The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 57: Union Ironworkers.
| Pad B Stories - Table of Contents |
And as I look at this image, and the empty place I see beneath it right now where these words and more need to be placed, my mind suddenly hands me a hilarious memory which I've already shared with you before, on Page 39, except that this time, that memory comes cleanly and clearly with the pair of Union Ironworkers you see in this photograph attached to it, unlike it did before, when I wrote what's on Page 39, without identifiable people in it.
And I can never, with full assurance, say that these two Ironworkers are absolutely the ones, but neither can I say they're not the ones, and whether or not they really are...
...doesn't even matter, in the end.
But the more I think of it, the more I think they are, and not only that, I'm now harboring a strong suspicion that this image was taken that day, perhaps immediately after the events described, me standing there foolishly with holes burned through the shoulders and front of my button-down shirt and right on into my skin beneath those holes.
Gene Lockamy (of that, there is no question, my prosopagnosia notwithstanding), and...
...if only I knew.
One day perhaps, someone will be able to help me.
One day perhaps, the name will suddenly come to me unasked-for, as a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky.
But not this day.
Not today, anyway.
Which is very definitely not to say it won't be tomorrow, though, and by way of illustrating how that one works, I shall invoke another story, about another Union Ironworker, up on the iron on another launch pad, this time Complex 41, where we were doing the tearout and refurb of the structures in preparation for the Titan IV Program after the work on Pad B was completed and that pad went Operational.
The Mobile Service Tower on Pad 41 was another very large multi-level mobile structure, and it rolled along a pair of dual railway tracks north-to-south and back again from it's "Park" position, 600 feet safely away from the actual launch point of the Titan IV, and its "Service" position, at the launch point, mated with the vehicle where it provided similar functions as our RSS on Pad B provided the Space Shuttle.
Ok, fine.
Here it is here, nearly finished, as we were lifting hoist drum components into place above the bridge crane box beams which would support them, up near the top of the tower, and you can see that it's a fairly tall structure, and if you were perhaps two-thirds up to the top, which is where this story occurs, you'd have a pretty good view of the surrounding countryside, and that surrounding countryside to the south was Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where every single launch pad except the two NASA pads at 39-A and 39-B, were located.
So there it all was, the whole thing, allofit, and it was all laid out, heading off into the hazy distance, mile after mile before you to the south.
Including Complex 17 A and B, which was where Delta launches took place, and back in those days, Delta was the workhorse, and they launched more of them than anything else, and they could be considered common, by someone who had racked up enough time in the area, and who had seen enough of them fly. And the word "enough" has very different meanings for different people, and a most of the veteran ironworkers out on the Cape had rapidly developed a very blasé attitude about rockets, and aside from a few outliers such as myself (not even an ironworker anyway), they did not really care in the slightest about any of it, and had other, more pressing matters, to devote their time to in day-to-day life.
And one day, I'm up on the tower at Pad 41, and it just so happened that it was time for the ironworkers' fifteen-minute morning break, and the place was dead quiet, and everybody was tools-down, resting, and, unannounced in advance as usual, there goes a Delta, rising into the sky on a pillar of bright flame and dense smoke.
And over toward the south side of the decking on the level we were all located on at the time, a boomer (an itinerant ironworker, not working from the local union hall, but instead someone who has traveled to where the "boom" was located, to where the jobs were located), down from Indiana, if memory serves, took immediate note of the flaming apparition rising into the sky, and, as do almost all people encountering such a thing for their first time ever, began pointing toward it and waving his arms, and turned momentarily back toward everyone else lounging around in the shadows behind him and shouted, "A rocket! There goes a rocket!" with great excitement in his voice.
And one of the grizzled veterans, a man who's name faded from my memory long long ago, but who I remember clearly as one of the better ironworkers in a group of already-good ironworkers, was laying down on the deckplates, with his head propped against a column behind him and his hard hat tipped down completely over his face, blocking out the light, and everything else, as he took his too-brief time of ease there that morning.
And in my mind's eye I can see all of this just as sharply as if it happened only an hour ago.
And in response to the boomer's excited shouts, he tipped his hard hat up just barely enough to allow him to make eye contact with the boomer and ever so laconically drawled "Is it coming this way?" to which the flummoxed boomer promptly indicated that it wasn't, and without another single word, tipped the hat back down, folded his arms back across his chest, and resumed his morning breaktime.
"Is it coming this way?"
And I did not burst out laughing, but it was an effort not to do so, and unlike the rest of the people around me, I did follow the flaming arc of that improbable machine as it continued on up, and out, and over the Atlantic Ocean, being careful to not give the appearance of any too much (any at all) excitement in so doing.
"Is it coming this way?"
As in, "If it's not in the process of going off course, and is about to land on us and kill everybody who didn't run for cover, maybe you should shut the fuck up about it and leave us the fuck alone."
As in, "Relax, boomer. It's just a rocket. You're right here with all the rest of us in Cape Fucking Canaveral, which is where rockets fly from on a regular basis, in case you didn't know, and we're used to it, and maybe you should get used to it, too."
And I tell this story to people every time I get a proper chance to, because it's such a good story, and succinctly sums things up out on the jobsite, in a uniquely-pithy way, and it's also just as funny as hell, too.
But I get to tell it this time for another reason, and this second reason is...
...uncanny...
