Back in those days I was still working on my degree, and if I wasn’t at university picking up units, you’d likely find me working in the trade, if there was a job to be had, which often enough there was. Short jobs fit the plan, shutdowns during semester breaks or over long weekends when an emergency repair came up or machinery needed to be swapped out and brought back into production as quickly as possible. Study and work, idea and action, braided together and it was an agreeable way to live. At Berkeley you could drop out, drop back in, take classes across departments, across schools, take just six units a semester, if that’s what worked for you. Rent was affordable, tuition was practically free, and student debt, at least as organized and sold by banks, didn’t exist. It did take longer to finish, but for me the degree itself wasn’t what mattered, and as for time and the future, these were vague and hypothetical concepts to me back then. Then along came what looked like a nice little one-day job welding pipe and it was here that my six work partners and I came this (thumb and index finger showing a sliver of light) close to losing our lives in a massive explosion.
There was no sign of anything amiss when I went to the Steamfitters Hall to pick up my dispatch. As I paid my dues I spotted George, the business agent, through the window and we chatted for a few moments. He explained that the job was at a plant where they did what’s called fuel finishing, which is extracting different octane levels out of the feed to present as three separate grades at the pump. Engineering had called for a branch to be added to the piping in the process unit where this was done. Seven of us would be on the job: three welders and three fitters out of our hall, and a crane operator out of the Operating Engineers. Four to midnight, one shift only. “Just right for you, short-timer, right?” said George, leaning through the window and prodding my shoulder with his finger. Yes, perfect, and what made it even better was that since it was only a one-day job, I’d keep my place on the list and not get bumped down to the bottom after the job was done.
I drove out to the refinery. Humming its low rumbling vibration, wisps of steam issuing like pennants along its length, it was stretched out like Tolkien’s Smaug along the broad bank of Suisun Bay, where the lower reaches of the Sacramento River join San Francisco Bay. I met the boss, a guy called Benny, who produced the job drawing from the pocket of his canvas jacket and unfolded it across the hood of his truck. It was pretty simple: a sixteen-inch-diameter tee, an elbow, a pup (short piece of straight pipe), a flange (steel ring like the brim of a hat with bolt holes to draw it up to another flange), and that was it. Sixteen inch is about like this (arms above head in a circle). We’d go into the system at the valve, lift it out, fabricate the branch, weld the fab back into the system, hang the valve back on at the downstream end, and that was it. Home after midnight, then on to the next.
Benny drove me to the work location, a sandy hollow between a pair of tanks about the size of small apartment buildings. The inert round shapes of the gray-painted piping looked like geology, and with a slice of the Bay visible in the distance, the site was almost like what you’d see on a camping trip, a peaceful, even place on a mild summer afternoon. Then the other hands arrived—a pair of fitters, who set up the horses and began organizing the work area, then Orville, an old fitter who’d been a plant operator at Shell, and then Jim and Floyd, the two other welders. They were clad in distinctive welder garb: starched shirts worn outside the belt, pockets with flaps, straight-leg pants, no-lace boots, caps with deep crowns, all precautions to keep the fire off your neck, out of your hair, out of your ear, out of the creases of your garments while you’re down under the pipe making the joint.
The valve was standing upright in the space like a sentinel, a steel hulk about four feet tall, weighing perhaps five hundred pounds. From Benny’s truck we unloaded the fittings and pipe, a pair of steel horses to support the fabrication, the Milwaukee grinders, the Victor burning torches, a piece of quarter-inch steel plate, and finally three metal-halide lamps, those super-bright lights that you see road workers using on night work, which would be needed after it got dark. We set up the lamps, fired up the Lincoln welding machines, and strung out the welding leads and power cords. We unbolted the valve and lowered it to the ground, communicating with the crane operator using crane signal sign language. The operations people had prepped the job before we got there by blowing it out with steam. I stuck my head in to have a look: echoey, dark, smelling of clean steel, with the faintest tinge of its earlier life with petroleum. Squeaky-clean, and it had to stay that way, so to begin we made a cover out of sheet steel to keep out slag, grit, and grinding dust while the system was open. We bolted this cover on the open flange and started on the sixteen-inch fabrication. Things were going well—sparks were flying, the Milwaukee grinders shrieking, the Lincoln welding machines growling under the labor of their output of voltage, one of them throwing off an occasional speck of soot from a carboned-up head, the halide lamps blazing away.
