[Les Paul]

The old boilers were used once a year during turnarounds on the big boilers. They should have been scrapped and condemned. As it was the only way to set the safties is to get the pressure up to 600 and see if it lifts there.

Since I was inside a control room I was spared the hearing loss. I'm pretty deaf anyway. The people that were outside mostly did have their eardrums burst. There were some guys that had earplugs in and had to have them surgically removed.

Had the explosion happened 8 minutes later I would have been getting readings in a lab directly below the blast. The building was about 1 foot high at 3:53. There was a toilet that I often used on the way to the lab. That would have sucked to had my pants down and been blown away. One of the guys that didn't make it was about 10 feet from that toilet. The top of his head was lopped off by flying debris. He was one of the funniest guys I ever knew. RIP.

I do have pictures somewhere. I was on a rescue crew that went in the next day to look for more bodies and snuck a camera in there. At that point even though they told us not to do it I didn't really care because I never dreamed they would rebuild the plant. It was over 18 months before the main parts of the plant came back on line.

They brought in several blast/explosion experts from over the world to estimate just how powerful the blast was. All the cars in the parking lot had their windows blown out and roofs caved in. I had just had my car repainted. The blast knocked buildings off their foundations 6 miles away. The explosion was heard 45 miles away. There was a pickup right under the blast that looked like it had been in one of those crushers.

One of the more outspoken and notorius operators there that day was quoted in the Sunday paper the next day that if it had happened on a Friday they would have been hauling bodies out with a front end loader. It was true, but the Company sure didn't like reading that.

As far as power plants being dangerous. Yea. We often get saftey advisories from other plants about accidents. In one there was a gasket that blew out on the main 1500 steam line. The steam blew directly into the control room par broiling 12 people. You never hear about that stuff on the news but it happens.