...and it relates directly to my inability to identify the Union Ironworker on the right, in the photograph at the top of this page.
The name of our principle in this story, who tipped his hard hat back down and went on with his break, faded with unpleasant speed from my memory, as happens dishearteningly often with me, and from then on, I could not tell the story and give this man his rightful name while doing so.
And with me, that's always been a condition of my life, and I've accommodated for it, but it does not mean I have to like it.
But my issue is one of recall, not recording, and I've experienced what I'm about to tell you too many times for you to gainsay any of it.
The recordings are there, intact, complete, accurate.
But I am unable to access them!
It's exactly like having something in a locked safe-deposit box, without a key.
For me, when something goes, it's gone irretrievably, utterly unreachable, leaving no trace of its former existence behind.
Except for when it isn't.
And over the decades, I tell no end of stories to no end of people replaying the tape through no end of repetitions...
And once in a while, for no reason I've ever been able to discern...
A missing name will suddenly form itself on my lips as if by reflexive knee-jerk as I tell the story, without the slightest advance warning.
And after roughly FOUR DECADES of telling this particular story every so often, one day a couple of years ago...
Billy Lee's name popped out of my mouth for no fucking reason at all, and thencefrom, yes, it very definitely was Billy Lee who drawled "Is it coming this way?" from the shadows beneath the deckplates out on Pad 41, and how I know it's the right name is yet another thing I'll never understand, but that too has been demonstrated by having people listening to some of the stuff I say (I say a LOT in case you didn't already know) concur and verify the suddenly re-available information I have just recovered as being correct, and I cannot describe the sensation when this happens and I suddenly know, but it's a very definite sensation nonetheless, and I can feel it, and so ok, so it is, and it's not for me to crack my brain over any of the "how?" and "why?" and instead, I am more than happy to accept my gift unexplained, as-is, and move on from there, as a slightly-more-complete human from then on.
So it was Billy Lee that day, and perhaps one day, our ironworker on the right, in the photograph at the top of this page, will suddenly have a name, and I will suddenly be that much more complete, and this story will be amended to include that lost name, and perhaps I'll be able to alert someone who knew him, about a Good Man, from long ago, and give them one more tiny fragment of the story.
And I tell these stories to let you know, and to let them know...
But sometimes I tell these stories to let me know.
And since I'm telling stories about Union Ironworkers, well then... what better place than right here to include another one?
And I introduced you to "Sag Rod" back on page 35, and he was a hell of an ironworker, and now's my chance to invoke a little story involving just the two of us, up on high steel, to help you (as much as I can, anyway), understand...
...what goes on...
...and just how heavy it can get...
...and how it gets dealt with.
And for all of that, we need to back up. We need to back way up, all the way back to that time when Dick Walls was just, at the very beginnings of things, starting to test his New Guy. The guy who's one and only original purpose was to be an answering machine, and nothing more than that, but who was soon found to possess utterly unforeseen and unexpected innate gifts that neither he himself, nor anyone else he had ever crossed paths with in his entire life, ever so much as suspected the existence of, previously.
And I better stop right here, while I can, and let you know what a "sag rod" is, 'cause it's a weird term, and people kinda get a funny look on their faces when you toss it at 'em the first time, so let us move beyond that and allow ourselves to be told that a Sag Rod is a very particular piece of steel, with a very particular job to do, and the name describes what it is, and what it does, exactly.
And, as a very strange coincidence, learning about what a sag rod is will take us to some of the very steel that you're going to get told about as part of this upcoming little vignette which tells us about some of the heavy shit that Union Ironworkers encounter, and deal with, as part of their day-to-day lives up on high steel.
We had to get to where the story occurs by traversing the full width of the skeletal Payload Changeout Room along its back side, along Column Line A, from Column Line 3 to Column Line 5, and to do that, we had to walk across the Girts to do it.
Refresh your memory about girts by going back to Page 4, where we were introduced to them as one of the very first things we ever learned about with this stuff, and it's been a while, and maybe you've forgotten some of it, so... ok.
And here's the same marked-up photograph from Page 4, showing you where the PCR Girts are, and now that we've refreshed ourselves thusly, let's look at a few drawings, to get the details on things.
And you've already seen the structural drawing which calls them out, S-91, highlighted to point out the Girts, and here it is again, for additional refamiliarization with this area on the back side of the RSS.
But we didn't get into any of the particulars of things back on Page 4 above and beyond me telling you that the Girts are "horizontal steel members that will be holding up the wall panels," so now's the time to do so, so as I can tell you the story, and you'll have a much better understanding of things as that story unfolds.
And we immediately encounter why "girts" get a special name, and how they're a little different from all the rest of the horizontal framing steel, all the rest of the beams which make up the structure.
And of course by now, we're already hip to the idea that whenever something gets specifically identified in some different way from everything all around it, they're trying to tell us to... pay heed. Pay heed to loads. Pay heed to peculiarities not encountered elsewhere. Stuff that might get us if we're not aware that some how, some thing, is different. So we mind our shit when we find ourselves out there on a Curtain Wall maybe, or in close proximity to a Torque Tube perhaps, and with girts it's the same kind of deal.
Mind yourself, ok? You're up here on the goddamned Girts, and they're...
...a little different.
Girts, by virtue of the job they have to do, carry loads in a different way.
