Worked at St. Marys Kansas (collins station?)....power house job back in the 70s....
Kansas is a right to work state, so I had to work for bosses that used to be butchers, bakers and what not....they got the job through relatives there. The iron work was so miscalculated, misfit that most was welded in place...the major contractor just couldn't seem to understand the bolt holes were suppose to line up...brother. Don't know if anyone around the area remembers but someone got so fed up with the lack of safety they brought in a military tear gas bomb and set it off...the news showed all these school buses taking people to Topeka. The saftey guy there was an accountant that would put on his "doctors hat" when someone showed up like I did, with something in my eye. Add to this the innovative methods for construction...on boiler work a hydro is done on the tubes after welding. Makes sense because the whole thing is covered in insulation and alumium. Some genius decided to go ahead and start insulating without doing the hydro....had a piece of equipement that was supposed to find leaks through all the coverings...of course they didn't account for major leaks that happened during the hydro...all the insulation had to be torn off and replace due to all the leaks.
I remember reading a union mag one day in the trailer during lunch....had a couple of pictures of a construction site in texas...about a 10 acre site with apprx. 5 stories of red iron. One night the operator (non union) forgot to set the brake on the cab and the wind came up that night and swung the boom hard into the iron. The result was a total collapse of all the beautiful set steel. And that was the problem, to meet schedule the scab ironworkers were only putting a few bolts at a time at the connections..thus it wasn't stabilized correctly.
The bottom line is we all paid through higher utility costs and what not due to the completely nonprofession manner of non union construction.
The major contractor at the St. Mary power house was Daniels and the one in texas was brown and root.
Of course I'm sure there are really great non union workers out there.
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