Mrs. Albright over at
Real Housewives of Oklahoma wants to know what our worst job ever was. My first thought was, "I have never had a bad job." Then I thought, well wait a minute...
My second job out of college was working as the Plant Process Engineer for a large natural gas processing plant in a small town in east Texas for a large independent oil company. It was the late 1970's and the first oil boom was in full swing and things were wild.
The Plant Superintendent was a drunk and on the take. The Area Manager was in way over his head. The plant was old, overloaded, and very profitable. Shoot, everything connected with the business was profitable at the time.
I worked there for about nine months until I got transferred to another plant located near Houston.
In those nine months, the plant had nine fires. Eight of those fires didn't hurt anybody.
One of the fires was a propane vapor flash in our refrigeration compression building. Three guys were walking into the building when the propane vapor in it ignited. There was no explosion just a flash like when you are trying to light your grill and it takes a while and then it goes "whuff" and it lights. Only this was on a lot bigger scale.
The guy leading the trio was burned very badly on his upper body, hands, face, and neck. He was a new employee only there a few months. He was terminated immediately, probably before the helicopter got him to the burn unit in Dallas. When he got out of the hospital months later the company gave him a contract job as a janitor in the office.
After the accident, something I'll never forget was seeing something that looked like cellophane hanging a metal handrail. I looked at it real close and it had whorls and patterns. I realized that it was the guy's skin from his hands that stuck to the rail as he staggered back out of the building after the flash and grabbed the rail.
The guy behind him was a more veteran employee. He was a Plant Operator which meant that he had to work a rotating shift. His main injuries were to the sides of his face. He was off work for several weeks with his injuries. When he came back, they kept him but made him work shifts even though he asked repeatedly just to work days as working nights caused him too much anxiety. He told me that his skin sounded like bacon in a frying pan when the flash fire happened.
The third guy was the Lead Mechanic. His burns were mainly his hands. They caused him a lot of discomfort. I remember being in the Plant Superintendent's staff meeting where he told the Maintenance Foreman to make sure that the mechanic was not allowed to go inside to warm his hands up in the winter. They were trying to make him retire you see.
I could tell you a lot more but I've probably wrote too much already. I was not happy with the slipshod half ass maintenance and operation of the place and the overheated concentration on production at the expense of safety. I was able to finagle myself a better job (I'm real good at finagling!) into a much safer situation
That company eventually got bought out by another company and the plant was spun off to yet another company. The Gas Processing industry is very safety oriented now. Most companies keep the safety department's management totally apart from the operations management so there is not the pressure to continue unsafe situations. Plus there are lots more Federal and State regulation of safety. Things are night and day compared between now and then.
I became an Operations Manager in Oklahoma in the mid 1980's. I only had one lost time injury among my 55 guys and gals during my tenure (which is one injury too many, so I'm not bragging.) I'm not sure how good a boss I was but my biggest fear was having to call somebody's wife or parent to tell them that their husband or son was hurt. I never had to do that (the one injury was a sore back) and I'm grateful for that.
Go check out the RHOK Stars. Tell them what your worst job was.
