Mixed Messages from OG&E and OU

Something Oklahoma University students can give thanks for this holiday season is a future in clean energy. Thursday's Daily Oklahoman reported that state regulators signed off Wednesday on a new OG&E wind farm being built out in Woodward. This approval will help OU achieve a goal of being powered entirely by renewable energy by 2013. This will actually be a bit of publicity coup helpful for recruiting green minded students and possibly making Oklahoma look more like a wind energy leader. To my eyes this appears to be good news, a solid commitment to rewnewable energy by the state of Oklahoma.

But what exactly did we approve?

It's not until the last few paragraphs of the article that you discover what the Oklahoma Corporation Commision signed off on is a rider increasing OG&E customer's utility bills about 90 cents per month over the next year. Then it will drop to about 80 cents the next year.

Clean energy investment is a top-heavy thing. You dump a lot of money into the front end, namely the construction costs of these $3-million-dollar-a-piece turbines and then you pump a lot of money out of them seven to ten years down the road. Turbines last around 20 years. If they're well maintained it could be longer.

It doesn't seem fair that OG&E customers should have to pay a dollar more per month so that OG&E can recoup construction costs on something they understand will be very profitable down the road. It might be different if there was any promise to customers that they would see a rebate of some kind when the turbines start to turn a profit. But this is basically a consumer tax pushed through using the publicity of hope and green energy.

Also the rider doesn't appear to benefit those paying for it. The article states the wind farm will generate 101 megawatts for Oklahoma University's Norman campus. That is enough power to run about 30,000 homes. Does OU campus require that much power? Perhaps. They have 30,000 students and 3,000 faculty, but they don't all live on campus. I'm sure the lights at the Oklahoma Memorial Stadium eat a little more power than the average home. But what happens when the lights aren't on?

What upsets me most about this move by the OG&E and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission is that wind energy is profitable, but this rider makes it appear that it isn't. It is an investment that takes several years to pay back and I understand that lots of people would rather see their investments pay off in a year or two rather than seven to ten. If you start sticking your consumers with start-up costs for your profitable venture, you're going to stir up a significant backlash against green energy. Wind will look more and more like a scam to milk customers rather than the profitable, necessary, and beneficial investment that it is.

Day 10: Help Yourself

Today was a terrifically short day. We started by finishing our pick-off. I messed this one up a bit. When doing a pick-off rescue you lower yourself to the victim on a rope. Then you transfer the victim to your rope by attaching the six-to-one pulley system to the rope you’re hanging on. I had trouble with this one because I attached the six-to-one to the wrong rope. The instructor clued me in on this. But once I got that sorted out, the rescue went smoothly.

After that came the simplest and coolest rescue, the self rescue. With the self rescue, you use a kit that you bring up with you to the tower. In the kit is a smaller version of your rope rider. We were told this one was military grade. Attached to your fall arrest is a rope ladder. When you find yourself hanging from your fall arrest, you can deploy this rope ladder and then climb it in order to reach up and attach the small rope rider to an anchor attached slightly above the clip that caught you. At this point you should have enough slack on your fall arrest to unattach the clip on your dorsal d-ring and then you can slowly slide to safety on your mini rope rider.

The group moved quickly through this and we were done for the day at about half-past twelve. I volunteered to go up the tower and gather some of the anchors and ropes we used to prevent any falls. Once I was safe on the ground, I headed to Oklahoma City to hang with the family.

Day 9: Rescue Rangers

In the morning I was able to perform my remote rescue. I had a big screw up when the clip fell off the edge of my extension pole. The self-closing clip nailed my victim in the arm on the way down, though he was a pretty good sport about it. Eventually I got it back together and got my rescue done by lunch.

Our class wasn’t moving very quickly. This was partly because we had guys who had to redo their rescues. But we also had a couple of guys in the class who just couldn’t get the steps down. They appeared to be watching the demonstrations, they passed the written tests, but when they got up on the towers it was as if everything they’d seen up to that point ceased to make sense. It was incredibly frustrating just to watch them. We were not allowed to coach people from the ground so I had to keep my mouth shut as they hung equipment upside down or stared bewildered at a set of carabineers. Further, both of these guys were close to sixty years old. I visited with one of them who complained that his body ached from the previous two days of climbing.

But there was an important lesson to be learned here. As I watch their victims dangle helplessly I realized the opposite of what it meant to trust someone with your life. Keep in mind that the harnesses that stop someone from falling are not designed to keep a person in that position for long. You have about fifteen to twenty minutes before suspension trauma starts to set in. The harness will compress the body in such a way that your circulation is cut off to the exterior limbs and all sorts of bad things can happen, including death. The gentlemen in question, and there were only two of them, were taking much longer than 20 minutes to get to the victims. Fortunately the victims were conscious and they could rig their positioning lanyard to make a saddle that they could stand on and get pressure off of the constriction points. But had they been knocked out, they would be in a world of hurt. Watching these guys I concluded that I would never go into a tower with either of them. In a rescue situation they would be almost as dangerous as no help at all. The instructors gave them a few opportunities to get the rescue right but they both failed.

