That Marinade!

It was truly beautiful out on the channel at night. Not everyone held that appreciation, but I did. All the bright lights on the catwalks, the flares, and the occasional colorful emissions – that was my world when I was a graveyard shift reactor operator at a chemical plant on the Houston Ship Channel.

We made various things, including the base for a brand-name hair dye, a plastic polymerizing agent, and solid rocket fuel. The economy had slowed – this was during the wind-down of the Vietnam War – and the crew was skeletal. There were three plants, and I was the only one at my plant, “B” plant. There were only about six of us total on graveyard.

During the slowdown, I managed to paint all of “B” plant by myself because I often had no process running. That effort included leaving Robinson Crusoe-like messages on the back side of various pipes. Snicker snicker.

And since I had an idle reactor one night, Ike, the foreman, asked me to help Freddy clean out a storage tank. Freddy was a bullshitter; he often came to work in the winter wearing a U.S. Army overcoat with his last name over the pocket. Most assumed that this early-20s guy was a vet, and he did nothing to dispel the assumption. Having worked with him often enough, I knew that was his brother’s Army jacket. But once you had a line on his B.S., he was an OK coworker, he did his part.

Creating the rocket fuel involved both aniline, which is toxic to humans, and DMSO, which can introduce itself and a passenger chemical into your body with just surface contact.

What we were using as a storage tank was an HEIL road tanker trailer; it was oval-shaped and permanently parked near the “C” plant (which made the rocket fuel). Our task was to enter the tank and scrape off any remaining hard deposits using the supplied solvent, Solvesso, a solution including toluene and lye. We, of course, dressed in hazmat space suits (not hermetically sealed) and oxygen masks.

After entering the tank, Freddy and I soon realized the oxygen lines we were using were not working, and the toluene in the solvent was clouding our thoughts. We climbed out and investigated: someone had used the oxygen lines to move rocket fuel, which was solid at room temperature. They were completely clogged and useless.

Reporting this to Ike, he told us to get our tools out of there, and he’d let the day shift take care of it.

So Freddy and I climbed back onto the tank, and I went in to get the tools, the idea being that just a moment of exposure wouldn’t trigger a reaction to the vapors. That’s what we thought. I climbed in to gather our few tools into a bucket, and I turned to hand them to Freddy. The last snapshot in my mind from that was Freddy’s hands silhouetted against the night sky in the maintenance hatch atop the tank, reaching for the bucket of tools. He said I giggled and fell into the base of the tank.

As I’ve been told, Freddy called for help, and luckily the few around “C” plant heard him and came over. Ike got on top of the tank and threw Freddy a line to put around me, but he was by then zonkered by the fumes and put it around his neck and went, “Duhh…” Ike jumped in and sidelined Freddy, and with the help of the big guy on shift (whose name I can’t recall) got me out of the tank.

As I learned later, from there, my brethren of the Ship Channel laid me down in a chemical shower.

And did nothing!

When the ambulance finally arrived, the driver was appalled. He immediately cut off the hazmat suit and my clothes and ran the shower before he took me to an ER, that ER being in Pasadena Southmore Hospital.

When I eventually woke up from that toluene voyage, I was alone on a grey tile slab. Almost immediately, people were upon me, helping me through a shower. I’d thought I was in a morgue at first. Soon enough I was in an ER of a hospital that my then med student and soon-to-be BIL said to get the hell out of. My sister (LHTD) arranged an ambulance (whose driver had picked me up on the first night of this) to get me to Houston’s Hermann Hospital. That’s where I spent the next month.

You’ve probably seen pictures of the Conestoga wagon-like beds they use for burn patients. I had, and had always wondered how they were set up. They have a series of straps that suspend you so you’re not resting on the sheets; you’re suspended in the air.

As the tank was oval-shaped, it had a small reservoir of the solvent along the bottom, maybe two inches deep at the most. When I fell, I landed in this marinade, and it soaked into what I was wearing. Chemical burns were all over, including one eye. But to me, the fascinating aspect was that you could see, in the burn patterns, the seams and stitching of my clothing, and my eyeglasses had acquired a rose tint.

Boredom was my companion for most of the time in the hospital; reading was difficult in that burn bed, and all I had to look forward to was the next Dilaudid pain shot. But this period gave me time to think about my life.

Most of my coworkers had fathers, brothers, uncles, or cousins who worked in the plants along the ship channel, and they came from nearby. And they were generally lifers. It was easy to understand why, at twenty-one and without any more than a high school diploma, I thought the pay was great. Save for Ike, there was hardly anyone over forty out on the pipes.

Being from West Houston, I was something of a foreigner there, and working graveyard shifts on the channel was separating me from friends and the life I’d thought I was living.

The opportunity for reflection afforded me the chance to decide to go to college. That’s another chapter in my life.