The Boiler Room Hero Scott Galto

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 two 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.

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

Hello Steamhead,

I am going from memory here,

No there were no exterior safety shut down controls in the power plant.

All operations of the power plant for control of the two dry wall boilers, The General Electric and Westinghouse turbines, pump floor operations the circulated 52,000 gallons per minute through the twin boilers and back to Cayuga lake after being boiled to 1,001 degrees, recirculated and scrubbed of heat twice before the water was returned to Cayuga lake at 52 degrees, the coal conveyors feeding the 4 coal bunkers, the coal feeders feeding the paddle blowers, the primary crusher under the coal stockpile, were managed in the control room. The control room had to be cooled using 100 tons of air conditioning around the clock.

The rotary coal dumper and 60 inch conveyor feeding the coal stockpile were controlled at the coal dumpers shed.

One thing that always stuck in my memory was how Mary Parkinsons young boy was injured and later died in 1977 on his birthday by being impacted by the coupler of the following empty car when he was centering the coupler to prevent the empty car from derailing.

To this day the former coal chief insists he did nothing wrong. Nothing was done to discipline the coal chief and he later bid out of the power plant job.

After the young man died they installed a safety interlock switch shed to prevent the coal chief from moving the coal cars with the radio remote control unless the laborer was standing on the switch plate.

For some backround information, the rotary coal dumper shed was installed on a curved track next to the curve of the main north south line of the railroad at the time if the coal car coupler was not returned to center the empty car would not recouple with the car ahead of it and when the locomotive pushed the next car to be unloaded through the rotary dumper the empty coal car would be derailed. The empty coal car coupler had to be centered to avoid being derailed as the loaded coal car had to be pulled back to the rotary rumper to be rolled over and unloaded.

When the power plant was built they did not need to straighten the 4 loaded car siding tracks because of the curve of the main line that was still in use. The loaded coal car tracks were set up to be operated in pairs where 2 loaded car tracks switched to the dumper track and the other loaded car tracks switched to the dumper track as well using 3 switches.

When the rotary dumper shed built was not turned to the east to straighten the exit for the 4 empty car tracks because the main line track was curved to follow the water level route to the north.

After each car was unloaded and pushed forward the empty coal car would be pushed to one of the four empty car tracks. This was managed with 3 switches for the four empty car tracks where each siding held 25 empty cars.

At the time the power plant generated 230 megawatts of power, half of which was sold and the other half delivered to the local distribution network surrounding Cayuga lake.

The power plant consumed 100 tons per hour of bituminous coal feeding the two boilers.

From what I remember of the history the powerplant was supplied with 70 ton coal cars from 1945 until they began being supplied with 100 ton coal cars that had a maximum loaded weight of 286,000 pounds.

Even in Nebraska, all boilers in commercial installations are required to have the boiler kill switch just outside the boiler room entrance.

For multiple boilers a single switch would drop out a relay for all burners.

I have had to add them on existing installations of all sizes if the installation is subject to state inspection.

Stands to reason. If something goes sideways in the boiler room you need to 1- get out of there right now, and 2- throw the emergency switch on the way out. Sometime in the last decade or so, inspectors started requiring them on at least some residential gas jobs around here, probably due to a Code change.

probably could do something fancy with a pilot light as a warning that the other switch was off.

once you're dealing with a farm of powerplant size boilers shutting one or several down abruptly can have consequences that may be worse than the original incident. a trained operator needs to make the call of if and how to shut it down, a switch that anyone in the plant can push could make the situation much worse.

A Man among Men. Rest Easy Mr. Galto. Mad Dog

Around here, on commercial jobs they want to see a lockable type of switch, basically a "one-armed" switch without fuses in it. Something like this:

https://www.supplyhouse.com/Eaton-DG322URB-Three-Phase-Non-Fusible-Disconnect-Switch-60A-240V

It would be very difficult to accidentally shut this type off by bumping it.

Even if you're using a standard wall switch with an "Emergency Switch" plate on it, you can get a guard which will prevent accidental shutoffs, like this:

https://www.supplyhouse.com/Pass-Seymour-7801P-Handle-Locking-Guard-for-Toggle-Switch

We sold a lot of these guards.