After remote rescue we moved on to the pick-off rescue. With this one the victim is hanging suspended from a rope, like the guy to the right. You then have to slide yourself down a rope to the guy, attach his harness to your rope rider and then lower both yourself and the victim to the ground. Before you hit the ground you want to swing the victim so he lands sitting down. The more bends in the body the better. The reason for this is that blood clots can form in the legs due to poor circulation. Putting kinks in the body keeps the un-oxygenated blood from flooding the system too quickly.

At the end of the day the instructors gathered us around and told us that the two guys who weren't getting it wouldn’t be joining us for Friday’s exercises. I personally was relieved as the rescues would move along quicker. The instructors pointed out that this wasn’t the first time guys had failed this portion of the course and that we should encourage these guys to return on Monday. The course includes many other certifications, such as OSHA training and electrical equipment training.

I looked over the course application, and among the requirements you must sign off on are a possible mobility test and the ability to climb and be physically fit. While these requirements are fairly obvious, I don’t know if the language is clear enough. Perhaps the school should be more explicit that this is a physically demanding course and applicants should understand that it requires complicated tasks at dangerous heights. Otherwise you may be setting people up for a career that they can’t handle.

Oklahoma City News Looking To Woodward

Here's a local TV news story on the area I'm in and the industry I'm trying to get into.

Day 8: Hanging Around the Derrick

Day eight began with some warming up by going through our descents again. The rope rider is a neat device but can be difficult to work with. The springs are necessarily stiff, you need that friction, but they can be tough to open properly to feed your rope into. I must admit that walking yourself down the vertical side of an oil derrick is a great way to start the day.

I spent a bit more time looking around to see how I felt about the heights. They do the climbing training first thing in this program so that those who are uncomfortable with heights will realize this right away and don’t waste their time training for an industry that is fundamentally wrong for them. I wasn’t that high up, about 30 feet, but looking around you see open plains and farmland. The occasional grain elevator and road is visible from this height. And to the north I could count dozens of pinwheeling turbines, a great reminder of why I was up here. The phrase “don’t look down,” is actually pretty helpful at this height. The first few times I was up there, I was so absorbed with positioning myself properly and getting a good descent that I didn’t even think about the fact that I was a fatal distance from the earth. Yes, even 30 feet is said to be fatal.

Once everyone had practiced this controlled means of descent, the instructors demonstrated a direct rescue. Again this is when a fall victim is suspended in such a way that the rescuer can bodily reach out, with no danger to himself, and grab the d-ring sticking out from the victim’s back. The three phases of rescue are always the same. First you have “Set up and access:” get to the victim and get your anchors ready, these are what you’ll be using to transfer the victim to the lowering device. Then we have “Raise and transfer,” here you use a portable pulley system called a six-to-one to lift the victim off his fall arrest, the line that stopped his fall, then transfer the guy to lowering system. Lastly you have “tag and lower.” Tagging means you tie a rope to the guy and throw it down below, so the people on the ground can pull the victim clear of the structure, finally you lower the guy.

After the demo, we were split into teams and paired up. Each guy would take a turn being rescued and rescuing. But since only two guys, one from our team and one from the other team could be doing a rescue, the rest of us were left down on the ground to watch. I took advantage of this opportunity to see what guys did right and what they did wrong. Lots of time they forgot to tag the victim. I would also walk around silently mouthing the steps to myself on the ground. This previsualization was helpful, but when I got to the top my six-to-one jammed. The instructor had to get a second one for me. After this hitch I was able to finish the rescue, but I myself almost forgot to tag my man. Easy to do. It was almost a perfect rescue, except when I was repacking the rescue bag I improperly loaded the rope in the rope-rider. The instructor made me climb up and fix it. I was fairly lucky to get the rescue right my first time. A few guys failed it the first go round and we only got two chances to get it right.


After direct rescue we moved on to remote rescue. In this case you can’t reach the guy directly, like Mr. Brown over here, instead have to use a long extending pole in order to clip a new anchor line to his dorsal d-ring. The clip on the end is self closing and once it hooks into the d-ring it closes automatically. This can be a tricky operation; the self closing clip can close accidentally, the victim can be blowing around in the wind making him a moving target, and as I found out the next day, your clip can fall off the pole.

