From: ptownson@eecs.nwu.edu (Patrick Townson)
Newsgroups: misc.misc
Subject: Marching To Zion
Date: 27 Sep 92 07:20:00 GMT
Reply-To: ptownson@eecs.nwu.edu
Organization: The World

A few miles north of Chicago, near the Illinois/Wisconsin state line
on the shore of Lake Michigan sits the town of Zion, IL. Founded near
the start of this century by a religious cult and its leader, Zion has
long since become a secular community like many across America. It has
a populace no more or less conservative than their counterparts across
the nation. It is small town America. One thing which stands out in
the memory of visitors to Zion is that almost all the streets are
named after Biblical characters and events ... street names rarely get
changed anywhere, and the streets of Zion were named when the religious
cult was in prominence there about three-quarters of a century ago.

The other thing Zion is known for across northern Illinois is its role
in the production of electricity for the area. One of Commonwealth
Edison Company's nuclear stations is located here. It is a nuclear
facility which has received mixed ratings over the years. Commonwealth
Edison has been both praised and damned for the Zion operation,
depending on who was explaining it and when in its history over the
past couple of decades. Nuclear power sites are not without regular
critics though; protestors near the entrance to the facility have been
a regular event since the early days. They come from all over -- not
just Zion, the majority of whose citizens are remarkably blaise about
it all -- but from Chicago and numerous communities across the state,
marching to Zion to display their anger and fears of a possible
disaster ala Chernoble or Three Mile Island. 

It has always been hard for me to understand the protests against
nuclear generation of electricity. Yes, 'incidents' can occur, and
the absolute finality of a serious accident at Zion and its effects on
the Chicago metropolitan area, particularly north of the city, are
horrible to think about.  But still ...

The young men and women who march to Zion are clean and well-bred for
the most part; you'll see little grit under their fingernails or dirt
in their hair. I wonder if they ever read in their history books about
places like the old Edison Stateline Generator, a coal-burning plant
which produced electricity for our area for a half-century before Zion
and the other nuke plants in our area were dreamed of.

Edison Stateline: on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, where the
lake begins to curve eastward across northern Indiana, at the point
where the dividing line between Illinois and Indiana meets the lake,
commonly known as 106th Street and Indianapolis Boulevard. To the
southeast is Whiting, Indiana; actually a section of Hammond
known as Robertsdale -- politically -- while geographically part of
Whiting. Straight south on the Illinois side, the City of Chicago
continues on for a few miles. 

In 1954-55 I was 12 years old. My best friend Dennis and I loved to
ride our bikes through the strip of wasteland north of the New York
Central tracks but immediatly south of the lake ... an area even then
incredibly polluted with a junk yard, scrap metal dump, automobile
tire dump, etc ... and of course the backside of Edison Stateline
Generator.  

Picture Westminster Abbey sitting amidst this scene: Edison Stateline
was a huge, gothic building. Giant windows which ran from top to
bottom in this five story building. A large smokestack on the roof.
Inside, no actual five stories -- just a groud floor and a very high
vaulted ceiling some sixty or seventy feet above. About where the
third floor would be if there had been floors, a 'catwalk' around the
inner perimiter of the building, and in a corner of the building at
the same height the office for the superintendent and his clerks. The
rest of the building was given over to several large blast furnaces;
big fire-belching, coal eating monsters which heated water contained
in them; converted the water to steam which was pushed under pressure
through a system of turbines. As the turbines spun rapidly propelled
by the steam, electricity was generated therein; it left the building
through enormous wires attached to high towers outside; these carried
the electricity over the wires to sub-stations throughout the area for
distribution over the electrical grid.  After propelling the turbines,
the steam would condense back into water and return to the furnaces
for reheating and re-use. 

Operating these furnaces were men who worked there around the clock in
three shifts daily, seven days per week. The furnaces burned coal and
the coal was brought to the furnaces from very *large* (ten or fifteen
feet high) piles of coal in the 'yard' next to the Abbey -- oops, I
mean the generating station. The building was intimidating to outsiders;   
on days which were overcast and rainy, the building seemed all that
more mysterious as it sat there with a drone coming constantly from
the turbines inside. One Sunday afternoon we had been playing games
that 12 year old boys will play in the field behind it. A severe
electrical storm, along with very dark skies and heavy rain came to
the area. Huge flashes of lightning brightened the otherwise dark sky
and the castle -- the abbey -- the 'monster building' as we sometimes
called it would appear brightly for a second during the lightning
which seemed to be attracted to it anyway. Then the large blast of
sound from the thunder. We hid in a secret shelter we had built and
watched it, quite fascinated as the lights in the building flickered
once or twice about the time the lightning would pass nearby.