Back on Page 56, I introduced you to Wind Loads with a very quick and dirty (and conservative, understating the true size of the actual loads that you just might encounter one day) back-of-the-napkin calculation for what the PCR Main Doors might be expected to see by way of wind loads when the weather in Florida decides to step it up, as it can, and will, do occasionally. And Wind Loads are one of those things that, for whatever reasons, people just never seem to fully appreciate.
Never seem to fully understand or respect.
Just how radical it gets, when exceptionally-high (but very-much-so fully-expected on infrequent occasions) winds start shoving on the side of a building or a structure.
Go put "wind load calculator" into google, or some other search engine, see what it spits back at you, and then play around with it some, just for laughs. S-91, which I just gave you a link to, tells us that the back side of the Payload Changeout Room on Line A is roughly (very roughly, and it's actually a bit larger) 50 feet wide by 70 feet high, which gives us 3500 square feet of surface area for the wind to push against.
Now go punch that 3500 square feet into your wind load calculator of choice.
Now tell it there's a hurricane blowing (we're in Florida, and in Florida you get hurricanes) at 130 knots, which is a strong Category 4 hurricane. It's not even a Cat 5. It gets worse. It gets much worse, but for now, we'll do a robust Cat 4, just to see what's going on.
Over 200,000 pounds of force!
Whoa!
And like I said, nobody ever really appreciates just how bad it can get, when the wind really decides to get up and get moving. Once every ten or twenty years kind of stuff. Once in a while, the fucking wind decides to just blow.
And you better be ready for it when it does, or otherwise you're going to find yourself looking for pieces of your structure someplace over in the next county. Or maybe even the next state.
So now that we know all that, we can now appreciate what's going on with our girts back there on Line A.
Those goddamned girts have some serious work to do, and unlike nearly everything else on our structure, that work consists in successfully resisting horizontal loads, instead of what everybody always assumes building structures do all the time, which is successfully resisting vertical (read: successfully not collapsing under their own weight because of gravity) loads. Wind loads, time and circumstance depending, can routinely exceed gravitational loads, and nobody gives any of that the slightest thought or respect.
The fucking wind will take you out.
So.
The girts act a little funny, and they look a little funny, and to understand why they look funny, we need to kind of know a little bit about why steel beams, columns, and what-have-you look they way they do.
As in, why does an I-Beam look like the letter "I" in the first place?
There's gotta be a reason, right?
It's not like somebody said, "Well, we were gonna use the letter 'Q' but it turned out to be too complicated to make 'em that way, so we picked the simplest letter we could, and that was an 'I' so that's what we used."
Nah, pretty sure that's not it.
So ok, so why?
Why I-Beams?
Wikipedia has the answers.
So ok. So their very curious and very particular shape makes them very efficient for what they do, which makes 'em lighter and cheaper and easier to deal with which is why we like 'em so much, and they're significantly stronger in one direction and not the other, and that's why they're almost always encountered as a right-side-up Letter 'I', 'cause in that orientation, they're doing their very best, very most-efficient work, successfully resisting vertical (gravitational) loads.
And I'm guessing that by now, you can kind of see where this is going, with our girts.
Which, in the case of the Payload Changeout Room take their main loading from the side, horizontally, and for which case, we're going to be encountering them as a letter 'I' laid over on its side, which now makes it look like the letter 'H'.
Now you need to know, you need to keep in mind, that girts are not necessarily, not always, laid-over 'I' beams. Different circumstances dictate different configurations. The RSS is a great goddamned big hard-core brute of a thing, strong as hell, and can not be taken in any way as any kind of "typical" for this sort of stuff, ok? When you encounter girts elsewhere, they may very well not even be wide-flange members in the first place, and they very definitely might not be running horizontally either. They might be running vertically. And they might be interior to the skin of the walls of the enclosed structure. And they might be channels, or some kind of composite shape. Or something else. Or some unknowable combination of different things in different areas on the same structure. It all depends. And by now, you're supposed to already know that it all depends, ok? But for the moment, around the exterior of the PCR, holding up the Insulated Metal Paneling that makes up the actual walls of the thing, you get your Girts as horizontally-running wide-flanges laid over on their side, with their webs running horizontally, and their flanges running vertically, opposite of what you see with webs and flanges almost everywhere else on the towers.
And S-91 has a little note telling us "W12 Girt See Det A S-91/S-95 Typical Unless Otherwise Noted" for everything along the back side of the PCR with the lone exception of a single WT6x8 at elevation 171'-2" which has a fucking W36x230 backing it up for god's sake, and which we don't care about anyway 'cause that's not the elevation we're interested in, and it's not part of the story I'm gonna be telling you here if I can ever get around to actually telling you the damn thing, so let's go look at our W12 girts, over on S-95, Detail A, right now, to see what they look like.
So here's Detail A on S-95 highlighted to show you a typical girt along the back side of the PCR, on Line A.
And we get to see it's a W12x26, and sure enough it's laid over on its side, flanges up, web horizontal (which forces a requirement for drain holes in that horizontal web to keep rain water from collecting and ponding, inducing the formation of rust which eventually destroys the integrity of the Girt, and/or cascading off the ends in some kind of small waterfall somewhere that we don't want), and a W12x26 is a pretty light piece of iron, and yeah, it's plenty strong enough along the axis of its web, but across the axis of its flanges it's not, and these things are arranged in two vertical runs across the back of the PCR, one from Column Line 3 to 4, and another one from Column Line 4 to 5, and S-91 and S-96 are both telling us these vertical runs span 26 feet each.
