Armco Steel - part 1

Sign at the Main Entrance

One of my more interesting and challenging jobs was working at Armco Steel in Ashland, Kentucky.  My younger brother Ed and I got jobs there one summer with the help of a family friend.  The pay was amazingly good, but the place was filled with ways to get hurt or killed.


We got temporary summer jobs called vacation fill in.  Vacation fill in means that each day when you punch in for work, you also get a pink card that tells you where in the plant to report for work.  Pretty much every day or night was a different job, but a lot of the time we did the worst of the worst kind of annual maintenance work.  Like climbing down into deep concrete wells and pumping out hydraulic fluid and other junk that had fallen in.  It was kind of like the scene in the first Star Wars movie where they were all trapped in the garbage collection area and the walls started closing on them.  It stank, it was dark, and if you got the skydrol on your hands, the skin would peel off.  Nice.

The Tipple area where the iron ore was delivered by trains

Steel mills are tough places to work, and Armco was no exception.  Their primary idea for an employee safety program was putting a big illuminated scoreboard at the main gate.  It was just like the kind you see at football games, except this one was a bit more personal.  They posted three different numbers for the last 12 months...Minor Injuries, Major Injuries, and Fatalities.  There were no zeroes in any of the three, including the fatalities.  I think there were three people killed the summer we worked there.  They seemed to think that posting the scores would scare people into being more safe...but it sure didn't seem to have much effect.

We were required to join the United Steel Workers Union to work there, and they had one particular practice that drove me nuts, but made Ed smile.  When you hired in, you got a seniority number assigned.  It was based on the date, and also the order you hired in on a particular day.  In our case we were hired in the same day in alphabetical order.  Meaning that Ed was the person who got hired right before me.  That was ok, except he was my younger brother.

The full impact of the seniority system didn't take long to rear it's head.  When we'd both get assigned to the same fill in detail, we would often be assigned slightly different jobs.  Like the hydraulic pit clean up job.  For that job, two people were required.  One had to climb down into the pit, and wade around in hip boots in smelly, caustic junk...and the other would lower down a big bucket, that the down side person would load with junk.  So the top side person would then pull up the bucket and dump it into a loader, and lower it again.  Clearly the top side person had the much better of the two jobs, so it went to the person with the higher seniority...in our case to Ed.  Ed was good about it and never rubbed it in, but he would always have that quiet smile on his face when I got the worst part of every assignment, and he didn't.

We had many really dirty, hot, smelly and dangerous jobs there.  Without fail, the foreman would always ignore all the posted safety warnings and never issue the required safety equipment.  On one job we both were working on the roof of the basic oxygen furnace building to sweep and blow off iron ore dust before it got so heavy it would collapse.  Since heat rises, it was about 130 degrees up there, and we wore face masks, big smelly rubber gloves and walked around with a huge vacuum hose to pick up the piles of drifting dust.  There was a large sign that said "Natural Gas Hazard Area - Oxygen Masks Required at All Times".

Of course they didn't give us the masks, and I got concerned.  When you use natural gas in a residential setting they add that wonderful aroma to it so people can smell it in case of a leak.  However, in industrial use, it is completely odorless, but just as deadly.  So, being a bit concerned, I pointed at the sign and asked the foreman, where were our masks.  He frowned and said "We ain't got none son.".  Pressing the point, I asked about how we can know we will be safe.  He paused, and then wet his finger in his mouth and stuck it straight up into the air.  I thought he was pointing to God as our protector, but he had a brilliant plan.  He was checking for which way the wind was blowing.  He then asked the most senior person on the crew to move to the upwind side of the building and watch us all.  He told him that if any of us collapsed, his job was to call for help on the radio.  Unfortunately, the foreman's radio wasn't working...but at least he made an effort, and none of us did collapse.

At night it seemed like a set from the movie Alien

We got this same foreman a number of times (maybe he was being punished), and so got to know him pretty well.  I think his name was John, and he rolled his own cigarettes.  Fascinating but disgusting at the same time.  But I learned to appreciate his dry wit, and especially his ability to act fast when needed...and that time came one day.

Ed and I had been operating jack hammers inside a large bathroom complex, and so got pretty good at it.  Don't know if you've every used a jack hammer, but they weigh around 100 pounds, shake the crap out of you, and will deafen you when you start them up in a tiled room.  Not to mention the chocking concrete dust they blow everywhere since they run off of compressed air.

So we were both happy to get cards one day that told us to report to a closed building for jack hammer work.  At least we wouldn't be in that bathroom sounding like a war zone.  John was our foreman, and he had us walk up several flights of stair to the very top of the building lugging our hammers and hoses.  They had big steel beams, laid in pairs that crossed just under the ceiling at regular intervals.  The one foot space between each pair had been filled with reinforced concrete, and it needed to be broken out so they could take the beams down.  They were remodeling it for some purpose that did not require ceiling cranes.  So, our job was to keep our left foot on one beam, our right foot on the other, and use the jack hammer to break out the concrete in between.  All this was done while we were about 60 feet in the air above a concrete floor.

Of course there was no safety equipment...no ropes or harnesses to catch us if we slipped.  And slipping was easy.  We walked backwards down the beam pairs, and would set the hammer down on the concrete to break it free. When the concrete broke, it would fall to the floor below with a crash, and the jack hammer would try to fall too.  It was a fine art to know just when to pull back hard on the hammer to keep you and it from going down with the concrete.  And the longer we worked and the tireder we got, the more likely an accident was.  I knew if we made a mistake on this one, we would show up in the Fatalities section of the scoreboard.

At first it went fine, but both Ed and I had some near misses.  We learned very quickly to be slow and methodical.  I got my beam pair done first, and was standing back on safe ground watching Ed get to the last five feet of beam before he too would be done.  John had been watching us the whole time, rolling and smoking, but not saying much.  He moved over to stand behind Ed, and watched him slowly backing towards him breaking out the beams.  I'm still not sure exactly what happened, but suddenly Ed lost his balance forward as the concrete broke.  His jack hammer dropped about half way down through the beams, and Ed was clearly going down with it despite his strength.

Just like a miracle, John quickly reached out one had and grabbed Ed's belt in the back, and reached back with his other hand to grab a piece of pipe attached to the wall.  He was now holding Ed and the jack hammer both, and swung them both back to the platform on which he was standing.  Ed and I were both totally freaked out, knowing how close he'd just come to dying...but John just smiled and said "Sure wouldn't do for you to work alone would it boy?  Next time just let go of the GD jack hammer.".  My heart was beating so fast I felt like I was going to throw up...and I think Ed felt even worse.

So...John let us take a break, and then we went back to work again...more slowly and carefully than before.

I learned a lot from working there, and in part 2 of this story will share how I still carry a souvenir of one of my worst days.  It wasn't all bad though.  I loved working with Ed.  He had a nice 57 Olds, and would would take us both to and from work in it.  We got so filthy dirty there that he had to put blankets in the car for us to sit on to keep from ruining the seats.  Our faces and clothes would be black, which made it all the more fun to see each other smile and laugh as we'd talk about our day on the way home...totally exhausted but proud of the hard work we'd done together.

I also learned the value of a good job, and to appreciate one when I had one.  I have a lot of respect for the people who actually made a life career of working at Armco.  I knew that I could never do that work for long, but some of them had been at it for 30 years.  They were tough, still hard working, and very wise in their own way.  They are the kind of people, like miners, who gave their lives to make a living for their families and to help build this country.

So, I give thanks to each of them on this day, but am especially thankful to foreman John....I love my brother Ed, and without you John, he wouldn't be here with us all today.  Thank you!