But other days were sunny and bright, and we enjoyed watching the
trains of the New York Central Railroad bring each *day's* supply of
coal. We'd count the cars on the train as it slowly went past, the
diesel engine straining to pull twenty, thirty or sometimes forty cars
of coal behind it. Sometimes the train would block the crossing of
109th Street and Calumet Avenue (on the Whiting, Indiana side of the
facility) for thirty minutes leaving many angry motorists cursing as
the train crawled through the generator coal yard at a snail's pace.
The cars would be unhooked one by one and the engine would 'shove'
the car onto a side track. This would be repeated several times until
all the full cars were unloaded and the empty cars from the day before
attached to the train.

With its cargo unloaded, the New York Central train would pull away,
and leave, only to return the next day about the same time with more
food for the furnaces. The longest train I recall seeing was one with
*sixty* cars attached, every one a loaded coal car. But the best part
of the excitement for 12-year old boys was yet to come ... the cars
had to be dumped out ... and presently what they called a 'switch-engine'
would come down the track to the cars to begin the process. All the
coal cars and the switch-engine had the inscription EDISON on their
side in large letters. Commonwealth Edison, you see, owned its own
small railroad there and the freight cars which made the trip to West
Virginia and the coal mines.

The engine would attach to the front of the cars the NYC RR had left
on the sidetrack and begin pushing them backward up an incline to a
point where they were several feet in the air in a tubular device
which completely surrounded the coal car. That car would be detached
from the train and left there as the rest pulled forward slightly.
Then several large steel grips would come forward and clamp around the
coal car, lift it off the tracks, and completely turn it over. The
coal would fall down a large crater into an area below where conveyor
belts would distribute it in piles around the 'yard'. As each car was
emptied, the steel grips would turn it right side up, and set it back
on the tracks ... the switch-engine and attached cars would back up
just slightly, tap the empty car and send it rolling down the other
side of the incline empty, where in a few seconds it would tail-end
other empty cars; bump the car in front of it with a loud noise and
sit there empty until the next day when the NYC RR would come for it
again for the trip to West Virginia. 

As each car in turn was lifted up and turned over, the coal would fall
out and clouds of dust would arise in the air. For the hour or so that
it took to empty the entire load -- each car took about two minutes to
be moved to the top of the incline, grabbed, turned over and dumped,
uprighted and shoved out of the way -- the sky would be thick with
coal dust ... the sky would be almost black at times.

Now and then we would get too close, at least according to Edison
which had several NO TRESPASSING signs about the facility, and the
foreman or someone would yell "You two little bastards get out of
here! Don't you see the danger? You'll get hurt! Go somewhere else to
play!" And we two little bastards would run off only to go around to
the other side and watch them work there instead until *they* came out
to run us off.

A LUCKY DAY: 'twas a Saturday afternoon in fact; we had been in our
secret fort amid the tire dump nearby when the NYC RR came through.
Admittedly we were foolish kids, but we raced up to the track, ran
around the crossing gates which were down so we could be on the other
side when the train started unloading. This time though, a nice man
was there by the name of Mister Hendricks; it turned out he was the
shift superintendent and he said if we behaved ourselves and did as he
said, we could walk around with him for awhile inside. Well of course
we could behave ourselves!  

Once inside, we were fascinated by the operation. But what I will
never forget was the men we saw working there. Everyone blacked by
coal dust, sweat pouring from their faces. The conveyors would bring
in coal from the yard to the furnaces; the men would shovel it into
the furnaces and periodically use long steel 'pokers' to stir up the
fire inside and make it burn better. It was about 2:30 in the
afternoon and new men were arriving from outside the building all the
time. They'd walk up to their work station and chat with the man they
were relieving; after a minute or two of chat, the ones who had been
there went to a section of the building where apparently there were
showers and lockers for their clothes. 

Mr. Hendricks took us to his office high above the work floor and gave
us glasses of cold ice-water. He showed us the clerks at work, with
their stacks of cards which represented railroad cars in transit
somewhere; their ledger books and other files. About five minutes
before three pm, he said "Now I'll let you blow the whistle ..." and
we did not have to be invited twice. Along the catwalk high above the
work floor and a few feet from the office was a little place where one
could stand or sit and observe the work going on below. Apparently Mr.
Hendricks did this a lot. Hanging down there from high above us was
long metal chain with a handle on the end of it that one would grip
with both hands and pull downward. This caused a trapdoor in the
steampipe running overhead to open and divert the steam down another
pipe and into a whistle which was mounted on the roof of the abbey --
I mean the castle -- I guess I mean the generator building. We were
anxious to 'do it' but Mr. Hendricks cautioned us to wait until the
clock said exactly three pm. It was a Western Union clock, noted for
accuracy, and the official time-keeping mechanism at the facility.