Which means our W12 Girts back there, laid over on their sides, are unsupported everywhere except their very ends, where they tie to the much heavier RSS Primary Framing (which we've already learned is what's doing all the actual work of holding everything up). And across a sufficiently-long unsupported span, something like a W12x26 will display an unexpectedly-bizarre aspect of structural steel, that people never seem to consider (in similar manner as they never seem to consider wind loading).
Light iron (which our W12x26 is) when placed across that sufficiently-long unsupported span, takes on this very weird, and very pronounced, rubbery aspect. Longer pieces of light iron become amazingly bouncy and twangy in the direction that their flanges point in (side-to-side, horizontally, in most cases, but not right now, not for our present set of Girts), even as they remain rock-solid in the direction their web points in (which is generally up-and-down, vertically, but again, not right now). They're strong here, but they're weak there. They're strong as steel in "this" direction, but they're made out of rubber in the direction "perpendicular to their axis of strength."
And in the present case, in the case of our laid-over-on-their-sides W12 Girts along the backside of the PCR, that unsupported span of 26 feet wasn't quite long enough to make those individual Girts bounce around like rubber balls in the up-and-down direction, but it was long enough to compromise their structural integrity in that direction, and if left unaddressed, and if something wasn't done about it, then those W12 Girts would sag, and in a structure, one of the things you can rest assured that you will never want to be dealing with, is having things sag.
Sag?
Hmmm...
Didn't we launch off into the wild deep woods of this latest tangent by saying somebody's name was Sag Rod?
Yes indeed, yes we did, and now, at long last, the threads will be tied back together and we will be able to continue on and maybe I'll eventually get to tell the fucking story.
But not yet.
Got a little thread-tying yet to do, ok?
And to tie things up, we'll head back to our drawings, and let's look at S-91 again.
Hmm... Sag Channels?
That word again. Sag.
And they're even kind enough to draw our attention to a section cut, 'F', which it says we can find over on S-96.
So let's go there now, and see what's up with that thing.
And S-96 shows us what's going on with the sag channels, and what's going on is that they're 4-inch channels, welded all-around to ⅜" plates, which are further welded all-around to the Girts, and up at the very top of things, are welded to some pretty heavy iron in the form of the 21-inch wide-flanges which make up the roof of the RSS, and which, owing to the fact that they're up there supporting the 90-ton Payload Hoist inside of its Equipment Room plus all of the half-cantilevered RCS Room, among other things, are fucking strong.
And it's that part up at the very top which tells the tale.
The sag channels are pretty much holding the whole works up with regards to our Girts, which will never sag, because they can't, and now you know what a "Sag Channel" is, and by extension, you also now know what a "Sag Rod" is, and the only difference is that in "normal" construction, where they're building things that are not such overwhelmingly-stout brutes like the RSS is, they don't use channel iron to keep things from sagging, and instead they use much lighter, cheaper, and much easier-to-work-with, steel rod instead, and it all gets tied, up at the very top, to something substantial, something which will comfortably bear the load, and everything hanging beneath it will stay put, right where we want it to, and, oh by the way, aren't we kind of describing a curtain wall right here?
Yep.
The PCR Girts constitute a variety of curtain wall, and the only reason nobody is labeling them as such on any of the drawings, is that, duh, of course it's a curtain wall. It's girts. What else could it be? Girts are not sensible structural members, and can never be expected to carry sensible structural loads above and beyond the horizontal wind loads they're designed and built to resist. And people (out on the job site, anyway, or at least the ones who have been around for a little while and have learned a few things along the way) know that, and people mind, and nothing goes wrong, and nobody gets hurt. Unlike up at the Antenna Access Platform, where we learned about curtain walls in the first place, and which is a place that you would never suspect to be freely hanging, in suspension, with all the worrisome lack of sturdy structural integrity that you would otherwise just... assume to be the case... just sort of... take for granted.. and which lack of full structural integrity just might kill you as a result.
So.
Look at all the cool shit you're learning, while you're waiting around for me to tell you a goddamned story about Union Ironworkers, which for some reason, I keep finding ways to put off till later, as I bounce from here... to there... and thence... and yonder... and... we'll eventually get there, ok? I promise.
And oh by the way, the surface area, in cross-section of that ⅜" plate which the uppermost end of the Sag Channels are welded to, up where it ties to those massive W21's that are holding them up, comes to just a weency bit more than one-and-a-half square inches.
Don't seem like much, does it? Just a little bitty piece of ⅜" plate, which all of the suspended load is being transferred through.
The whole works is hanging from something that doesn't even have two full inches of cross-sectional area to resist the (substantial) forces which are pulling downward on it with all their might.
The whole works is hanging by a goddamned thread, from the looks of it.
Well... maybe not.
That little piece of ⅜" plate is A36 Steel.
Ok, what's that mean?
Well in order for a given piece of steel to meet the spec for A36, (and by now we're learning that there's a bunch of different specs for a bunch of different kinds of steel), it has to have, among other things, the requisite yield strength, and "yield strength" is a very particular item, with a very particular definition, and that definition boils down to how hard can you pull on this stuff, before it yields?
Not break (for which it will of course take an even harder pull to do that), but to simply yield.
To simply begin to stretch some.
