"Adapt yourself to the life you have been given; and truly love the people with whom destiny has surrounded you." - Marcus Aurelius
The previous career autobiography post is here.
I took a cold-call from a headhunter in 2010. It was a call that would greatly change the direction of the lives of my family. In the previous post, I noted that the timing of the call was significant. The headhunter called during a point of low morale, company disruption, and management pressure. In that period of dissatisfaction, I decided to interview for the position that he was trying to fill.
The prospective job was in Hermiston, Oregon. The company in Hermiston insisted that the entire family accompany me for the interview. They had previously hired employees who fell in love with the region because it offered fantastic hunting, camping and fishing - only to find that the spouse was utterly miserable due to the remoteness of the place. They called this situation "mall withdrawal", and they wanted to ensure the spouse was on-board with the area.
They provided each of us with airline tickets and lodging for the interview - which went well. All of the people we interacted with were kind, engaged, and gracious. It was a pleasant and unexpected shock, because over the decades we had become used to the opposite behavior. Upon our return to Bakersfield, we had a family meeting to discuss the matter, in the event I was offered a position. My wife, who was born in California and had lived there all her life, said she really liked how nice everyone was, and said "I'm ready to get the f out of here", and our daughter said she was OK with moving - although she later had regrets about leaving all of her friends behind.
This was a huge decision for all of us. I'd worked in Southern California for most of my adult life. All my industry connections and most of my friends were there. My wife's family was there. Our daughter's friends were all there. We were moving a long way - 950 miles (1500km) - to a place where we knew nobody and had no friends at all. It was with a huge amount of trepidation that I accepted the position.
When I turned in my notice at Elk Hills, it was incredibly bittersweet. I was ready to leave Bakersfield - that was long overdue (the air quality is ghastly) - but it also felt like I had stabbed my work family in the back. The HR gal broke down in tears when I told her that I was leaving, and most of the guys were unhappy to see me go as well. It really was a close-knit group there, so on an emotional level it was very tough to say goodbye. It didn't help my feelings of sorrow/regret that several of the issues at the facility that had led me to leave were being resolved by the time I actually left.
So we opened a new chapter in our lives. My wife and daughter stayed behind in Bakersfield until the school year finished and our house sold. I drove to Oregon with a trailer full of household effects to set up living a temporary apartment life. It is a two day drive to reach Hermiston from Bakersfield - I no longer undertake 15 hour-long drives.
I started the job at the Hermiston Generating Plant, and the work part of living in Hermiston was really awesome. I (and my wife and daughter) were warmly welcomed by the families there. I got help moving, got help with storing stuff, and everyone appreciated not having to work extra hard because I was filling an opening that had taken a long time to fill.
I was almost immediately put in the control room of a plant that I'd barely begun working at. It seemed to me that they had a very high level of trust for an outsider. And again, we were welcomed into another large disorganized and dysfunctional family. Life was pretty good at work.
The Hermiston Generating Plant was one of the earliest-built power plants that used GE 7FA gas turbines. When it was built in 1990, it was the flagship of US Generating Company, a subsidiary of Pacific Gas & Electric, the largest electric utility in California. The world is small :) The rated output of the plant is 450 MW.
This plant was arranged in a Dual 1x1 configuration. Each gas turbine drove a generator, and exhausted into a waste heat boiler. Steam from the boiler drove a separate steam turbine. There were two identical stand-alone units, which had a few very minor interconnections for air, water and electrical. For gas turbines, the stacks were quite high, compared to the other places I've worked.
One of the more difficult things I had to adjust to was how slack the emissions limits were compared to California. In California, there was a rolling 15 minute average, and you had to be under the emission limit in each 15 minute period. Loss of ammonia flow to the SCR system would lead to an emissions violation within a couple of minutes. You would be in career-ending trouble if you didn't make the decision to shut down the unit ASAP. No big deal in Oregon, though. You had about four hours to figure out how to get ammonia flowing again.
The plant is a cogeneration plant, which supplies a portion of the steam to a potato processing plant that makes french fries. As a result, the entire area smells like french fries most of the time.
There are a few unusual things about these units, and one of those things is a lack of installed redundant equipment. On each unit, there is a single condensate pump, a single feedwater pump, a single closed cycle cooling pump, and a single circulating water pump. A failure in any one of these critical pumps will take the unit offline. I thought it was odd that they would decide to build such a remote plant with a lack of redundancy.
I guess they figured the other unit offered the redundancy :) In any event, this place had the best-stocked warehouse of spare parts I've ever seen in my life. It had all the necessary spare motors and pumps, bearings and breakers that were not installed, in the event that they failed. The place was really self-sufficient.
