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University furnace job is to 'boil water,' but that doesn't mean there's no pressure By
Lara Gale
Five fire-breathing monsters live on the side of Utah State University's Old Main Hill, just a little north and west of the Haight Alumni House. Their masters say they're fairly well-behaved, for monsters. We feed Œem, water Œem. They're noisy and stinky and make a huge mess, but we keep Œem happy and they're harmless, mostly. Mostly? Well, if you know what you're doing, nothing's going to go wrong. And if you don't? "It
wants to turn into steam One of these guys blows up, could flatten, oh, a city block. Probably Old Main, the Alumni House, that church across the street and anybody in between. "But it's not going to happen," Dave Reimer says with a laugh, motioning to the three computer screens in front of him: two diagrams, labeled in bold red Boiler #1 and Boiler #3, and a paused game of Ages of Empires. He clicks around the first two, bringing up Boiler #2 and Boiler #5. The screen is lighted with one-dimensional maps of primary-colored pipes, pumps and tanks the vital organs of the machines that provide steam to heat some 3.2 million square feet of buildings on the USU campus. That number at the top? That's the number of pounds per square inch of pressure inside the steam tank. It has to be around 85. That number to the left? That's how many inches of water are in the boiler. Has to be about 26. Nothing flashing, nothing beeping, nothing spewing flames nothing going to happen. He leaves Ages of Empires alone. You can't talk and play Ages of Empires. Reimer is sitting in a quiet rectangular office. The door separating him from the heat and noise and coal dust of the plant has a sticker on the window that says, "The Heartbeat of Utah State University," which he watches through the walls of windows surrounding him. Reimer is one of 10 boiler technicians who share the responsibility of meeting the plant's round-the-clock demands, and one of two who stay up all night with it. Three nights a week, he gets out of bed when most people are coming home from work, heads to work when most people are sitting down to dinner, and spends the 12 hours between sunset and sunrise watching for monsters to go bump in the night. Reimer leans over to see what's being written about him and says to be sure and add somewhere in there that it's not at all interesting. "My job is to babysit boilers," he says. "My job is to boil water." Directly in front of him, big red Boiler #3 chugs away, quiet from this side of the glass. Only the subtle rhythmic pedaling motion of three joints above the stove door gives any indication that the steel contraption is doing anything at all. Reimer knows what it's doing. The other boilers have been switched to burning mainly natural gas, but # 3 still consumes roughly 60 tons of coal a day. Three grates shift batches of coal through the flames toward the front of the boiler until they're dumped off as a pile of ashes that Reimer will have to sweep up before his shift ends. Sixty tons of coal, enough to fill seven dump trucks, make a lot of ashes. A team of investigators from workers compensation visited the plant a year ago to find out why so many employees were taking leave from work for back problems. Now they have back-support belts to wear when they shovel the heavy, oily black ash, though it doesn't help with carpal tunnel syndrome, the second-worst health problem among this plant's technicians. Reimer has never had carpal tunnel, or back problems. Or anything. He reaches behind the computer and comes up dangling a little tan box from a silver chain. He touches the button on the box lightly with his thumb. "The university police gave us these. We're supposed to wear them anytime we're out there," he says with a scoff. A lot of maintenance and inspecting goes into keeping this heart beating, often requiring technicians to crawl under the boilers and inside tunnels, sometimes with nothing but a grate between them and a one-story fall into the guts of the machinery. When Reimer was hired to the night shift nine years ago, young, married, fresh from engineering school in Canada, he was gung-ho about maintenance. No boiler was going to go blow up during his shift. "Then one of the guys said, ŒYou know, if something happens while you're under the boiler, no one's ever going to find you,'" Reimer pauses to let that sink in, then laughs. "I was like oh, I hadn't thought of that." Now he leaves the more risky maintenance to the day-shift guys, who work in pairs. Night-shift technicians work alone, which is why the emergency police beeper. They're also supposed to check in with the university police every two hours. "And if we don't, they're supposed to call back within like 15 minutes or something, and send someone out if we don't answer," he says, rolling his eyes. "No one has ever called here." All the precautions came about four years ago when a technician in his mid-60's died and wasn't found until the day shift came in the next morning. "He died of a heart attack, though, so . . ." Reimer bats at the tan box and watches it swing. Are the university police even hooked up to the beeper anymore? He catches it mid-swing. Should he? He does. And picks up the phone immediately. "Hi, did