I mentioned earlier about the weird rubberiness you'll encounter with steel in certain situations, and now you're going to learn that in addition to the situations where steel acts like rubber, there are other situations where it will act like taffy.
Where it will stretch, stiffly, without completely coming apart and breaking.
We're getting close enough to breaking, but we're not quite there yet, and so, when things start getting overloaded, steel will stretch out some, before the application of additional forces of overloading it eventually causes it to fail altogether. Causes it to break in half.
And we do not, under any circumstances, want any of that crap going on with the structures we're building, and so they've worked it all out, come up with a spec that includes this aspect of things, and the engineers know all about it, and they design everything so as that it never sees those kinds of overload conditions, where...
...things start to come apart.
Things start to yield.
And the Yield Strength for A36 steel is 36 ksi. Hey, how 'bout that? Same number. 36. Who knew? Well, now you know.
That's nice. But what the fuck is a "36 ksi"?
Well... "36" is 36. Not much we can do with that one, right? "k" stands for thousand, just like in kilograms or kiloparsecs, or anything else that there's so many of 'em that it becomes easier to measure them by the thousands. And "si" stands for Square Inches, which are.. square inches, and... ok.
What 36 ksi completely fails to mention, is exactly what there might be 36 thousand of, per square inch, and that one has always bothered me, but that's just the way it is, and the thing they're not even bothering to mention is pounds.
So 36 ksi is thirty-six thousand pounds per square inch.
Which is one hell of a lot of force to be able to funnel down through something with a cross-section of only one square inch.
Before that one-inch something even begins to yield.
And A36 is considered "mild" steel!
Really. That's what it's actually called a lot of times.
Fucking steel is strong.
Insanely strong.
I was up on the Pad one day, might have been my first month swimming in this ever-so-new-and-strange water. Might have been my first week.
I dunno.
Brand new guy. Full-on Village Idiot. Didn't know shit about nuthin!
And I was up on the Pad Deck over in the shake-out yard area one morning, just south of the south end of the Flame Trench, looking north and west toward where they were going at it, hammer and tongs, with heavy steel erection, and for reasons I can no longer recall, maybe the crane was picking up something I considered as being heavy, using just the jib line, which may have been a common one-inch wire rope, but then again, it may have been something else entirely, but whatever it was, it commandeered my attention, and I remarked on it somehow in some way to Elmo McBee, who was standing there right next to me, and who, along with so many others in that original Wilhoit crew, had taken some kind of pity on me, and who even went so far as to stop and actually help me upon occasion, and whatever it was that came out of my mouth about a square inch of steel caused Elmo to jerk his head around toward me, and with this incredulous look on his face at having to tell somebody something this basic and completely taken-for-granted by everybody, he replied with, "You can pick up the WORLD with an inch of steel."
And deep into the folds of my brain it went, instantly, as if put there with a branding iron, and the memory of the look on his face and the tone of his voice will never leave me, never fade, and will always bring a slight smile to my face as I recall it.
"You can pick up the WORLD with an inch of steel."
So ok, so it turns out that our little ⅜" plate that's holding up all of the sag channels for the PCR Girts is perfectly fine, and perfectly adequate for the task it has been given to perform.
So ok, PCR Girts.
And they're W12's, laid over on their sides, and any Union Ironworker would describe a thing 12-inches wide, spanning an open gap of any distance at all, long or short, a hundred or two feet above the distant ground, as a sidewalk.
A sidewalk.
As in, something which is so ridiculously wide, level, and expansive, affording vastly more room than might ever conceivably become properly necessary, that it becomes literally impossible to fall off of it. A place where even drunk people and two-year-old toddlers can safely be expected to hack it, successfully.
Excepting idiots staring at phones in a brain-dead trance (who are now, by definition, deemed even less capable than drunk people and two-year-old toddlers), and who of course deserve it, do you know anybody who's ever actually fallen off of a sidewalk?.
Me neither.
People do not fall off of sidewalks.
Idiot's walk off of sidewalks, but they're idiots, and they're staring at their phones, transfixed on absorbing the stupidest shit imaginable, no longer even communicating with written words, but instead communicating via the use of breathtakingly-lame and simple-minded cartoons, and it very definitely serves them right.
Otherwise, "sidewalk", as invoked by Union Ironworkers, is not quite, but almost, synonymous with "open flat ground."
So.
Richard Walls has just, very recently, decided to ever-so-gingerly, one small thing at a time, but in pretty quick succession too, begin testing his New Guy. His answering machine. Who has very recently begun to evidence weird innate talents for aspects of the steel erection business that nobody ever suspected in the slightest, in advance.
Had I been there four full months?
Maybe.
Maybe even five. I do not know.
The erection of heavy iron goes fast, which you already know, because I've already told you so.
And the RSS was beginning to flesh out, and the main tasks of erecting the Primary Framing were already near-complete, and Wilhoit was now in the process of erecting Sheffield's PCR Elevator Steel, and they'd made it most of the way up to where it ties back to the RSS Main Framing up at the Top Truss 208'-2" level...
...but not quite.
And a problem was encountered where Wilhoit might be having to hit Sheffield with a back charge for additional labor hours and possibly material costs, above and beyond the terms of the original contract, above and beyond the original Scope of Work, because of a possible misfabrication of the steel, and that's gonna cost somebody some time and money, and both Sheffield and Wilhoit would very much prefer to not be the one responsible for that time and money, and whatever it was, it required prompt attention, because having a gang of ironworkers and possibly a crane, sitting idle, waiting for a resolution, gets EXPENSIVE, in a fucking HURRY, minute by minute, hour by hour.