Day 7: What Climbs Up Must Come Down

Morning began with bullshitting about knocking out the rescue victim if he fights you. This was combined with references to a video we watched yesterday in which a guy was yelled at to cut someone down, this resulted in the rescue dummy and the rescuer falling to the ground. There is quite a bit of bullshitting that goes on in these classes. And as we practiced our climbing and rescue the coming week there would be a lot of time to do so.

Then we reviewed some test questions and took a test. A few of the terms I didn’t know at all, and if I don’t know it, I thought it’s more dangerous to luck through an exam and get out on the field without a clue than to retest. This is in fact an accepted philosophy, which I would later find out is summed up as “You guess, you die.” But even with the blank questions I managed to pass the test by answering more than 80 percent of the questions. They took my picture and my scores will be given to the TSL database. With that, the time had come to move from theory to practice.

The instructors took us to a neighboring room and instructed us to grab a red bag. Inside the bag we found harnesses to which we would be attaching fall arrest and safety gear. We were also outfitted with hard hats, gloves, safety glasses and a positioning lanyard. My harness was a standard size and I had to do a lot of cinching up to do in order to get it to fit, I'm a small guy. There was so much extra length that we had to tape up the excess to keep it close to me. This is an important practice when there are moving machine parts in your work area.

After gearing up we moved outside to a decommissioned oil derrick. Here we were to perform several of the climbing techniques that we had studied the previous day. One was called a monkey climb. This is an important technique to use when there is no fall prevention, for example if you are climbing a structure to establish a new safety line you would use this technique. After we ascended about half way up the derrick we would tie off using our positioning lanyard. This would let us let go of the structure with both hands and then lean back. We also practiced transferring from one fall arrest system to another. We would climb the structure using one system, position off, and then reach behind our heads to the dorsal d-ring located between our shoulder blades. For this transfer you had to first carefully cover your established fall arrest system, clip in the new one and then uncover and unclip your previous system.

This was followed by descents using rope riders. This is basically a variable friction device that you feed the rope through. Then you slowly walked down the side of the wall. It was important to get familiar with this device because we would be using it or a variation of it for each rescue practiced for the rest of the week.

The Chinese Turbine Debate

Over the weekend I heard a bit about the recent scandal of using Federal stimulus dollars to purchase Chinese wind turbines. I'll be reading more about this event in the next few days, as we all will, but I'd like to share a few thoughts I have about this article in the New York Times.

Of course the AWEA is already all over this. They point out that not all of the turbine parts are being made in China, logistically it’s better to manufacture some of the larger components here rather than pay expensive shipping costs. And of course as any bystander would realize, while it is important to develop the manufacturing side of the nation’s wind industry, manufacturing is only part of the picture. The project in question will install 240 wind turbines. We can expect each one of those to last about 20 years. If you figure 2 turbine techs will be required to maintain every 10 turbines, importing parts from China will create 48 long term jobs, not counting the supervisory and administrative positions.

We also have to consider the construction positions, the money to made transporting parts, and the manufacture of replacement parts and tools. Not to mention that buying from China can get 600 megawatts of clean energy into our mix sooner, that’s clean, renewable energy for 180,000 homes. So while Senator Schumer’s efforts to protect American manufacturing are laudable, it doesn’t make much sense at the moment for Energy Secretary Steven Chu to obey Schumer’s demand to “reject any request for stimulus money unless the high-value components, including the wind turbines, are manufactured in the United States.”

In this economy it is more important to get the dollars and jobs these turbines will create than to cut out a vital supplier. Of course we hope American manufacturing can become increasingly competitive with China, but the green revolution is shaping up to be one that will take place in a global economy.

Day 6: Friends don’t let friends go splat.

It’s very quiet where I live. At night I hear only a handful of sounds. The refrigerator kicking on, the heater kicking on, the windblown branches scraping the house, passing trains on a track about a mile south, and coyotes.

As I exit my front door in the morning, I can look to the right and see this picture I took, the sun coming up over the prairies, cows grazing under the light of the new day.

When I arrived at class our new instructors were already introducing themselves. The big guy with handlebar mustache was named Ruben and the one wearing the shirt that read “Friends don’t let friends go splat,” was named Cervantes. Good name for a guy in the wind industry, no? They told us a bit about their background and the company they work for. They teach for Airstreams, but the safety course was put together by a company called Tech Safety Lines. They are manufacturers of fall prevention and rescue equipment, which largely involves ropes and carabineers.

We learned quite a bit the first day out. We learned the basics of fall prevention. This often involves the mentioned ropes and carabineers. There are three basic measures of protection. Fall restraint, work positioning, and fall arrest. Fall restraint means that you can’t fall, for example a rope tied to a harness that keeps you from even nearing a building edge where you might fall. Work positioning is a way of clipping a line to your harness so that you can work in an area with both hands but not fall more than two feet. Fall arrest is a system which stops the momentum of a falling body. These measure are often combined. So you have a system of redundant measures to prevent a fall.

