Prentice Hall, 1991
direct quotations from the pages indicated:
page 47 - Nucor had put Hawley through a psychological test devised by a Nucor psychologist, one John Seres, out of Chicago. Nucor's psychological test, which Nucor gave to all candidates for jobs at the Crawfordsville Project, was supposed to identify goal-oriented people, self-reliant people: Nucor material. The test also weeded out applicants who might sympathize with labor unions.
page 83 - The Nucor workers earned pay that was double or triple the average la borer's pay in the small towns where Nucor built its mills. Nucor gave its employees their bonuses every week, so that they did not have to wait around for the end of the year to see what kind of spare change the management might chuck in their direction, after the management had decided upon its own bonuses. Iverson gave the Nucor production workers a steady ten percent of the Nucor Corporation's pretax profits every year for their retirement plans. Since the company's profits varied from year to year, the steelworkers had no idea how much money they would be worth when they retired. When an employee retired, Nucor paid him his retirement savings in a lump sum; no pension.
page 83 - Some Nucor steelworkers, who had been with the company since the Darlington startup, now had more than $200,000 in the bank, sitting in their individual Nucor retirement plans, waiting to be drawn as a single check when they retired, and a portion of that wealth was laid up in the form of Nucor stock. If Nucor's stock were to grow rapidly in value, some of the long-time employees might get a check for $500,000 when they retired. On the other hand, if the Crawfordsville Project failed and Nucor's stock dropped in value, then every steelworker at the company would have a diminished nest egg.
page 83 - Nucor production workers received college tuition money for their children, $1,800 a year for each child in college. Iverson gave all Nucor employees stock in the company at regular intervals. He did not lay any body off, although he never promised not to lay people off. Iverson had managed to get through twenty-five years in the steel business without a layoff. Except once, when a Nucor general manager laid off forty Nucor workers. Iverson ordered the manager to rehire the workers, and soon afterward he fired the manager. The message was not lost on the company's managers. There has not been a layoff at Nucor since then.
page 83 - Nucor's steelworkers work in production teams of about thirty people, all of whom are responsible for the efficiency of the team. The rules are strict, if not ruthless. The pressure to keep up production comes from the rules, and the rules are enforced by the production team itself. If one person in the team is late for work or doesn't show up for work, the paychecks of all thirty people in the team can be damaged that week. The reaction to absenteeism at Nucor is swift and unpleasant, and comes from other members of the production team rather than from managers. People who become sick may try to struggle through a day's work for fear of hurting or irritating their fellow team members. If a person on a team is thought to be lazy by the others, they nag him and lecture him, and if he doesn't take to lectures, they get him fired.
page 84 - "These are a tough people," said Iverson. "You have to be tough to make steel. Making steel is hard, dirty, dangerous, skilled work." In the early years the teams had all been male, but lately one had begun to see hot metal women in the production teams, here and there.
page 84 - During a factory startup, the production teams gradually take control of the factory. The teams themselves begin to decide who shall stay with the team and who shall be fired. Plenty of people are fired, or they hate the work and quit in frustration. Employees who don't like the pressure of a Nucor plant startup don't stay with Nucor. It is a Darwinian law of non union steel, in which the rewards are money, but the work is not all that safe, and the people who can't handle the job are many. "If there's one guy in a group who isn't doing well," said Iverson, "the others in the group either train him or get rid of him. " One time, some members of a team in a Nucor Vulcraft joist plant chased a guy around the plant with an angle iron. They figured that the quickest way to get him off the team was to kill him.
page 132 - I counted a total of forty-two different building permits on the walls, displayed in little plastic frames. There were local and state building permits. conspicuous by its absence was a federal building permit from the Environmental Protection Agency - a permit for the construction of a steel mill in the middle of Indiana.
