One place I will never forget working as a guard where they make vegetable oil and corn syrup products. It sits on a hill side looking down over the valley and is a large sprawling place which consists of plant , boiler house and offices .
You sat in a small guard house at front of plant which had no heat the radiator in it never worked you had to bring your own small electric heater .You would start out with a walk down a long narrow road way past a large water condenser unit for the ammonia based freezer unit and could always smell ammonia when you went by it . They had an emergency breathing SCBA unit near by if there was a leak but they never taught guards how to use it if you needed to escape you where just expected to run if you came upon a bad leak. But that was pre OSHA days after some complaints they changed the units around to a better design. You would then walk down a steep gravel ramp past some large oil storage tanks to the big old brick boiler house which had 2 enormous boilers in them which they expected you to push a red button to restart boilers if they shut off and you saw pressure going low .I told them no way I would never do it and risk an explosion since these where low pressure oil guns on the boilers . In first place no one other than a Qualified Stationary Engineer should have been going any where near or doing anything around these boilers. but these people who owned this place could care less . One early morning the pressure went down and I called plant supervisor and he was all mad I would not start boilers I told him I smelled heavy oil smell he better get down there good thing he did had I hit button there could have been an explosion the ignition gun had shut off and flooded boiler with oil. After this incident they no longer had us pushing the button and they eventually put new boilers in and tore down the old boiler house some years later .
You then went into a rickety old office building looked like something out of the 30's and door locks where always acting up. One of the workers was a big fitness fanatic he had a treadmill in corner of his office and sweat suits hanging on a hook next to the machine he wore when working out on the machine . After checking the office building you climbed up some steps but beside the steps was a open air plant that mixed manure products talk about a smell when it was running , After climbing the steps you went across railroad tracks as they had a siding to bring rail cars full of corn oil into plant. Carnegie at one time had a very busy railroad yard, but no more only a single track goes thru town now and a train is rarely seen where one time there had been many fatal accidents with trains and cars at the several crossings you never here that any more . You would start in the back of plant you checked small hut where sprinkler pipes for fire protection to plant came in to see heater was on in winter time and water pressure was correct then you walked thru the plant and production lines with pipes going everywhere some of which leaked product at some of the joints which they caught in buckets .
Even thou we walked thru production area where food products never had to put on hair nets or booties something you must do today when the line is working or not in most plants which deal with food products . Then you would walk thru production offices and lab like offices where they worked on making sure product was pure and came up with new items. and back to the booth you went every 2 hours you did this .
One sunny late afternoon I was walking down the ramp and heard what sounded like a riffle discharge and something hit one of the tanks. I looked across valley and there some one in white jump suit had a hunting riffle standing on the old foundations of the transfer facility Browning & Ferris once ran where city of Pittsburgh garbage trucks would off load and B&F would load into bigger trucks to be taken to land fill and there he was shooting at the tanks I took cover and ran to boiler house luckily there was a phone with outside line to call supervisor I called Carnegie police who sent an officer immediately to the old transfer plant but they got away. The officer then came over and took a report from me as to what all took place. Hair raising to say the least. The CPP Supervisor Bill ? a WWII vet came by and took a report as well , I like wild bill as we called him . he often talked about his time in the jungles of pacific and fighting the Japanese and how he got scar on his chin from a Japaneses officers sword but was saved by a Sargent who killed the officer. Do not know if any of it was true because most guys I knew who where in WWII rarely ever talked about it.
including my uncles who served .
But thats the way it was with lots of the guards I worked with all had these big story's what they did makes you wonder what they where doing working as guards unless it was for retirement income.
I remember Maurice got all mad because the one guards a retired army major had a tie clip that looked like a M16 he told Maurice to take take a flying fuck and quit over it. He was only doing the job to fill in some time he had on his hands. Lots of retires work as guards. the final night shift I worked at the plant I ended up saving lives while patrolling I saw smoke and what looked like a small flame near a houses attic as I got closer my worst fears where realized the house was on fire I called the towns dispatch and they got fire fighters there in time to save the family who where soundly sleeping. The house was torn down and its a vacant lot now.
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