job. Each time someone does it, there's a rescue team on standby. Chief engineer Boon-Teak Lee has made the trek on several occasions. "It's nothing," he said, as he guided us through the plant. "[It's] just a lot of steel. I've been crawling through them for so many years." Lee started working at the plant in 1977 and became chief engineer in 1981. He opened one of the boiler hatches to show us the interior. Waves of heat blasted through the foot-wide viewing window. Inside, four enormous jets of flame blazed and roared furiously, the heat so intense it made the steel glow white hot in the circular openings where the fuel injects. The heat creates steam, which rises up to the fourth storey of the plant. From there, it travels throughout the U of T campus, where it heats many buildings. The exhaust gases from the turbine engines and boilers go to the heat-recovery unit, which reabsorbs some of the energy. This increases the operation's overall fuel efficiency. On the day we were there, the plant was on track to burn 50,000 cubic meters of gas. Its gas bill reaches a staggering $1 million a month. In the control room, a small group of engineering students in hard hats took notes on the day's operating conditions. Temperatures, flow rates, pressures, voltages, wattages, amperages, and clearance levels are all recorded in real time by the many sensors throughout the plant, and fed into computers, whose LCD monitors display schematics of