page 133 - There were two potential sources of pollution from the Crawfordsville steel mill. The first was air pollution. There would be a slight but noticeable decrease in the quality of the ambient air downwind from the mill. Most of the air pollution would be gases and tiny smoke particles coming from the electric arc furnaces in the melt shop. Nucor would clean the furnace smoke by passing it through filter bags in a baghouse, a pollution control building near the melt shop. The filter bags would remove zinc and lead particles before the smoke was discharged into the atmosphere. By the time the smoke was released it would be nearly invisible, but it would contain carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen.
page 133 - The second potential source of pollution was the steel mill's water systems. The water came from the wells dug under Cornstalk Creek. Most of it would be sprayed on red-hot steel, evaporating into the air at a rate of two million gallons a day. The water vapor was nothing but clean steam, because it was boiled from clean steel. But there were also closed water loops in the mill.
page 133 - The water in the closed loops accumulated oils and chemical contaminates. The oils would be skimmed off and sold to waste-oil dealers. The chemicals would be filtered out of the water through lime and charcoal filers, and the lime and charcoal sludge would be hauled away and buried in landfills.
page 133 - By far the largest source of pollution was indirect. The steel mill would consume more than a hundred million watts of electricity around the clock, to melt steel and drive the engines of the CSP. The electricity was generated by Public Service of Indiana in coal-fired generating stations that burned soft coal, a source of acid rain and carbon dioxide. Coal-fired power stations located in various places in Indiana would contribute energy to the mill, and coal smoke and gases would drift north by east into Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Busse had got a sweet deal on the price of electricity from Public Service: he was going to pay 1.6 cents per kilowatt hour. The electricity bills would come to $1.5 million a month.
page 134 - While the haggling with the EPA was going on, Ken Iverson chose to let the Crawfordsville Project roll ahead full-speed without an environmental permit. Iverson and Busse believed the Nucor Corporation was in a global race to perfect the thin-slab casting of steel, and could not afford to wait. In a technical if not a literal sense, the Crawfordsville Project was an unlawful act. Nucor ultimately would pay nearly a quarter of a million dollars in fines to the EPA for building the steel mill without a permit. The Nucor mill was reasonably clean but was crash-built, which offended the EPA.
page 135 - "There's your average four-story building down in there," said Busse, indicating the pit. "If this plant was built by U.S. Steel, it would cost six hundred million dollars, easy," he said, leaning on the steering wheel of the truck. "We may end up doing it for less than two hundred and sixty million. And if this facility was build by the government, I don't know what it would cost. A billion dollars, two billion. I don't know."
page 136 - A rolling mill is like an iceberg, in that most of its mass is invisible. Steel rolling machines float on barges of concrete. Most of a steel mills' mass is below ground and out of sight. The tops of the machines, which may rise several stories above the ground, are the tip of the iceberg.
page 178 - The electrodes burrowed into the scrap at 65 million watts of power. .... At the flip of a switch, Millett had added a city to the Indiana power grid. The furnace was tapping enormous amounts of electrical energy out of the state's power grid, reaching to within spitting distance of its maximum draws, and driving the energy at high voltage into seventy tons of broken steel, enlacing the pile with arcs of electricity.
page 179 - An arc furnace can produce electrical disturbances in a state's power grid, echoes or harmonics that back-ripple through the grid. The furnace talks to the grid. Nucor mills were equipped with protective gear to dampen harmonics, but typically, during a startup, the gear fails to work properly, and when Nucor pulls a high tap on a long arc in a new furnace, there is a drop in voltage throughout the entire state, and the power chatters and wavers as if someone is running a monstrous vacuum cleaner off the power grid. The chattering is strongest in towns near the steel mill and near the ends of utility lines, in outlying parts of the grid. It can cause fluorescent lights to blink and television sets to flicker and computers to crash.
page 197 - But to the best that I can discover, Nucor seems to be losing about one employee a year in accidental deaths. Jame Coblin, Nucor's personnel managers, provided me with what he said is a complete list of Nucor's accidental fatalities between 1980 and 1990. The list describes 9 deaths in 10 years - 3 deaths in Nucor's steel mills, 6 in the Vulcraft plants - out of a work force that averaged 4,500 people during that time. It works out to 20 deaths per 100,000. That's 2 1/2 times the national average. But not 6 or 7 times the national average, as Kinney claims.
