"One of my first jobs" or "Why the Hole in my Resume?"
For a short time after leaving my employment with STELCO in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1967, I was employed by the International Nickel Company. I started with them as a management trainee along with another alumni from my college. During my training I was to work at the INCO Research Station in Port Colborne, on the shore of Lake Erie. This three story building housed two high pressure, rotating, high temp reactors in which nickel ore and a deadly gas reacted to form elemental nickel metal hydride. The gas, nickel carbonyl, had no odour but was explained to us carefully as a severe nerve agent, which was contained as a liquid, at high pressure, in pipes running throughout the buildings. The only detection method was a flame, a gas flame, like a lighter, which many of the workers carried around on their belts, lit. If the flame turned from blue to red they were to hold their breath and rush outside. On every wall, stations of Scott Air Packs, like scuba gear with face masks, were set every 40 feet. On our tour the supervisor showed us the tanks in an outside building that held the 50,000 gallons of this gas, liquefied at pressure. He showed how the tanks were placed over a pool of water so that any leaked drops would be reacted with water and neutralised. He explained that the odour after neutralising was the smell of wet, rotting burlap and invited each trainee to put his head inside to smell this odour.I declined by telling him I knew the smell of rotten burlap, I know he eyed me suspiciously, I was probably a wise guy or a slacker. My first demerit!
After a few more hours of classroom instruction in the operation we were all assigned to one of three shift supervisors. Me and Mike would be on the next night shift and we were soon following the foreman around to take instruction. It didn't take long for me to realise that the culture among workers here was not the professionalism I had so enjoyed at Stelco Research in Burlington. About 1 a.m., on the ground floor, near the reactor, I heard a lot of shouting and laughing as a worker called to someone 50 feet up on a mezzanine, who then tossed a large wrench down to him. With an unusual show of intelligence, this fellow declined to attempt to catch the wrench which then proceeded to bounce off the concrete and rebound off several walls, pipes and instruments, to hoots of laughter. The foreman was nowhere in sight. Mike and I were in a lab about an hour later when all the lights in the building went out and all the workers began shouting. We immediately went to our assigned emergency station which was a pressure maintenance area where another guy, with a flashlight, instructed us to maintain the seal pressure on the now stalled reactors, manually, by pumping two hydraulic handles each and keeping the pointer on the gauge in front of us to at least 3,000 psig. He was nice enough to leave us the flashlight but as far as we could tell everyone else evacuated. While standing there, facing the gauges, pumping adroitly, Mike and I, both wondering if this was all a freshman initiation, decided that this wasn't the management vocation we had signed up to learn. Several tens of minutes passed before the power was restored and we could stop pumping, only to learn that the cause of the blackout was due to a prank by a worker who entered the substation and threw a main power breaker. Just for a hoot!
This was enough for me. Next day, before I left for my shift again, I called the plant supervisor who had welcomed us on our first day. I explained I would not be returning and during the discussion included some serious personnel accusations. He asked if I would come in and repeat my story to someone else in the office and I reluctantly agreed and drove the 65 miles from Hamilton to the meeting. I was ushered into a conference room with about six suits, the night foreman, supervisor and head of research. I told my story, answered some questions and was escorted out by a security man who suggested it would be best if no one knew my address and I should not return to Port Colborne. I later learned, from Mike, of the firing of a number of people and much later read of several tragic incidents and deaths at that facility. The company is no longer in business. I worked for INCO for four days and was paid for my time there, after deductions it came to 161 dollars. I framed the check stub.