All of this is extremely important for wind turbine techs considering they typically work 300 feet above the earth. After discussing fall prevention we moved to proper anchoring, where to attach your harness, and then on to occupational hazards. There are three major ones for working on wind turbines, falling, electricity, and moving parts. I had already read about and been told of these hazards. The pony tail story from the first day is still fresh in my mind. The wind farm manager also told the story of a friend of his who used to climb to the top of a tower and position off, meaning he tied a lanyard around a solid anchor and then clipped the lanyard to himself, then this friend would drink from a thermos of coffee he brought up with him. He did this up until the day he forgot to properly position off and fell to his death.

The instructors had some grizzly pictures to show us of a poor guy who got caught in a rotating piece of machinery. You could tell only that it was a body, but you couldn’t tell where his head was, it just looked like a twisted doll. There was also a picture of a guy who got too close to a high voltage wire. That looked like a charred skeleton. One of the favorites we saw was a video of a man trying to rescue a dummy hanging from a telephone pole. His friends on the ground were heckling him telling him to hurry, and like a fool, he listened. Whipping out his knife he cut down the dummy which fell quickly and most likely damagingly to his dummy destruction. The man then made the mistake of trying to grab the fallen victim and painfully followed himself.

We moved on to rescue techniques, which I’ll get into more over the next few days. But basically there are a few things to remember when rescuing people who have fallen and are suspended by their harness. First you need to do it quickly, the way that a harness compresses a person’s body when he is hanging in it can cut off circulation and cause permanent bodily harm. You have a window of 15 to 20 minutes to get to the guy and get the pressure off of him before suspension trauma takes effect. To do this you have to get into a position where you can get the person in question off the fall arrest device that caught the victim and then transfer them to a lowering device. It’s a pretty complicated series of actions, made more complicated by the fact that someone’s life depends on you doing it correctly. But that’s why they are training us.

After going over an entire manual’s worth of material, the instructors took showed us the equipment we would be using. I have to admit I didn’t really understand what all the stuff was for. I sort of understood how it worked, but it wasn’t until we started working on it the next day that it all started to gel.

Day 5: Digital Multimeters and You

Today was an introductory course to electronics. As it was explained to us we would be getting a short primer on electronic theory before digging deeper into the topic later in the week. Our instructor Mr. Stone, normally teaches the diesel technology classes. He’s a big guy with a handle bar mustache and a lazy eye.

He walked us through voltage, current and resistance. I had a circuit analysis class at New York City College of Technology, so this was largely a refresher for me. I was startled at how quickly he moved through the information, covering nearly half a semester at City Tech in a morning out here. One of the most brilliant things he showed us was something called the thumb chart.

Very quickly, electric circuit theory is fairly easy to understand if you compare it to water in a garden hose. Voltage is like pressure, and your battery provides the voltage, the way a water tower might provide pressure to your garden hose. Current is basically water moving through the hose. And resistance is, as my instructor put it, like kinking the hose.

As they teach in you physics classes or electronic theory, these three elements, voltage, resistance and current are linked by a little thing called Ohm’s law. Ohm’s law states that voltage is equal to resistance times current or V = I x R. With this law and a little bit of algebra you can find the resistance, the voltage and the current as long as you have the other two bits of info. But since my algebra is weak I always moved a little slowly through these algebraic manipulations. But all of that was made incredible easy by the thumb chart.

With this idiotic little graphic, you can find out how to calculate any of the elements in Ohm’s law simply by covering the variable you want. If you want to know the current, cover the letter I and bam, it’s voltage divided by resistance. I quickly realized that you can plug another chart familiar to the electrically inclined which is the power chart. Wattage is an expression of Voltage times Current. So you can make a thumb chart for it. I know what you’re thinking, “Dude, that’s really cool and all but what if you only have the voltage and the resistance, but you still need to calculate power. Well, just turn your attention back to first thumb chart, you can get the current needed for your calculation by dividing the voltage by the resistance.


You either understand what I’ve just written because it is so painfully obvious, or you have no clue what I’m talking about. My point is that these charts provided a eureka moment for me that crystallized a lot of the theory I’d been stumbling over since beginning electrical studies.

Mr. Stone passed out a variety of multimeters. These devices can measure many things, hence the multi in their name. We will likely use them to measure current and voltage. We used them to test a few switches to see if they were working or not. None of them worked. We then watched a video detailing how to use all the other functions. The impact of this video could be measure in decibels, largely coming from a sleeping student.

