Tubularsock

Dawn was just crossing over into existence when Tubularsock heard a soft rap on the door of his top floor corner office in his underground bunker in Oakland, CA overlooking Washington, D.C.

Immediately after the soft rap a small bundle of papers were slipped under the door and true to form the messenger was so stealth that no traces remained of the visit except the bundle of papers.

 “Drat”! was the expression one would have heard being emitted from Tubularsock’s mouth “but there weren’t nobody around!”

Now Tubularsock has to admit that when it comes to Steamfitters and Boilermakers Tubularsock has limited exposure of just what they do on the job.

The only knowledge of steamfitting is when Tubularsock goes to the WestEnd Gym and attempts to fit into their rather small steam room. And as far as boilermaker all you have to do is bring up Dick Cheney’s name and it makes-Tubularsock-boil. So lets call this for what it happen to be ……… limited knowledge and experience.

 Well lucky for you and Tubularsock someone who does know the ins and outs of the Steamfitters and Boilermakers Trades has come to the rescue.

 Stamboul is a retired Boilermaker. He was kind enough to send Tubularsock the following information and it is a fascinating peek into refinery work.

Also Tubularsock in his previous blog post had stated that at times to save money the oil refinery will have the workers install smaller pipes in the run. This was incorrect. What they do do is slip in a lower schedule (thickness) pipe as Stamboul will explain. All pipes in a refinery are required to have a proper schedule (thickness) as designed for their use.

 Thank you Stamboul for this contribution and your insights.

 Let me tell you a story: After WW-2, many of the local home boys returned to Richmond, Martinez, Concord, Pittsburg and Antioch. Many were Italian and Portuguese and the refineries in the bay area put them to work. Back then all the refineries had excellent training programs and they all had their own Boiler shops on the premises. The new hires worked an 8 hour day then went to training school in the refineries for another two hours with pay. After a five year apprentice program where they were trained to be Boilermakers and steamfitters on the job, they graduated and were master mechanics.

 

When I broke into the trades in the late 70’s these men were unit foremen’s and supervisors. Working out of the Boilermaker’s Union for Union contractors hired by the refineries to do maintenance work, I came across these old paisans in the various units I worked in. Here is what I observed about them: they knew there units backwards and forwards; they were master mechanics, and believed in union craftsmanship and would never hire non-union workers to repair their units; they were hard headed son of a bitches and yelled all the time, but if you worked hard and knew your shit, they would back you 100% and finally, they believed in running maintenance and were constantly repairing their units when things went wrong. One more thing about them, they were able to make decisions on the spot and most of the time they were right.

 

Things changed around 1985. The refineries force retired all these guys, imported crackers from Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana to run these units. These jerks didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, didn’t have the nuts to make any decisions without checking first with Houston or wherever and ran these units into the ground.

 

The refineries here made a concerted effort to take maintenance work away from the unions and hire nothing but non-union contractors. These contractors in competition with each other bribed the unit foremen and I personally witnessed this myself at Chevron, Shell and Tosco. The refineries took a position of no more standing maintenance work in the units, and let the units go to hell until they exploded and then let the insurance pay for the repair.

 

I’m not going to get into it, but I worked many of the explosions that killed workers especially at Tosco and the causes were mostly utilizing the wrong schedule wall thickness of the pipe in the repair.  

 

No one puts the wrong size pipe in, but they do cheat by using the wrong schedule and bribing the inspectors who x-ray the pipe.