Hood down, earplugs in to damp out the job racket and block fugitive sparks from rolling into my ear canal, I set about welding the ell to the tee. The outside world was entirely excluded but for the little blue light of the arc gleaming through the dark glass of the hood window, and as I worked the molten metal along the vee of the joint, it was just me and the electricity and the weld. In this small private world I soon fell into an almost meditative state and a kind of detachment set in, with layers of memory and reflection attaching themselves in mental counterpoint to the physical work. A reading in my seventeenth-century seminar, one concerned with fire and transformation, came to me now: Sir Thomas Browne’s “Urn Burial,” a meditation that took off from the discovery in the mid-1600s of Roman relics in Norfolk, in eastern England. These discoveries included bodies in funeral urns but also weapons, coins, bracelets, drinking cups, all the equipment and furniture of a Roman city, rediscovered long after the garrison was abandoned, hidden remains present just three feet below the surface of what later became the city of Norfolk. For thirteen hundred years nobody had an inkling they were there, an unknown world submerged under the visible one. Browne reflects on the long timeline between our world and the Romans’, the short moment between life and death, on worlds superimposed on worlds, of durable things that outlast forests, nations, ancient families, and then on the filigree of the individual experience and sensation of everyday life that dances away in a moment. And expanding on the idea of how, when faced by the inevitability of death, we are indisposed to die, Browne muses on the details of funerary customs of past civilizations and on the properties of bodies when they are embraced and consumed by fire, declaring that the fiery method of disposing of remains is preferable to burial or leaving them to the depredations of dogs, crows, or vultures. To accomplish a cremation properly, some bodies need little or no fuel beyond themselves to sustain the pyre, although others are quite the opposite, he says, citing the example of a corpse in Plutarch that extinguished two pyres when it exploded. And on the point of the imperfect flammability of certain corpses, a woman’s body can be added to an ill-burning pyre because, he alleges, a woman’s body is more combustible than a man’s. It’s an arresting train of thought, all the more memorable because presented in the resonant language of the age of Milton. But at this point I had to pause in my own meditations because I had burned my welding rod down to the nub and needed to replace it.
But as I flipped up my hood and took in the outside world again, I heard a menacing sound. It penetrated my earplugs and the machine clamor of the job. Sss-sss-sss! What could it be? A compressed air leak? A broken air hose? (A Chicago fitting, a piece of steel as big as your fist, can do a lot of damage whipping around in a workspace on the end of a broken hose.) Everyone heard it. We put down our tools and tried to identify the source of the leak. Where could it be coming from? A compressor? On some jobs you have a compressor to break out concrete or power air-driven tools. But on this job we had no need for air tools and no compressor, and in our sandy hollow between the tanks there was no piped-in plant air. Where’s that leak coming from? It was getting louder. It seemed to be coming from behind that dust cover we’d just bolted on the open flange. Louder! SSS!-SSS! Now we could see the cover actually bulging outward under pressure, the plate rattling and trembling against the flange. Then, to my utter disbelief, I saw streams of gasoline beginning to spray out from behind the sheet steel. It was like something in a Kubrick horror movie: you turn on the kitchen faucet and blood comes out. Gasoline was gushing out now.
What had happened, as later became clear, was that the plant operator back in the control house at the refinery, half a mile away, had made a mistake. He’d opened the wrong valve and charged our pipe with gasoline, and with a hundred and twenty pounds of pressure behind it, the charge flew down the pipe, driving a bolus of air toward the steel cover plate, followed by a rush of gasoline.
Now gasoline was shooting out and pooling under our half-built fabrication, and our work area was turning into a gasoline pond. Later I calculated that a few hundred to a couple of thousand gallons were released. The live electric circuits, the power cables, the Milwaukee grinders, the welding leads burdened with their load of live voltage, the burning torches, all were submerged in a deepening pond of gasoline. In the commotion one of the halide lamps had tipped over, and I saw it shining up at me from the bottom of the pond. It was the eeriest thing I ever saw. The entire area was pulsating with fumes, but by some miracle there was no spark.
They say that people at the last moment experience a bright light as they enter into a realm of brilliance. You see it represented in paintings of the Resurrection. Everything I was on the verge of losing flew through my imagination: the trip to Mazatlán with my darling, the books and plays I was destined to write, the steaks and drinks, the big paychecks, the concerts, the dances, the museum trips, the trusting eyes of my child looking up at me, asking, “Why, Daddy?” I was unwilling to accept this outcome. No, I refuse! And yet the Damoclean moment persisted, hanging heavily like a drop of moisture about to fall from a leaf. The entire duration of the almost-disaster was perhaps thirty seconds, but time itself in this moment had become a stretchy membrane that deformed and elongated, until at last I saw the flow diminish. It subsided to a trickle and then stopped altogether, and then the pooled gasoline began to seep away into the sand. Then, toward the end of this eternity, the plant operator, belatedly realizing what he’d done, clattered down to the area in his pickup, white as a ghost, to investigate. He closed the job and sent us on our way. We seven hands got out of there right away, reeking of gasoline. We didn’t look back. The contractor mailed us our checks. There was no debrief, no consult with the hazmat crew, no safety meeting with the general foreman. It was like a bad breakup: slammed doors, dirty dishes on the table, broken dishes on the floor. But we got away with our lives intact.
What did I learn? Well, to take normal precautions, be alert to surroundings, have what’s called situational awareness. Be careful, be prepared, have an escape route, a Plan B. But I’d done all these things and they meant nothing. It hit me that I’d collided with a dimension of life that had been invisible, that prudence and preparation could not have helped me foresee or control, that one is living on the knife-edge of chance, as Sir Thomas himself might have said, and the way forward is an avenue lined with uncertainties.
Potter Wickware’s degrees are in English and cell biology. He is a member of Plumbers & Steamfitters Local 342 in Concord, California.
