The Boiler Room Hero Scott Galto

RayWohlfarth

In this weeks video, I do a different style of video and tell the story of Scott Galto, a stationary engineer in Dwight, IL. As he was starting the boiler, a catastrophic accident occurred

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujzihMilo8M

leonz

Edited for typos and clarity:

Good morning and thank you Ray for the description of the actual events surrounding the steam plant accident and the heroism that Scott Galto showed that day which obviously saved many lives and prevented massive steam related damage to the steam plant at this building.

It reminds me of what happened while was sweeping the floor of the former Milliken Station power plant where I was a temp to hire employee almost 40 years ago.

Ater sweeping and mopping the floor in the control room I started sweeping the quarry tile floor of the turbine building which is the size of four football fields using an 8 foot dust mop.

When I was sweeping the floor of free of fly ash near the number one boiler there was a massive fire ball that erupted from the north wall of the dry wall boiler near where the pulverized coal was blown into the fire box of the boiler at each corner of the pulverized coal boiler.

I did not know it at the time but this was a common occurrence that happened every day.

I ran over to the nearest phone in the turbine hall and called the control room and told them about the fireball that had just occurred.

The day shift turbine operator came out and looked at where the coal fueled fire ball came out and just as he was looking at the boilers north wall one of the four coal paddle blowers blew in another batch of pulverized coal into the dry wall boiler and another huge fireball came out of the crack in the wall of the boiler.

After that he told me not to worry about it. because it was one of two dry wall pulverized combustion boilers at the power plant.

This power plant was built by Combustion Engineering at Milliken Station between 1940 and 1947 .

Go figure, I guess it was something they were going to repair after the outage started after Dave Stafford laid me off.

RayWohlfarth

@leonz I would have had to change my pants seeing that. LOL I worked inside one of those coal fired power plants in Pittsburgh and it was filthy. Flyash was everywhere.

Steamhead

Wasn't there an emergency cutoff switch at the boiler room entrance? Around here, inspectors require this…………

EdTheHeaterMan

I don't think that I ever told my son about the dangers of operating a steam boiler. I remember a time when I didn't realize that a steam relief valve could empty the room of oxygen instantly and make that room scalding hot just as fast. When i learned about that, I always left the boiler room door open on that church steam boiler, even ig the cold days of winter.

I just texted my son who does side work on oil burners, and has one oil burner customer that has a steamer. I gave him the 2 minute course about steam displacing the oxygen and that steam is lighter than air and leave the boiler room door open. He said that i never stressed that before, I guess I just did it without telling him why, so it didn't sink in. He thanked me for the info. then went back to welding something at work.

Thanks for that story Ray. I made me make a special point about telling my son know about STEAM in a way I forgot to do, when we were working together.