At about fifteen seconds before three pm, Mr. Hendricks said to pull
it NOW. The two of us each grabbed hold of the bar and putting our
combined weight on it were able to pull it down from above perhaps
several inches; maybe a foot. As the bar came down, from overhead we
heard a 'whoosh' sound as steam began filling the pipe where it had
been diverted, and after a couple seconds of 'whoosh' the whistle on
the top of the building began to sound. We held on for about ten
seconds and would have probably held it longer except that Mr.
Hendricks said to let go.

As we looked out the window after making the whistle sound, we saw
dozens of people streaming from the building getting into their cars
in the parking lot and driving away. On the work floor there remained
a full crew, but these were the guys we had seen coming in a half hour
earlier; they were still mostly clean but would be black with coal
dust before their shift ended at 11 PM. After more ice-water from the
fountain in Mr. Hendrick's office he escorted us outside with a
warning to 'not tell anyone I let you in here; they'll can my ass for
sure if they knew it ...'. Of course we were not about to tell anyone
anything; it had been a great adventure for the two of us.

Beginning with the advent of electricity for the masses before the
turn of the century and continuing on until the middle years of this
century, plants like this operated in every city and town across
America. In big cities the plants were bigger, but each of them spewed
dust and carbon monoxide out into the air all the time. I remember
very well how the sky around Edison Stateline was *always* grey and
overcast. People simply ignored it; large cities were always very
filthy places to live earlier in this century because of the
electrical generators.  Men would sweat, toil and lose their lives
working in the coal mines to dig up coal the NYC RR would take around
the nation while other men would sweat and toil to keep the furnaces
going all the time. When a furnace needed repairs, it would be shut
down and when cooled off, men would climb inside to make repairs by
welding it and scrubbing it clean for another couple year's of use.

I think it was two years later -- I was in high school -- that I made
another trip to Edison Stateline, this time by the front door and a
guard who asked me what I wanted. I asked if I could speak with Mr.
Hendricks to say hello ... he let me go via the elevator up to the
office on the catwalk but when I asked if Mr. Hendricks was around the
lady looked at me sort of funny and said "well didn't you know he died
last year?"  I guess that surprised me and I asked what caused him to
die. "Well, what does anyone die from when they work here? " she asked
me with an incredulous look as if to say what is wrong with the little
bastard? Doesn't he know anything?  "He died from lung cancer, it was
an occupational thing the way the docs diagnosed him; they found coal
dust all over his lungs ...".

I thanked her, took a drink of ice-water from the fountain which now
had a sign on it saying "Do not drink up the last of this water
without putting a new bottle here; be considerate of others" and left.
As I left, the crossing gates were going down on the west side of the
building, the 102nd Street NYC RR crossing on the Chicago side of the
line. It was about time for the daily dump. I beat the train to the
crossing and went on home, not really interested in watching any
longer. 

At Zion recently, I chatted with one of the demonstrators; a fellow
perhaps nineteen or twenty years old. Nuclear power was a Bad Thing,
he hastened to inform me; sooner or later -- probably sooner -- there
would be an accident that sent us all to Hell in a hurry. I told him
he should have been around forty years earlier; then he could have
seen a Living Hell on Earth at Stateline. 

I am reminded of the statistic which says flying in an airplane across
the country is many times safer than riding in your automobile a few
miles. Yes, maybe so, but there is a certain awful finality to an
airplane crash that we can avoid in many or most instances by riding
in our car. And likewise, nuclear power is 'so much cleaner and
healthier' to live with than the coal furnaces which generated our
electricity in the past. But still ...

All the Edison Statelines in the world could not keep up with the
demand for electricity we have these days. We consume immense amounts
of electricity much of which could be avoided. Yet despite our
voracious consumption of resources, we cannot understand why pollution
is so bad. Milton Friedman once noted that the amount of pollution we
must live with is directly proportionate to the lifestyle we insist on
living. I tried to explain all this to the nuke site demonstrator, but
I think it went over his head. So be it.

They march to Zion and protest the policies of Edison ... and I think
back to the 1950's and the men who were incapacitated by age 60 with a
variety of lung infections and cancer, to say nothing of the neighbors
of the electric plants. 

Maybe someday we will be able to rely totally on solar power. That is
my dream.


Patrick Townson
Newsgroups: misc.misc