by Captain Lee
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To my lovely bride, Mary Anne, who has been through it all and put up with all of it through the years.
It’s been a long and crazy ride, she just made it easier and a lot more worthwhile.
Chapter 1
When the Horse Is Dead, Stop Kicking It
I didn’t know why the bottom rung of the ladder worried me. The bottom one was the easy one. It was the one on the top that was going to kill me.
“Another day, another dollar,” I said to myself, planting my foot on that bottom rung. It had no give in it, comforting since it was taking my weight and 40 pounds of welding gear. I swung my lifeline around a steel cable running up the length of the ladder, clipping in and moving up. The clamp was designed to allow movement upward but arrest any movement downward. A good policy to have. Only 400 feet to go to the top of the water tower.
I was working for Chicago Bridge & Iron, an outfit that built all kinds of enormous structures. For some jobs, it was smokestacks. For others, it was nuclear-containment vessels. Other times it was water towers. The one thing in common—it was all high steel, giant fabrications that required working in the sky between 400 and 1,000 feet up. Not many people worked that high, and I’d been more than a bit scared the first time I saw how far you could drop, but that was just motivation for me. Since I was a kid, I always wanted to go places other guys were afraid to go, do things others couldn’t or wouldn’t do. The fear let me know that it was worth my time, let me know the task passed my test. Now it was up to me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to quit. Nothing was going to kick my ass. I loved forcing myself out of my comfort zone.
The money wasn’t too bad, either.
Working as a welder was a good job in 1975. They paid me $9 an hour to climb those ladders and fuse one piece of metal to another. That was enough in earnings in one day for a week’s worth of groceries for me, my wife, and our five kids. I’d have a month’s rent in just a few days of work. Not too shabby for a twenty-five-year-old with a growing family. The dangers didn’t even seem like dangers when you’re twenty-five. Mortality is something that happens to the other guy. The thing was, sometimes, you worked side-by-side with the other guy. And so did he. Hell, I was 10 feet tall, invisible and bulletproof—just ask me. That was the only time in my life that I knew everything. Been learning ever since.
Accidents happened. They happened with all too much regularity. Hell, in our southeast division, there were 600 boilermakers and laborers, and we’d lose 1 percent of those guys every year to accidents. Six men every single year. Breaking safety lines. Equipment failure. Acts of God. Lots of things can happen to a man at 800 feet in the air when he’s holding a welding rod that burns at over 3,000 degrees, and not a lot of them good. A one-inch air arc used for melting steel can reach minimum temps of 6,500 degrees Fahrenheit. One time, a foreman hired his son, only eighteen, to work the site. He was on the ground, not even up in the scaffolding, when someone working above somehow lost his grip on a grinder. The machine weighed about 20 pounds, and from where it fell, it took about six seconds to reach the ground. Every second, it just got faster and faster. By the time it hit the kid, that 20-pound grinder was moving at about 130 miles per hour, and it took him out instantly. The ambulance came, took the body away. His dad never came back to the site. The rest of us? We waited for over an hour before the accident was squared away, then we got back to work. It sounds cold, but there was nothing else but work, and that was exactly what we needed at that point in time. Stay occupied.
I kept climbing up the ladder. I didn’t want to think about the bad things that could happen, I just wanted to think about my safety and my job, what I needed to do. You overthink it, you can lose it. I’d seen that happen, too. Guys who were just like me, guys with more experience than me, who would go up every day to the job and then, one day—BOOM—it would just hit them like a flash of light: the danger, the risk. They’d grab on to the scaffolding with white knuckles, grip so tight you’d have to pry their fingers off with a crowbar. They couldn’t climb down. The foreman would have to call 911 so they could come up with a basket and lower them down to the ground. One bad day could be the last day they’d ever spend on the high steel. The ability to focus was paramount.
Guys who’ve never done the work don’t quite understand it. They might think that climbing a ladder fifty stories is just like climbing a ladder to fix their gutters, just a bit higher up. But it’s not that way. When you’re climbing something that big, going that high, you look up, and the ladder doesn’t just look like it goes up, it feels like it’s angling backward as you climb. So, you focus on the next rung and try not to think about the ladder bending backward, or then you may white knuckle the next grip, and they’d have to send a basket to get your dumb ass down.
I finally reached the top. It was so high up, I could literally see some very low-lying clouds below me, could see birds flying beneath me. When I first started the work, it took me six months before I was able to feel comfortable moving around. The first ninety days, anything that didn’t move, I tied off to it. I was taking no chances. Of course, it slowed me down considerably, but I didn’t care; I wanted to feel safe. Now I felt more secure. I walked to my spot, calm but aware. My workstation was waiting—a ladder hanging out over the rest of the world, anchored in by another one of the crew. These guys were professionals, like me, and they knew what they were doing. Still, it was my life hanging on the end of that ladder and dangling over a 400-foot drop. I gave the welding perch a good once-over. Trust but verify.
