"When you **** with me.....you fuckin' with the man."
oh geezus.....

.....is it time for you to have some metamucil yet?......
You obviously
don't don't nearly as much as you pretend to. I was presented with the option to remove or quarantine the file. I chose to remove it.
In October 1952 I reported for my first day of work as a trainee to be a process operator at the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant(ORGDP) which was the uranium processing facility being operated by Union Carbide for the old AEC, now DOE. An unbelievable facility which took raw uranium as it appears from the mine, flourinated it and placed it in cylinders so they could heat it into a gaseous state and feed it into a 4400 stage cascade which pumped it through converters containing barrier tubes from one stage to another until at the top the uranium 235 isotope was withdrawn in 5" diameter cylinders, 30 inches long...always safe. The withdrawn material was approximately 97% pure. It was the plant from which the first material was harvested for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The Nagasaki bomb was a plutonium bomb and that material came from one of the western AEC/DOE sites.
There were 84 of the class of trainees which were hired to either assume responsbilities in the newest addition to the facility, K-33 or replace those who were selected to do so. In January 1953 an operator was handling a feed cylinder in the first unit of the K-27 facility and just as he was connecting a 1 1/2" copper line it ruptured spreading the approximately ten tons of low alpha/beta assay radioactive contamination over two floors of a quarter mile long building. A floor above the spill, a quarter mile away...the condensing uo2f2 formed icycles two feet long hanging from 6" steel construction beams and tons of the material was in a powder form on the floors.
All of the 84 trainees and about 25 other employees who could be spared to help were assigned to four rotating shifts which worked 24/7 for about three months till mid April 1953. We were issued plain white coveralls, yellow skull caps, shoe covers and no type of mask. That would have literally been a joke to anyone working in toxic contamination today. When they dismantled the same plants after they had been "purged to a negative" and shut down those doing the work, some continuing as we speak, wear/wore double impearmeable suits with a positive pressure on the inside provided by 110# air pressure so no type of exposure is/was possible.
The average age of our trainee group was 20 and about 30-35 for our supervisors. The supervisors would joke and cut up with us and were like "one of the boys." I was barely 18 and several of my good buddies were about the same age. After we dressed in our "protective clothing," we began in the areas where the icycles formed and broke them off and placed them in boxes about 3x3x2 to be hauled away by coded chemicals in a 2 1/2 ton truck. Then we would use large sponges dipped in a barrel of solvent and wash down each one of the thousands of steel beams in the large processing facility. One night on 12-8 shift the boys were feeling frisky and somebody threw one of the big wet sponges at another trainee and a huge war started among nearly everyone...even our supervisor. Two of the boys got mad and had a fight in one of the airlocks and were suspended for three days as disciplinary action.
We had so many vacuum cleaners running that we had to station somebody near the electrical panels at the back of the 300 yard wide buildings to reset circuit breakers when they tripped due to overload. Guess how they labeled the bags which no doubt ended up in a trash dump or land fill? "Class D Household Filth." There were no toxic or radioactive admonitions whatsoever on any of the material we cleaned up from the facility.
In those days the safety department consisted of a dozen or so employees who worked 8-4 shift and their main mission in life seemed to be the uninterrupted hours of the "Safety Train" and every so often each of the K-25 employees were awarded some kind of safety award after the billboards in front of the plant could boast a new safety record of so many million employee hours without a disabling injury. In other words the safety people were company employees with an assigned mission and were graded and evaluated by their supervision relative to the company's success.
Today the "Sick Employee Program" run by the DOL is constantly settling documented cancer cases and various other types of deaths which were no doubt caused by the type incident I just described. This was not an isolated case of spill or exposure...I knew of numerous events such as gas releases or cascade components operated inproperly and in nearly every incident the company covered it up. I do believe this was the largest and most troublesome release and consequent cleanup in the history of the K-25 plant.
As far as the other 32 years in the mainframe center and my little network that I'm running here....blow it out your ass. I've had numerous engineers and technicians reporting to me who could eat your lunch any time...any place. I'll tell you what.....write an algorithm to calculate how long it will take for crabs to be added to the endangered species list......now that so many women are shaving their pubic hairs.
"When you **** with me.....you fuckin' with the man."