Back charges, all too often, can, and DO, turn into protracted legal nightmares if allowed to get out of hand, be it by misfeasance, malfeasance, or nonfeasance on the part of one or even both parties to the events which precipitate them.
This kind of stuff happens all the time in construction work, and depending on the relationship between the involved parties, it can be easy or hard, simple or complex, cost-free or crushingly-expensive, and when you're getting along as well as Sheffield and Wilhoit got along, neither party wants things to become adversarial because even-handed cooperation leads directly to greatest efficiency and least expense for both parties, and both parties would much rather just get to the bottom of the goddamned thing, whatever it is, as soon as possible, resolve it on the spot, if possible, and then move on with the job.
Good Project Managers, enjoying good personal and business relationships with each other, working together in an environment of demonstrated trustworthiness, will find a way to cut through whatever problem it might turn out to be, with greatest efficiency, in the least amount of time, with least sensible long-view expense to their own company, and Richard Walls of Sheffield Steel, and Tom Kirby of Wilhoit Steel Erectors were both fortunate to enjoy such a good personal and business relationship with each other, and when the gang of ironworkers hanging iron, up on the Elevator Tower, encountered an issue and had to stop the work... well then...
And it was up in a place in the Elevator Tower where you had to walk across the full span of the PCR Girts to get to it, and then, from there, additional interestingness prevailed, gaining proper access to where the problem with one of the diagonal braces in the Elevator Tower came up from below, along Line 5.6, and met the the column it was supposed to connect with at Line A.1, just beneath the W8 framing member at elevation 199'-5¾", T/S (Top of Steel, which is one of the standard nomenclatures for specifying elevations).
And this was early in the construction of the RSS, and none of it looked like what you see on the drawings I'm including to show things to you.
Everything was very much incomplete as it perforce had to be, to permit the ongoing erection of additional steel.
Wilhoit (Red Milliken, along with his foremen) was virtuoso at it, ingeniously hanging iron "incompletely" in a crafty and savvy way that never impeded subsequent clear access to what was coming next, and this is a devilishly-tricky aspect to steel erection on bewilderingly-complex items like the RSS, and it really separates the adepts from everybody else, and the adepts will cunningly skip over things in a way (which very often does not appear to an untrained eye to make any sense) that allows them to just blaze away at it with free and clear access to everything at all times, permitting the fastest-possible (and therefore least-expensive possible) steel erection, and then come back later on and fill things in, and it's done with liberal use of temporary supports and no end of other trickiness, and dammit, here I go again, but I'm gonna stop right here and leave well enough alone for the time being.
...and it became a day for further testing of the New Guy.
And if memory serves me correctly, this was my second ever outing, up on high steel, and I've told you about the first, but here's a link to it just in case your memory needs a bit of a refresh.
No idea where I was? No idea where I was being taken to? Completely unsure of myself? Bewildered? Nervous? Terrified?
All of that and much more, and all of it a hundred times more intense than you can imagine, even if you've got a really good imagination.
But there's something about me...
Something I myself have never really understood...
I watch it as a spectator sometimes...
Wondering where it's going to take me next...
...not knowing...
And all of my life I have allowed it to take me to places...
And I'm clearly still alive to tell the tales...
But sometimes...
So anyway, the whole thing is wide open, hardly any Secondary Framing anywhere except for the Girts, and owing to the nature of elevator towers, it's good to get 'em in early, and get 'em in perfectly plumb, square, and true, 'cause the elevator is going to be using the force of gravity to keep it located exactly where it's supposed to be located beneath its hoisting sheaves, and it doesn't come any more plumb, square, and true, than fucking gravity, so get that Elevator Tower in early, and get it in right. Additionally, owing to their requirements for exceptional stiffness (again, to keep 'em plumb, square, and true) elevator towers have extra bracing and are very stiff, and that stiffness contributes to the overall stiffness of the entire structure, so again, get it in early, and get it in right, and while you're at it, once it's done, go ahead and tie to it with the surrounding structure, and take advantage of that additional stiffness as you do it. And once you're up there, it's just you and the iron.
Impossibly, I took a photograph of the RSS not very long at all before the events in this story transpired, and you've already seen that photograph, but here it is again, marked up, and that's the half-built Elevator Tower over there, and when Sag and me went out on the iron that day, it was pretty much all the way up to the level of the Top Truss at 208'-2", but it was still very much incomplete, and part of why it was incomplete was the reason that took us both up there that day.
The 3x2x¼ double-angle diagonal X-bracing over on the Line 5.6 side of the Elevator Tower, the southernmost side of the Elevator Tower as the RSS sat in the de-mate position it was being erected in, going from Line A.1 at the bottom, to A.4 at its top was ok, but its compliment, going from A.4 at its bottom, to A.1 at its top, was what could not be connected up at its top, at Column Line A.1/5.6, 'cause something was fucked up, and it needed to be looked at before anybody was going to be able to do anything further with it.
Apparently, following my first foray out onto the iron, Red Milliken advised my boss Richard Walls that I did not evidence any slacker mentality or life-threatening (neither to myself, nor anyone else) idiocy, and so RW must have determined that I might be trusted with further testing up on the iron, and this day's little field-trip with Sag Rod constituted the next small step of that testing program.