I pulled at my collar a little bit to get some more air. I was wearing what basically all the guys wore, a kind of informal welder’s uniform: denim pants, T-shirt under a long-sleeve denim shirt, leather boots, and a leather cape sleeve covering my torso and back, leather sleeves down to the wrists, and welding gloves that went to the elbow. It was a lot of gear to be wearing in Biloxi, Mississippi, in June, but it helped keep you separated from molten metal that might come flying off the structure. We all wore our denim shirts untucked, not because we were slobs, but because you sure as hell didn’t want any red-hot metal getting between your waist and your belt. Same reason why none of us wore lace-up work boots. You wanted to avoid molten slag getting caught in your laces and burning a hole through the top of your foot. If for some reason, God forbid, something got in that boot, we could slip it off without having to cut it off. That’s the sort of thing that could ruin your whole day, not to mention the fact you would never walk again without a limp.
You’d think guys might wear steel-toed boots for the work, something tough that could take a pounding, but no one did. If you had something heavy fall on your foot, and such things weren’t uncommon, you didn’t want a plate of steel over your toes. If you’re wearing just a good leather work boot when a 200-pound piece of metal falls on it, some of those toes are going to break. But if you’re wearing steel-toed boots, the metal’s going to pinch those toes right off. Better a broken toe than a severed one.
After all that climbing and hauling gear to your workstation, that’s when the fun really began: the welding. The welding we did was all stick welding. I started the first pass with a welding rod for mild steel (6010) that held two pieces of me
tal together. Then I finished that with a low-hydrogen rod called 7018, the final interior weld on that seam. I welded uphill, starting at the bottom of the seam and moving upward to the top.
I made each pass until the thickness of the seam was overfilled so another crew, the QA (quality assurance) guys, could grind the weld down flat and X-ray it for flaws. Then I went on the outside of the structure and used a tool called an air arc, cutting out the first pass of 6010 that I’d put in and then welding up the outside of the seam. As soon as I finished the seam, techs came by to prep it for X-ray to see if there were any flaws in the welds. If there were, I’d have to go back in, cut them out, and redo them. On big structures that held a lot of weight and nuclear-containment vessels, they were all 100 percent X-ray work.
We got a bonus of 25 cents for every good foot of weld we put down, but for every bad picture they took they’d penalize us 50 cents and make us stop working, go back, and fix the fuckup. Hey, in the real world, you fuck up, there are consequences. So, if you weren’t laying down new welds, you were losing money. It was called the picture bonus, so on top of the $9 per hour, I could make almost an additional $9 an hour by laying down good welds and not screwing up. If you didn’t do your job well, theoretically, you could end up in the hole, which would lead to your immediate dismissal. The foreman always walked around with a pocket full of cash to pay off slackers and send them down the road. We used to call it two weeks and a road map. Now, that’s incentive. Nobody wanted to lose their job and give up that good money. Hell, when you get paid that well, that’s about a steak dinner for two with all the trimmings and a couple of drinks—every two hours—in a restaurant that a blue-collar guy like me had no business being in. Didn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy it, but my edges were a bit rough.
Speed was important. That’s why I carried my rod bag with another 25 to 30 pounds of welding rod. A can of welding rods weighed about 50 pounds, and I’d carry as much as I could. I wouldn’t waste time going to the toolshed to get more or waiting on ground crew to send up more rods. Welding rods would have to be stored in a rod oven to keep all moisture out of the equation. The humidity would cause you to lay down bad welds and cost you money. All rods exposed longer than a couple of hours had to be put back in the oven to dry out.
Any way I could think of to save time, I’d do it. My lunch “hour” was the five minutes I’d need to shovel down the sandwich and apple I had in my lunchbox. There were no port-a-potties 50 stories up, so while some guys would climb down that ladder to hit the head, other guys would just relieve themselves off the side of the tower. It might sound uncouth, but the time saved could buy a man a nice new pair of boots. Taking a piss was expensive on the high steel. I’d even seen guys take a dump in an empty rod can and then heave it over the side. Worked great, except that one time the wind caught it and ended up spraying everyone’s cars with shit from on high. Brought a literal meaning to the term “shit storm.”
It may sound gross, but time was money. If we finished up the job before schedule and under budget, the crew got to split 40 percent of what we saved. If someone wasn’t cutting it, he was messing with our money, and that would not be tolerated. This could be a problem with new guys. They didn’t know the pace, didn’t necessarily know how we did things, and they could slow us down. On our crew you did your job and did it right or we would make you pay, and it wasn’t going to be pleasant. One time, and only once, a guy was such a damn slacker that the crew waited until he went to the port-a-potties and wrapped a welding rod through the hasp of the lock. Then they had the crane operator lift it up and shake it around before setting it down. We unlocked it, and the newbie came stumbling out, covered in shit and with a brand-new perspective. But a guy would have to really be dragging ass to get a code red like that.
