capstan line on it, and then pull at right angles to the stern of the tow. This develops much more usable pulling power, but it takes time and effort to do this.

This isn't what the pilot of the Clyde chose to do. For some reason. he was allergic to the idea of knocking out and pulling at right angles. What he did do was to put the flanking rudders (you use those to steer when you're backing up) hard down to port, and backed on it full astern.

The problem here is that this doesn't develop enough force to overcome the bank suction, and the full discharge from both propellers was directed right onto the bank, which eventually started eroding it. Bear in mind that there's a heavily used double track railroad mainline on top of this bank. 

The pilot kept it up, backing full astern on both engines, for two and a half hours. More and more of the bank was being washed away by the water coming out of what amounted to two 2500 horsepower pumps with impellers that are nine feet in diameter. The bank kept falling into the river, and the pilot kept doing the same thing...

Sammy, the mate that I rode the Rusty Flowers with, was standing on the stern corner of the tow, telling the pilot what was going on by radio, and getting no acknowledgment. He knew this was serious enough that he went to the wheelhouse to talk to the pilot. He pointed out what was going on, telling him he was endangering the railroad. He was ignored, the pilot wouldn't even look around to see what was happening. Sammy went back to the tow and continued to radio the damage being done.

His last radio transmission to the wheelhouse was this: “I am standing here, looking at ties and rail hanging in thin air.” The pilot kept backing on it full astern.

 

This is the accident area as seen from Route 35, with a stopped BNSF train. You can see the dam, and the lock is just to the right of the dam, where you can see the radio tower and crane boom.

 

Shortly after this exchange, a deckhand that was watching from the second deck screamed, “HERE COMES A TRAIN!!!” Yep, the inevitable... A manifest freight, being pulled by two locomotives, running southbound at 42 miles an hour.

The lead locomotive made it over the washout, but the trailing locomotive and the train did not. The trailing locomotive and about thirteen cars of the train came crashing down the bank. The locomotive plowed its way up the port side of the boat from the rudder room almost to the galley, tearing open the side of the deckhouse all the way.

The chief engineer had been back in the rudder room, doing some maintenance on the boat's air compressors. He saw what was coming, and ran as fast as he could for the main deck accommodations. As he was yanking open the door into the quarters from the forward engine room, rocks, wood, and dirt were hitting him in the back. It was lucky for him that he was up; if he had been off watch and in bed, he would have been dead, his quarters were a small cabin and the engineer's booth on the port side of the main deck between the rudder room and the engine room. His bunk was on the outboard bulkhead that was shredded by the locomotive.

A couple of the rail cars crashing down the bank were lumber racks. The deckhand who was up on the second deck of the Clyde saw what was coming, and decided that now was the time to terminate his contract to ride that boat, and he dove into the river from the second deck on the channel side. The second deck ended up heaped with lumber.

When the trailing locomotive was done wreaking havoc on the deckhouse of the Clyde, it ended up in the river alongside the boat. Its fuel tank was torn open during the crash, so the diesel fuel was leaking into the river.

Among the rail cars were a couple more boxcars loaded with butter. Nobody that I talked with was sure how it started, but somehow, the spilled butter caught fire, so now there was an honest to god butter fire melting and burning the butter, and setting wood and paper on fire as well. (Only in Wisconsin...) A Coast Guard fireboat was dispatched to the scene from Dubuque, Iowa to help fight the fires and boom off the oil in the water.

The deckhand that jumped suffered some minor injuries, he was treated and released from a local hospital, as was one of the rail crew who was aboard the lead locomotive. Other than that, nobody was hurt. The deckie did cause a bit of a panic, as nobody could find him for a while.

The railroad had to shut down its mainline for a couple of days for clearing debris and repairs, and the Coast Guard shut down nine miles of river for two days as well.

I don't know about the damage to the trailing locomotive, but it had to be substantial. The Clyde Butcher had lost its air compressors in the crash, so it was immobilized and had to be towed downriver to the St. Louis area for repairs. It did go back into service after the repairs.

After everything shook out, the Coast Guard and the Corps Of Engineers made that waiting area a caution zone. You can still see the notation on the Upper Mississippi chart for the area. It's still on Chart 32; a purple box on the right hand edge of the chart that reads,

Critical Zone;

Potential Railroad

Trackbed Erosion

728.8 -729.3 L

 

The relevant section of Upper Mississippi River navigation chart #32.

 

 

A Journal Of Commerce article that I was able to find had put a thumbnail estimate of damages of at least $1.0 million for the railroad alone.

The pilot was not fired for this colossal piece of bad judgment. The company lawyers convinced his bosses that firing him would be an admission of guilt, so he continued to work there. He did earn a new nickname only used behind his back, however. 

“Choo-Choo”...

CSX was the majority owner of ACBL while I worked for them (That time. But that's another river story.). I was living in Utica, Illinois at the time I rode a trip with Sammy and the relief captain of the Clyde. I had just come home from that trip, and I was researching a compressed air drain system that I had built intending to patent it. I wanted to look over a locomotive's air drain system, so I stopped by the CSX depot in Ottawa to ask if I could go on the property to look over a locomotive's drain system. The trainmaster was in. I introduced myself and told him that I worked for “the barge line”. He immediately perked up. “Do you know anything about an ACBL towboat getting hit by a BN train over on the Mississippi?”, he asked. I replied, “Is there any coffee to spare in that thermos?” “Yep!” “Pour me a cup and I'll tell you about it, I just got off the boat, and I worked with two of the crew of the Clyde this trip.” He poured, and I told him this story. When we were done, he let out a little whistle and said, “A railroad suing a railroad... Do you have any idea of how long that this will be dragged through the courts?” I assured him that I had no idea. He said, “Lawyers will be hired by both roads, work their whole careers and retire before this is settled.” I never was able to find out if he was right.

https://www.joc.com/train-derails-river-closing-upper-mississippi-bn-main-line-cargo-butter-wood-set-alight_19910709