Something's mucked-up in the Elevator Tower with the X-bracing over on the Line 5.6 side, up in the Line A.1 corner beneath the framing steel at elevation 199'-5¾". Whatever it is, it's got Wilhoit stopped, and Wilhoit says it's misfabricated steel, and Sheffield Steel furnished that steel, so Sheffield needs to send somebody up there to look at it, and maybe draw a little picture of what's there, and maybe write some words of description to go with it, and then bring that information back down to the ground, so as their Project Manager, Richard Walls, can find out for himself what's going on, so as he can disposition it as quickly as possible to get the job moving again, and James MacLaren, Village Idiot New Guy, has been designated (not because MacLaren was any kind of worth a shit, but because he was the only guy they had out at the Pad, so they were stuck with him, like it or not) as the person who will go up on the tower following along behind Sag Rod, who was one of Wilhoit's foremen, and who will be showing him the way to the problem, and pointing out what's wrong, and maybe even what needs to be done to resolve it.
James MacLaren, Village Idiot New Guy, gets told that he's going to be taking a tape-measure, a pencil, and a pad of paper, and he's going up there somewhere to look at something, but above and beyond that, he wouldn't know a gusset plate from a gallon jug, and he has no idea what the hell is actually going on.
James MacLaren, Village Idiot New Guy, looks upwards toward the sky-piercing open-steel structure visible out the field trailer window, gulps hard, and agrees, still having no idea what the fuck is going on here.
And the Girts, being the W12x26's they are, laid over on their sides as they are, form a little sidewalk, one foot wide, with a pair of upstanding "fences," three inches high, on either side of the sidewalk, which of course are formed by the flanges of the W12's.
And as you traverse the "sidewalk," you find yourself taking each additional step in a funny way, with your foot landing down in this sort of "gutter" or "channel" formed by those upstanding flanges on either side of the "sidewalk."
And although that might sound comforting insofar as it provides a means of restraining your footfalls to a place where they can never wind up partially over the side, it is in fact just the opposite, because as your foot is falling, or rising, the nature of how a human walks will take that foot out to the side a little bit with each successive step, in a way that causes those upstanding three-inch-tall flanges to want to trip you up. To cause your toe, or heel, or even the side of your boot to bang into the top edge of the flange or maybe somewhere along its side, completely disrupting the rhythm of your step, and introducing side-to-side inertial corrections in the path that the mass of your body is taking, which "corrections" can, and do, cause your moving center of mass to wind up in places...
...where you might not want it to.
And you're damn near twenty stories up, far above the surrounding wilderness of the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge, and only a mere fourteen stories above the cold hard concrete of the Pad Deck, clearly visible through the wide-open emptiness on either side of the Girt, directly beneath your bulging eyeballs as they're zeroing in on that horrifyingly narrow, twelve-inch-wide, "sidewalk" with the fucking fences on either side of it.
And just beyond the "fences," on either side of that terrifyingly-narrow girt...
...the cold eyes of death are staring directly at you, unblinking.
And Sag Rod is a sixty-something year-old man, and he's moving on the iron like a mountain goat, and for him it's a mixture of tedium and irritation, sprinkled lightly with a dash of "You've got a first-timer on your hands here, so keep a close eye on him, and make sure he doesn't freeze up in panic, mid-span (it happens, and over the years I heard too many separate stories about people all of a sudden freezing up while out there on the iron, including veteran ironworkers), or find a way to kill somebody, whether himself or somebody else, ok?"
And with Sag Rod in the lead, out there well ahead...
Across the Girt...
Across a fifty-foot wide-open span...
Accompanied only by a light whisper of the breeze and the cold unblinking eyes of death which refuse to quit staring up at you, from far below where they lie waiting...
And the Girt directly above you is only 6'-2" on-center away from the one you're traversing, and it's close, but it doesn't quite touch the top of your hard hat because as you walk, you're just a little bit less than fully erect, and you can sort of reach around with your right arm above your head and grab hold of the upstanding flange edge on its upper side to steady yourself, but it takes your eyes off what you're walking on for just a second, and its awkward, and to do so not only completely disrupts the cadence of your steps, but it also introduces a particularly-unpleasant side-to-side inertia to your whole body as you first raise your arm to grab hold of something... anything... to hold on to, to bring yourself to believe that you have a sporting chance of simply making it, and then let go of the flange edge and lower that arm to take your next steps, and it turns out to be quite a bit worse than useless, and you very quickly figure that out as you see Sag Rod's back out there ahead of you, continuing on into the distance across the Girt without a care in the world, and you knock that shit off, pronto, and the sag channels are only four inches wide, and they provide rock solid stability to hold on to while allowing for free movement around them as you go, but they're seven feet apart on-center, and between them there is a deeply-frightening space, and it just so happens that the Primary Framing splits the span of the Girt you're on into three nearly-equal spaces, but that stuff is a foot or so off to the side, and in between... more terrifyingly-open space... and you gulp hard, and you mind your boots with the "fences", and you work the sag channels when you can... and some how, through some miracle, you arrive at the Elevator Tower...
...still alive.
And what I just walked you through isn't even the story, but we're about to get there.