It was thirsty work. I always worked in the southeast, in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia and Florida, because I liked being able to work year-round and not have to worry about bad weather. But that also meant that I was wearing three layers of clothing, including a layer of leather, in Mississippi on a 100-degree day while blasting a steel plate with up to 6,500 degrees of heat. The company always provided salt pills to the crew so we’d retain water. And they’d send up these 10-gallon Igloo coolers full of water and ice so we didn’t pass out. Just doing your job, it was easy to lose 7 pounds a day just from sweating. It sure made a man thirsty. For some, maybe even thirsty for something stronger than water.
And that’s what nearly killed me.
When you’re building something enormous, like a water tower, you have the crane you’re using pull itself up to the next level. The crane climbs up the structure as you complete the lower portions. You’re basically using the crane to disassemble and reassemble itself at a higher point on the structure. We call this “jumping the rig.” We’d finished a lower level and were prepping the jump the rig. We worked it primarily as a three-man job. Two guys would sit on the base of the cage that housed the boom of the crane in wing seats and get raised to the next level, using steel pry bars to push the cage away from the welded seams, so it wouldn’t get hung up. A crane operator sat 50 to 75 yards away, responding to our hand signals to go faster, slower, brake, or whatever we indicated. Crane signals on high steel are all uniform, so it’s not something that you just make up as you go along.
I took one wing seat, and my brother-in-law, Scotty, took the other one. Scotty had been the one to help get me the job on the site.
“Watch that seam,” he said, pushing out his pry bar.
That’s when the world started to fall away.
The cage just started sliding down the cable that had been pulling us up. It wasn’t a freefall, but we were going down, and picking up speed.
My right hand went to the straps holding me in place, as did Scotty’s. We only had two options: We could stay on and hope that the cage offered some protection or cushion once we hit bottom. Or we could try to peel out and jump, maybe grab a cable on the way down.
Either way, the odds were good we were going to die.
We dropped about 50 feet in the three seconds before the brakes re-engaged. Longest three seconds of my life. It wasn’t a sharp shock, not the immediate snap of a hangman’s noose. The brake was designed to arrest a fall more gradually, so it wouldn’t tear the equipment apart. And thank God it was, or the impact might have broken our backs.
Scotty and I caught our breaths.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. You?” I replied.
“Still alive,” he said.
In most places, you fall five stories, the boss would say, “Take the rest of the day.” Not us. We unstrapped ourselves and finished jumping the rig before heading down to solid ground.
It had only been about forty-five minutes, but that was plenty of time for Scotty and me to get pissed. You start with the adrenaline of almost dying, and then you add the realization that someone was responsible for what happened. Then that adrenaline is transformed from “survival” to “payback.”
“You guys okay?” one of the other guys, Bill, asked.
“Getting there,” I said.
“Shit, when I saw Clarence Irishing up his coffee this morning, I figured he was just feeling cold,” Bill said. It was only a ten-man crew. If one guy heard or saw something, we’d all know it eventually.
“Yeah, Biloxi in summer can practically give you fucking frostbite,” I said.
Goddamn Clarence. He was the crane operator. Classic Southern good ol’ boy. Not much between the ears. He’d put whiskey in his coffee, and he must have let his foot slip off the crane’s brake. And almost killed us.
Scotty started running his hand over his 5-pound sledgehammer like he was warming it up. We’d use the tool to beat down bull pins that we used for fitting, but I think Scotty now had another beat down in mind.
As soon as we got to the deck, Scotty had one thing on his mind. He slid that sledge out of his tool belt and made a beeline for Clarence. The crane operator was an
older guy, maybe forty-five or so, and if Scotty had his way, he wasn’t going to get one minute older.
Before Scotty could cave his skull in, he got wrapped up by our foreman, Carl Dover. Scotty was no stick figure. He was about 6'1", 195 pounds of solid muscle, chiseled by years of working high steel, but Carl had about 2 inches and 30 pounds on him. Carl was one tough son of a bitch, definitely the kind of guy you’d want on your side in a fight. The edges are pretty rough on boilermakers. Redneck boilermakers make New York City construction workers look like crossing guards. No offense to the trades in New York, but these guys were something you had to see to believe. We never worked by local union laws. We were part of the international union and rules were different, if they existed at all. These guys would fight at the drop of a hard hat. Hell, sometimes they would even throw the hat to get things going.
“Easy, Scotty,” Carl said. Scotty was no shrinking violet, but he wasn’t so lost in his adrenaline rage that he wanted to mix it up with Carl.
“Clarence is out of here. I gave him his walking papers,” Carl said. It was enough to get Scotty to holster his sledge.
It got my heart rate up, that’s for sure. I was pretty shaken up. So shaken up that I took half an hour to let the tremors go away before going back up top to work. You can’t make good welds while you’re shaking, but you can’t earn any bonus money if you’re sitting one out. That’s just how it worked. There’s an accident, there’s an injury, you treat it, you fix the equipment, and you get back to work.
And it’s not like this put the fear of God into the rest of the crew. It was like playing a football game. A guy gets a concussion, tears an ACL, or dislocates a shoulder—that’s rough, it’s unfortunate, but that’s his problem. Should have moved a little faster, should have practiced more, should have seen it coming. It’s not a problem that’s going to get solved by the rest of the team quitting.