Later we went to a room with lots of circuit boards set up. These were much bigger and user friendly than the boards they gave us to work with back at City Tech. Here, I learned another important lesson about heat and impedance. We were given some light bulbs and some wires, along with a switch and wires. After wiring these up we used multimeters to make some measurements. My partner and I ran into a problem. We measured the resistance of the light bulb when it was out of a circuit and then we calculated what our current should be. When we wired the circuit up we discovered that our current was much lower than we had anticipated, about 100 times lower. Confused we enlisted the help of our instructor. He tested the equipment, and everything checked out. Then he remembered that the resistance of the bulb in the circuit increases dramatically as current is passed through the filament and the filament heats up. This triggered a memory of my recent physics course where I heard something like the hotter an object gets the less current it can pass, but the name of the phenomenon escapes me.

The week ended early that afternoon, and I went back to Oklahoma City where I would be put to work by my mother trimming trees and bushes around the house. This activity required the use of a ladder, and I would find out the coming week just how many safety violations I committed doing routine things around the house.

Day 3 and 4: Almost Platinum and Learning to Excel

The morning of the third day we continued to work on our work keys skills tests. I find math pleasantly relaxing. I like the process, breaking a problem into its steps, setting up the formula, plugging in the numbers and out comes your perfect little answer. So for the entire morning of the second day I boned up the processes of math, lots of percentage conversions and fractions. After I got bored with math I tried out the other skills test and was happy to find I got platinum level scores on those. But that would set me up with a bit of false confidence. After a morning at the computer I went out for lunch.

When we got back it was time to test. Much to the elation of the instructor, and myself, I must admit, I didn’t miss a single question out of the 33 that sent my way. I then went for the reading test. I got a perfect score on that one too. Sadly, when it came time to do the locating information test I missed a couple and only got the gold. That means that my overall certificate will be gold rating even though I scored perfectly on the other two test. I guess you’re only as good as your weakest area. Having completed the test, I got to get out of class pretty early. It was a good thing too, because I was having an intense craving for a Braum’s hamburger.

Braum’s is a regional ice cream chain that also does some fast food. It’s similar to an In & Out burger, only they have a miniature dairy market for milk and eggs and ice cream in each store and they don’t pay their employees as well. I don’t know what sort of opiates they put in those burgers at Braum’s, but I’ve found that since moving back to Oklahoma that I can’t go more than a few days without one of their juicy burgers. They stuff them with thick tomato slices and crisp lettuce and when you bite into it, you are filled with a Proustian warmth. Braum’s burgers are my madeleines.

I also decided to treat my nearly platinum self to a cherry lime aide. I watched carefully as a young girl was walked through the steps of squeezing fresh limes into a paper cup and adding the syrup and seltzer that infuses this sweet-tart mix with its sublime effervescence. As she handed it to me, I asked “Is this your first cherry lime aide?” She flashed an abashed smile and said it was. I told her I’d let her know how it was. But I didn’t try it in front of her. Lime aides can be hit or miss and I didn’t want to embarrass the poor kid by making a sour face. Lucky for me she did a pretty good job.

The next day, we were shuffled into another computer room to get some training on the ubiquitous spreadsheet program, Excel. My cousin Jim once told me that the world was run on Excel spreadsheets. A frightening thought. I used the program almost daily at my old job, so I know it fairly well. That being the case I was asked by the instructor to sit near those who had less experience, this way I could help them out. I picked up a new nickname, “Class Genius.”

Throughout the day the instructor asked me several questions, at one point she wanted to set up an excel sheet comparing wind turbine performance to average wind speed, but she had too many variables out there. The lesson here is you have to know what you want before you set up an excel spread sheet. One of the other things I learned was how to lock spreadsheets so you can only change certain variables. This is very useful for creating form documents that can be distributed around a business. I also use google spreadsheet for a variety of purposes. I showed the instructor my google account and she asked me to show the rest of the class. The guys seemed appreciative, I think it’s a great thing as we are all moving closer to the cloud.

Day 2 “Why did God give you two ears and one mouth?”

We began the morning with more leadership training. We were asked to discuss the time we were part of great team. This one was frighteningly tough for me. While many of the guys discussed their winning high school football team or Army unit I was left to consider if getting a varsity letter for swimming the breaststroke actually counted as a team activity. The point of the exercise was to get us to think about what makes a good team.

Then we watched a film featuring one of the greatest team leaders god has ever seen fit to bestow upon a school of god: Lou Holtz. Lou reminds me a lot of Ross Perot. He shouts everything he says, he has a declarative style that discourages questions, while encouraging confusion and he slings that home spun wisdom like it was whisky to the Irish. WIN apparently is an anagram for What’s Important Now. And God gave us two ears and one mouth so we could listen twice as much as we speak. In my immaturity I began riffing on Mr. Holtz, thinking things like “God gave us two eyes and two nostrils so we could smell everything we see.”