you guys just get a beep from the heat plant?" Yeah, they've got the fire alarm going off. "Sorry about that." No problem. He hangs up laughing. "Oh, it works." It's not that he doesn't respect the power of the boilers. It's easy to blow up boilers, he says. Used to happen all the time, way, way back before primary-colored diagrams on computer screens. One little screw-up, like letting the boiler run low on water, could land the plant in his lap. The water in the tank is boiling under about 85 pounds of pressure from steam; about as much pressure as is created by a hand pressing hard on a table. Under 85 pounds of pressure, water boils at about 300 degrees. If the boiler runs low on water, the steel pipes aren't insulated from the 700-degree fire, and steam leaks out as they crack and split. Suddenly under no pressure, the 300-degree water has an identity crisis. "It wants to turn into steam all of it. Like now." Which means, in a word, ka-boom. "It could happen, but this place . . ." Reimer shakes his head. "You'd have to do every single thing possible wrong. And be asleep." All the workings of every boiler, once monitored by an analog dinosaur, were programmed into a modern computer complete with trouble warnings and back-up warnings and safety measures in case no one caught the back-up warnings, and back-up safety measures in case those failed. Reimer knows better than to trust it absolutely, though. Just yesterday two new guys were making routine rounds in the plant and saw a huge puddle near a boiler. No lights, no alarms, just a puddle. Good old-fashioned common sense kicked in and the men shut the boiler off, maybe minutes before hairline fractures in the dry, overheating pipes would have cracked open. Concerned representatives of the computer company that installed the safety bells and whistles found they had missed a connection or two. Oops, sorry about that. Could have blown up the plant. "But, it didn't," Reimer says. There are other ways to blow up the plant. Meltdown. Sometimes the grates stop shuffling and the coal in back piles higher and higher and melts and melts until the entire grate is soldered with one great lump of coal. If the guy on duty doesn't notice and the grate starts melting, the plant blows up. Coal dust. You get too much crushed coal, the dust gets in and makes the fire burn hotter and higher. If the guy on duty doesn't notice and steel parts inside the boiler melt down, the plant blows up. It never happens. The only thing that ever stops these boilers are power outages. "Power outages are nothing," Reimer says. He's not afraid of the dark, and even if he were, he would only sit in terror for 10 minutes before the generator out back kicked on. The place used to freak him out, he says. "It's pretty dark and you're pretty alone here at night," he says. At the far east end of the plant, where rusted rebar and bolts are bared through the crumbling walls they have been holding together since 1911, stubby cement stairs lead to the dark, jagged mouth of a tunnel separated from the plant by a dimly outlined gate. The tunnel runs for miles beneath the campus. It's there for maintenance on the steam pipes, but generally technicians avoid it; they'd rather dig than be caught dead in that old thing. Most traffic comes from trouble-making students, which prompted the gate. Reimer usually leaves the office light off and window-covers drawn to deter them. Nobody seems to know anything about the heat plant unless they've happened on it by accident, he says. He's kicked out a boy frantic for a place to type his term paper, students ducking out of the rain, bored kids looking for trouble. "But if you ask a student where the heat's from when they walk into a classroom out of freezing weather, they don't know," he said. Reimer admits sometimes the darkness and the rhythm of the machines and the glow of the screen put him to sleep in his chair. It never lasts more than 10 minutes, and anyway, he would wake up if something went wrong. The slightest clink, just a tiny clank even on this side of the windows, he trusts his ear more than the most advanced primary-colored diagram technology in the world -- he would be at the machine's side in a moment, inspecting for trouble. "When I first got here, the old guys would say, ŒYep, you get so you can hear the plant.' Riiiight," Reimer sighs, with a smile, and scratches his five o'clock shadow. "I guess that's how long I've been here. I know what they mean." He never thought he'd be at the plant this long. He doesn't even like engineering. He got a half-tuition waiver for his job and started taking classes to add to his associate's in engineering six years ago. "I hated it, hated it," he says. "Chemistry was math, physics was math, math was math." The only part he liked was working with computers. So last year he got his degree in graphic design. The heat plant is going to be demolished and replaced within the next five years by a modern plant with all natural-gas burning boilers, but Reimer hopes he'll have moved on by then. For now he sits in his rectangular office, three screens buzzing at him in the darkness. He scoots his chair a little to the left, clicks the mouse, and starts a really intense game of Ages of Empires.
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