Hermiston Generating also made the most of their personnel. At most facilities during outages, skilled millwrights disassemble the gas turbines. But in Hermiston, operators removed the combustion cans from the gas turbines. While I was there, I did maintenance tasks that I'd not been asked to do before: Remove the roof from a gas turbine enclosure, remove cooling tower hub and fans assemblies, and replace the blades, get into 480 and 4160 volt breakers, inspect and repair them, and perform wholesale area lighting replacement.
Like I said, the place was pretty self-sufficient. There were no maintenance mechanics employed there. The plant manager believed that any operator who could read a tech manual could also be a mechanic. Maybe he was onto something, because the place ran as well or better than others that I've worked at.
Below: My outside operator unloading a conservator for a main transformer. Yes the place even had spare main transformers on site.
There were some other things that were different about Oregon than California as well. The photos below are in a farm supply store, not a gun shop.
Below: Those are all boxes of ammunition, of different calibers - rifle, handgun, shotgun. Nothing like this can be left out unlocked on shelves in California. It would be gone.
Not far from Hermiston, there was a WW2 era army munitions storage base. During the cold war, it was re-purposed, and became the Umatilla Chemical Depot. Hermiston is the sort of place where the US liked to store tons and tons of mustard (blister) and VX (nerve) gas. Those who wish to stockpile nerve gas should be the ones who have to live downwind from it.
Below: How you test nerve gas containers for leakage. Had a buddy who used to do this test when he was in the army.
Whilst we lived there, a government contractor completed incinerating the last batches of mustard gas. Thankfully, the nerve gas had been incinerated prior to our arrival. Once a week the town's alarms would be sounded to test them, so that the residents could be sure that the "shelter in place" alarms worked. You could go to city hall and get a kit (duct tape and vinyl sheets to cover your windows and doors) in the event something went wrong at the incineration furnace. Very comforting!
Oddly enough, out in the middle of the desert, our biggest problem - and the reason we eventually left Hermiston - was finding a decent place to live. Out in the middle of nowhere, a shortage of housing. Once I got settled in the apartment, and while our house in Bakersfield was sale pending, I tried to find a rental home. I wanted to rent at first, until we got to know the area and found or built a place. It wasn't easy.
I found a realtor, and asked her if she could help us in any way to find a rental - that our moving van was en route and I had no address to give them. She contacted one of her clients that had moved out of the area who was having no luck selling their house, and convinced them to rent it to us. It was unkempt and they were chain-smokers. The house reeked of cigarettes. At that point, we were just thrilled to have a place to unload our furniture. It was just that bad trying to find a rental place.
It was an old farm house on an acre, and I thought it was really charming. On the other hand, it was a two bedroom, single bathroom house without a lot of room. It definitely wasn't where we were meant to be permanently (it was for sale, after all) - too many carcinogens.
One year after we moved in, the owner was able to sell the house we were renting. In the meantime we had given up on trying to find a house on property that we liked. Instead we made an offer on 20 acres of grazeable land. The property sat on a shelf overlooking the town of Hermiston, and had a spring-fed pond on it. This was part of a larger cattle range parcel that was being split into smaller portions.
Below: Where we *thought* we were going to build our forever home.
We had negotiated a lower than asking price with the seller, and it took so long for him to sub-divide the property that our offer finally expired. He then demanded full asking price. I told him that I wouldn't do business with him. He then said he would honor the original agreed on price, but I wasn't giving the seller any of my money after that stunt.
So about the time that the idea of building a new house on 20 acres was disintegrating, we were forced to scramble to find another rental. We moved out of the little farm house, into a flimsy newer cookie cutter house in a tract in town. This newer rental house sat on a postage-stamp sized lot, and it creaked more than the 70 year old farm house.
It was a miserable move, and a miserable living arrangement. The house was an "investment property", so we paid very high monthly rent, and had to deal with an absolutely dickish property management company. They would do anything to avoid making repairs on the property - including a gas leak in the furnace.
That said, there were a lot of neat experiences we had in Oregon. Our horse-crazy daughter finally got to take riding lessons.
We saw the Oregon Trail on the pass over the Blue Mountains
We got to hear the mighty Columbia River thundering over the McNary Dam on one of the highest flow spring runoffs on record. It was earth shaking.
We visited Wallowa, a place reminiscent of the Alps. All but unknown to anyone but the locals.
We saw interesting basalt formations along the Columbia River
Once again, we found ourselves deciding to relocate, this time after just two years. Within those two years, we moved three times. Bakersfield to Hermiston, Farmhouse in Hermiston to tract house in Hermiston, and finally from Hermiston to North Idaho.
No comments:
Post a Comment