page 197 - Joseph Kinney, the executive director of the National Safe Workplace Institute, in Chicago, does not love the Nucor corporation. He trails around after Nucor, visiting small towns where Nucor operates, talking to people and gathering reports on accidents at Nucor plants. Kinney describe his group as "the only national organization whose sole focus is on employee safety and health."
page 252 - The ladle hit the ground in a stagging area-a place where slag is dumped from ladles-and the molten steel inside the ladle lurched at impact, throwing steel everywhere in a chrysanthemum burst. The stagging ground was wet. It exploded. That blew out the south wall of the melt shop. The ladle tipped over against a retaining wall and dumped part of its contents on the ground at the base of the casting tower. The steel raced across the ground and fell into a tunnel beneath the casting tower. The tunnel had an open roof-it was more like a trench than a tunnel-and it may have contained water mixed with pieces of scrap steel. In any case, water was somewhere in the area. You can put water on steel, but you can't put steel on water.
page 252 - There followed an awesome explosion. Inside the tunnel, molten steel buried the water and scrap, and the water flashed to superheated steam. Superheated steam, raised instantly to the temperature of molten steel, expands with a force that is a hundred thousand times greater than the pressure of the atmosphere. In other words, it produces a tremendous explosion. A fireball ballooned upward, throwing a fan-burst of liquid steel mixed with chunks of scrap all the way to the roof of the building, blowing out the north wall and parts of the roof. There followed a pause, because it takes a while for something to be hurled a hundred feet in the air and come down, and then molten steel and scrap metal came down over the casting tower, hitting the casting deck with great splats and clatters and back-splashes, landing on wooden pallets, bags of powder, wastebaskets, storage lockers, and card board boxes. The whole casting deck erupted in fires. Moments later, concrete in the deck began to explode under molten steel, throwing concrete shrapnel and liquid steel into the air again. Cans of cement exploded with thuds. Explosions missed all four men standing on the deck. The four men standing on the deck ran for cover and survived.
page 252 - The spill and the explosion released a flash of infrared light. The flash filled the building with infrared radiation. The radiant heat inside the building rose to searing temperatures and then dropped quickly as the infrared light faded away. It was not unlike a nuclear explosion. During a major steel spill, human skin can be blistered by blackbody light reflecting off walls and ceilings, as well as from the light coming directly from the metal.
page 253 - Huddled beneath the control desk in the pulpit on the casting tower, Mark Millett and the casting foreman, Dave Smith, didn't really hear the explosion. To them it felt like a hurricane, and the metal rain came, and the deck caught fire. They crawled out from under the control desk and ran onto the deck into the fires. Smith was in charge of the casting tower. He was the pilot, with primary responsibility for the lives on the casting tower. Smith was twenty-nine years old, a tall, skinny, rather quiet person, with glasses, a narrow chin, and a loose-limbed way about him. He had worked for North Star Steel before he came to Nucor. At North Star he had once seen an electric arc furnace blow up. It was a chain of explosions that lasted for twenty minutes, while everyone stood around outdoors watching the melt shop disintegrate. As he put it, "I've been around Cape Hom a lot."
page 262 - If the ladle had fallen about five seconds earlier, it would have landed on the casting deck and drenched the casting tower with molten steel. It would have burned up the casting tower, and in that case it is generally believed that no one on the casting tower would have survived, because no one would have had time to escape. Numbered among the dead would have been Mark Millett.
page 262 - Inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, came through the plant and sifted through twisted metal and broken crane cables. Some of the crane cables had fallen into the ladle of molten steel and had dissolved, and so crucial evidence was gone. It might have been possible to restart steel production within a day or two-although the walls were blown out, the machinery was for the most part undamaged-but Busse didn't want to make steel. The OSHA people found various safety violations. They reported, "The employer did not furnish a place of employment which was free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death. " OSHA levied a thirty thousand dollar fine on Nucor; Nucor is contesting it.