After the wisdom of Lou Holtz we discussed how the burden of communication is on the listener. This seemed a bit backwards to me. Such sentiments give idiots license to say all sort of idiotic things and then beg off with the phrase, “Well that’s not what I meant, you’re not listening.” Case in point, we were given an example of how a hyperbusy husband once told his equally hyperbusy spouse “We need a wife.” The wife apparently didn’t appreciate this comment, but maybe that’s because she wasn’t shouldering her burden as the listener.

This was followed by putting jigsaw puzzles together as a group. Each group of four was given a puzzle and each member had their own responsibility: one person to sort, one to put the puzzle together and one to oversee the project. I we worked together to assemble our portrait of a butterfly alighting upon a cluster of flowers, the instructor would add impediments to our progress such as work gloves, or dark safety glass. Putting a puzzle together with gloves on is pretty tough. This was supposed to help us accept the difficulties that safety regulations sometimes put upon us. Point taken.

In the end I was confused as to why we were having leadership training when the purpose of this course was to get an entry level position in the wind industry. But considering that it is a relatively new industry I could end up a leader with little warning.

When we got back from lunch we were introduced to Work Keys. Work Keys is essentially a computer administered skills test, broken into three categories: applied math, locating information, and reading for comprehension. Those who complete the exam are given ratings that range from Bronze to Platinum. The joker of the classroom announced that he would be getting the brown award. Good scores on the math test were required for this particular program. After working through the obligatory “How to use this program” program, I moved to the pretest for math. I only scored a six out of a possible seven on the pre-test. This meant that a bit of review was in order. The test itself was largely occupational word problems. “Company A charges you $0.06 per kilowatt hour. Company B charges you $0.04 per kilowatt hour, plus a $15.00 monthly charge. You use 1000 kilowatt hours per month. Which is the better deal?”

While we were working through our training modules, the woman helping us with the work skills tests asked us about our color personalities. She asked if there were any blues in the classroom. I pretended to be absorbed in the skills tests on my monitor. But a fellow student pointed to me and said I was a blue. The woman asked me if I was in the right industry. Good question.

Day 1: I’m a “Blue”

Not knowing what to expect, I arrived at the school full of nerves. The class had 10 other souls beside me. Looking around, I could tell right away that I was the odd man out. Just like Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour experts, a life time of Oklahoma living had given me the ability to identify native Oklahomans with a glance. They look a lot like Texans from the northern part of the state, but they tend to be more partial to scarlet, as opposed to orange. Not that Oklahoma lacks an orange team, people just tend to gravitate towards winners. Sorry Cowboys, but my diploma gives me the right to speak.

As we went around the room and people introduced themselves, I felt a little outclassed. As I would learn later, wind turbines are like oil derricks that go up instead of down, and most of the guys in the class have roughnecked. I don’t know much about roughnecking, (working on oil derricks for the uninitiated), but it sounds like a crap deal. Work is unsteady, dangerous and dirty. The only thing good about it is the pay. Guys around the room traded stories about unemployment, some had been out of a job for more than a year. One fresh out of high school kid introduced himself as an orphan. He’s one of the few people in the class who may be less qualified than me. It is my suspicion that the business is more interested in people who have been around large dangerous machinery than those able to discuss the influence of T.S. Eliott on American poetry.

The program manager came in and showed us a power point presentation, the first of many for this course. I discovered that every megawatt of energy produced by wind power can save up to 600 gallons of water. Considering the increasing value of water, that’s an advantage.

We then took a look at this video: http://www.opb.org/programs/ofg/segments/view/1640 It’s the kind of thing that I wish I could’ve seen earlier on. I was very curious about the day to day activities of a turbine technician. I think this video gives a very good idea.

As the director struggled with a defective video feed a few people trickled into the classroom. These folks would make up the 3 person panel discussion which I found most enlightening. The members of the discussion were Greg Adams, a wind developer, Joe Banks, a wind farm manager and Kaylah McNabb who described herself as a liaison between state departments and developers.

Among the many things we learned from the discussion was the importance of land owner relationships. We heard stories about people getting angry about litter and farmers who wore ear plugs to keep out the government signals that the turbines are beaming into his head.

Mr. Adams discussed how there is a 7 to 10 year payback on wind turbines. This initial cost period is then followed by what he called 10 years of gravy. As Mr. Adams put it, “Nothing gets done without a return on investment.” This is the great challenge with wind. While it is clean and profitable, people have to be willing to wait 7 to 10 years before that profit comes through. Most people want to see returns on their investments much sooner than 7 to 10 years. And no doubt many must wonder if there isn’t a more profitable place to invest in.