You fetch up on the flat upper surface of the top flange of the W8x24 that defines the northern side of the Elevator Tower, looking generally southwards across the open space of the elevator shaft, with your right hand firmly gripping the W10x33 column which is very-comfortingly there, just to your right.
Breathe...
Regain your composure...
...as much as you can, anyway.
...you've never been anywhere like this in your entire life, and as of right now...
...you're in it, like it or no.
And yeah, by that point I was in the goddamned thing, like it or no.
Sag is headed across the W8 past the column I'm gripping, working his way around the intervening 3x2x¼ double-angle diagonal X-bracing that fills the space between columns, still moving with the casual energy and confidence of a man forty years younger than he actually is, grabbing the diagonals and swinging out and around them, momentarily placing himself totally out over the open void, and then continuing the swing on around and placing his next footfalls down on the W8, and he makes the far column, and then a sharp left-hand turn, and out into the diagonals on the far side of the wide-open elevator shaft from where I'm standing, not even ten full feet away from him, where he stops, turns, and with one hand casually holding on to the diagonal, points with his other hand up into the corner, up there twelve some-odd feet above the soles of his boots resting on the top flange of the W8, and begins to tell me what's wrong.
And the distance up, and across the open shaft, places the gusset plate on the column at Line A.1/5.6, which the diagonal over there cannot be connected to, about fifteen feet away from my eyes, and it's very light diagonal bracing, and it's a small thing, and the trio of bolt holes in it are none too easy to see precisely, and as a part of having to more or less lay hands on the offending gusset plate up there, trying to tell this dumbfuck new guy with the goddamned pad of paper and a fucking pencil in his hand exactly what's wrong, Sag Rod grabs the opposite diagonal of the 'X' in the X-bracing, the one running from Line A.1 low, to A.4 high over there, the one running low from the right to high on the left as viewed from my own position, and swings himself around cat-like, goes boots-down on the ever-so-flimsy-looking diagonal, pushes into it, and half-vaults himself upward and outward along the diagonal toward the center of things where the two legs of the 'X' cross each other to get within, or very nearly within, touching distance of the gusset...
And at that point...
Something happened...
Something the likes of which I never again saw in my life, and which I sometimes think that The Fates provided me with, when I was a brand-new New Guy, in order to make sure...
Make sure I was...
Always aware...
Of where I was...
When I was on the iron...
And which instantaneously grabbed hold of a piece of real estate inside my brain, and which it has never since let go of, to the slightest degree, even all these long decades later...
And as Sag latched on to that diagonal with his right hand, making to swing himself around and reposition himself to climb up a little higher and get closer to where he could just about place a finger on the gusset...
And as he initiated that swing...
The whole diagonal, the one running from low on the right, to high on the left, as viewed from my position...
Not the one with the "issue" at its top, but the other one...
As he gripped it in his right hand and swung...
It LET GO, up on top, where it should have been bolted the the column on Line A.4/5.6...
But wasn't...
And what happened next fucking seared itself into my memory.
The whole diagonal, with Sag hanging on to it with one hand, boot down on it beneath himself, lurched inward directly at me across the open gulf of the empty elevator shaft.
And this happened less than ten feet in front of me, and it happened fast.
Oh god, it happened so fast.
At which point Sag's instincts as one of the best ironworkers I ever met kicked immediately into gear.
And he did...
...nothing.
Lurching with the iron as it twanged horrifyingly out over the open elevator shaft, Sag, wearing a completely neutral expression on his face, locked eyes with me.
And said nothing.
And did nothing.
And the three bolts holding that diagonal to the gusset plate down at its bottom...
...somehow...
...held.
And I want to say he lurched out into open space across half the width of the elevator shaft, but that cannot be the case, but however far it was...
It was too far.
And Sag held on, one hand and one foot, and with what had to have been monumental grip strength in his right hand, he held his position directly above the lurching diagonal, and he arced out across the open void, eyes locked on mine the whole time, saying not a word. Not even an intake of breath.
And time slowed way down, as it does when shit gets real.
And the twang of the diagonal took it deeply into the void...
Where it then stopped...
And then the angels held their breath...
And reconsidered...
And then the diagonal twanged right back to where it came from, with Sag still holding his position, still eyes-locked with mine.
And then the sonofabitch went right back at it, swinging around the other way, in a way that prevented the motherfucking diagonal from breaking free up top this time, eyes now returned to the tasks at hand, no longer locked with mine, still never uttering a sound, and proceeded to finish his climb up toward the corner of things above his head where the problem was located, and without missing a beat he proceeded to calmly and matter-of-factly explain things to me (which I have completely forgotten the precise details of) in a way that I could understand, and make a little sketch of, and write a few words of description about.
And that was it...
...nothing else...
...nothing more...
...not a single word was exchanged about any of it.
And then we went back, the same way we came.
Across the fearsome (to me) span of the Girt, and down to the ground, where I gave my paper to Dick Walls, and if memory serves (and I am mistrustful of everything that happened after Sag Rod took his little ride on the diagonal, because it almost seems as if everything afterwards was somehow erased, perhaps as a part of my brain making damn good and sure that the Main Thing was burned in permanently), I did not even relate the story to him at the time, or even ever.
It was a ferocious experience, and it wasn't even me that endured it.
And never did me and Sag ever so much as glancingly mention it to each other, afterwards.
And never again did I look at Sag Rod the same.
And never again did I look at any other ironworkers the same.
Nor myself, for that matter, either.
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