Joe Banks discussed the day to day life of a turbine tech. Abbreviated: It starts at 6:30 in the morning with a safety meeting. Usually guys are in the tower by 8:00 or 8:15 AM. The day can end anywhere from 3:00 to 4:00 or 7:30 to 8:00.

It was the safety discussion that was the most sobering. The members of panel took this portion very seriously. They discussed how electricity will reach out and grab you. They said that everything on a wind farm is fighting you. Not to mention that you are 300 feet in the sky. They told several stories of people who died on the job. I had read about fatalities in Paul Gipe’s “Wind Power,” but hearing them described first hand was pretty jarring. The worst had to be the guy who got his pony tail sucked into the machinery of a turbine and after following it was quickly reduced to a pulp.

Then we broke for lunch. When we returned, we were told that the panel spent most of lunch discussing the importance of leadership abilities and communicating with others. This announcement was followed by charm school. We interviewed each other, introduced each other based on our interviews, and spoke about who we thought good leaders were in our lives.

After that we were given four cards of different colors. They were blue, orange, green and gold. We were told to organize the cards in the order they most matched our personality. In a moment of inattention I picked blue as the color I most resembled. I didn’t read the whole card and was to find that I was the only person who picked this color. This was then followed by a discussion of how to approach each person according to their color. For example, Greens are analytic, visionaries and one should get right to the point when dealing with them. Blues on the other hand are sensitive and need to be nurtured. Blues are also emotional and sensitive. As the instructor went through my particular quarter of the personality matrix, my head hung lower and lower. In a word, among these roughnecks, I had chosen the category that singled me out as a pussy. It was said that women are often blue. Great, I’m the bitch of the bunch.

Woodward, OK, Cheap Apartments and Murder

On Labor Day Weekend of 1974, Woodward, Oklahoma was rocked by a heinous quadruple murder. Twenty-five years later, I moved in next door. Read on.

In the morning my mom took me shopping where we bought boots and some clothes to blend. After getting together some supplies with my mother's help, I slid along the plains in my rented Nissan Sentra from the capitol of Oklahoma to the land of wind power.

I had arranged my apartment last week. If it were New York City I would’ve used Craigslist, but Woodward is so far out it’s off the Craigslist map. I had to get creative and used the Woodward newspaper’s online edition. There I found the number for a one bedroom apartment for $400, so I called to arrange a place. The man on the line seemed surprised that I was going to take the place without seeing it. On the way out to Woodward, I gave the man a call and he said that he would leave the place open for me. The land I crossed was very flat and has a beauty that consists mostly of its expanses. Directions to Woodward go like this, head west on I-40 to Exit 108, take that road north about 25 miles and then turn left at the big grain elevator, you’ll know the one. That’s about it.

The town of Woodward has two major streets, Highway 34 going North/South, and Highway 15 which runs East/West. There are a handful of traffic lights and a huge grain elevator. I’ll definitely be checking it out over the next few weeks.

I pulled into the apartment complex and having seen it from above on google maps I knew it would be a few separate buildings. My apartment is in a squat three-unit building. To my north and east is open pasture. Boiling Springs State Park is a few miles down the road. The door to the apartment wasn’t open as promised but as I was about to call a small, older man with a sturdy frame and hands made of pumice came out, he was preceded by a small dog and two small children. He showed me the place, which has brown shag carpet and faux wood paneling. Sadly, the previous tenants were smokers. I doubt that smell will ever come out of the shag carpet. There’s a kitchen table, a suspicious looking bed, a maroon recliner that’s seen better days, and a cart on wheels. I get free cable and HBO, but I have to pay extra for internet. For some reason I am also blessed with Showtime.

I handed the man a check for the place and asked him where the Wal-Mart was. He gave me some directions and then walked through a mental checklist making sure we’d taken care of everything. He then nodded and said, “You know where the Wal-Mart is, you’re pretty much set.” Words to live by.

I headed out, hungry for some food. I had looked up the town before I came and all I could find as far a Mexican food went was a place called Taco Factory. That didn’t sound too encouraging. Fortunately I saw a place called Ramiro’s. But before I ate I wanted to find internet. Knowing that sometimes fast food restaurants occasionally have free wi-fi, I pulled into the parking lot of a Braum’s restaurant. There I had no luck finding an unsecured signal, so I drove down a bit to Pizza Hut, where I briefly pinged a network labeled The Red Country Inn. A quick check of the rearview mirror revealed the Red Country Inn marquee, underscored by the ubiquitous religious quote. I crossed Highway 34 and parked outside one of the rooms. After a quick check of my email, I went to eat. Ramiro’s was a nice place, winner of the Woodward New best Mexican food award. It happened to be next to another inn that offered free internet and did some work on my blog there.

After dinner I went to Wal-Mart and stocked up on supplies for my stay. When I returned home it was after dark, but the moon is so bright out here that you might think it’s still dusk. The light cast a shadow, I was hoping there would be some stars to look at, but they were blocked out by the intense glow of Lady Luna. I unpacked my groceries and my stuff while listening to the Yankees take on the Phillies. It was then that I noticed suspicious holes in the cabinetry that looked like bullet holes. What happened here? Apparently the place was loaned to rail workers before who were allegedly neat, except they occasionally shot holes in the cabinetry. Little did I know…

The next day I was to find out that nearby these apartments or perhaps in the same lot, a family of four was brutally shot to death. I’m including a link to the actually court opinion on the case which details the murders. On September 3rd, Bob Patee went to see what was going on with his friend Mervin Thrasher. Thrasher had failed to show up for work a few days ago and hadn’t answered any of Patee’s calls. When Patee investigated at 10:30 one evening he found the Thrasher home dark. He shined a flashlight into the home’s bedroom window only to have it alight on the body of Sandra Thrasher.

According to court documents sometime during the weekend someone entered the Thrasher home, tied 28 year old Mervin Thrasher’s hands behind his back, tied up his wife, 27 year old Sandra Thrasher, binding her hands and feet together and then proceeded to shoot Mervin in the head three times with a .22 caliber rifle belonging to the Thrashers. Mervin’s wife Sandra was shot in the head twice, the Thrasher’s 5-year-old daughter Penelope was shot in the head three times and their 18-month-old son Robert was shot in the head two times.

This brutal murder was later pinned on Billy Wayne Collins. While Collins confessed to the crime he blamed the murders on a drifter he called Jerry Prowess. According to Collins, Prowess threatened to kill Collins if he said anything. Collins dropped the man off at the edge of town. The murder weapon was never found.

Collins was sentenced to death which was later commuted to a life sentence. He was up for parole last July. It’s a horrible and somewhat inconclusive story. I am left to wonder if this Jerry Prowess is a figment of Collins imagination, or if there is a man still wandering the highways of America with an old .22 rifle slung over his shoulder.

Leaving New York

I can think of no worse time to leave New York City than in the fall. After the summer heat has passed and the city cools, New York becomes a much easier place to live. The smells of garbage recede, the tourist thin out, the great, woolly sweaters reappear and wrap themselves around the bustling beauties that sweep through the city canyons.

I spent the past few weeks trying to reconnect with whom I could. Though I’m a humble sort and don’t like to cause too much fuss, I did want to let the people I care about know I’m going to miss them. I also wanted to take care of some things like sorting out rent with an obstinate landlord, and getting a few pictures framed.
Mostly I’ve been walking in Central Park near my house. The park is alive with color, the leaves scattered along the walkways like the discarded strategies of summer. Shortly after the rain, the whole park takes on gloss adding a reflective note to the world which is reflected again in the recently cleaned surface of the Harlem Meer. A simple stroll to the subway becomes a transcendent experience. So much so that a stranger stopped me to say, “Young man, do you see the beauty of nature?” To which I responded “Of course. It’s amazing.” A rare and warm exchange in a city that keeps mostly to itself.

Further, on the weekend I’ve chosen to leave, there is a grand Halloween party at the home of my favorite hosts in the city. A gathering of close friends at a brownstone collectively referred to “La Casa.” Though, I’m a strictly fair weather fan, the Yankees are in the World Series, an occasion for mass celebration. The New York City marathon is running this weekend, which is a spectacle worth seeing, when legions of folks line the 26 mile path to root for friends and strangers.

I’m going to miss this great city that has become my home over the past three years. I’ll miss the tamale vendors, serving warm, mole-stuffed masa out of their great caldrons. I’ll miss the rush of the express train as it blows down the center track. I’ll miss walking down to the bodega for a few beers in the evening. I’ll miss the Bryant Park and lunches with friends, the sprawling libraries, the catty exchanges, the rumble of the Metro North. I’ll miss the feeling that there is no end to the places you can explore, no possible way you could ever get to a point where there is nothing new.

But most of all I’m going to miss my girlfriend, lovely Katherine. I’ve been coping with leaving her by simply pushing it away. Waiting until I have left to entertain that feeling. But as I sit in an O’Hare gate waiting for my flight to Oklahoma City, I can’t avoid the specter of her absence. It is here with me now and growing greater. I will return to New York and its myriad wonders, but I’ll be coming for her.