By Lucy

I was anxious in the morning.

I’d tossed and turned all night. It occurred to me that I had been able to run out the door fairly quickly at the Vagabond’s place for two reasons; one, he was a shorter drive to the mill than my current place, and two, I had Soylent. I’d meant to pack Soylent to bring with me for my first job after the move, but I’d misplaced the box somewhere and being broke, I didn’t want to order more, so I had to get up early enough to cook and consume breakfast. Then I was too anxious to eat much and ended up throwing it back into the fridge.

My measuring tape had fallen out of my tool belt and I couldn’t find it. I lost precious time searching for it before deciding I didn’t need it. For all I knew, today was orientation and I didn’t need any tools. I left later than intended.

The guy was waiting outside the truck when I pulled into the parking lot. I gathered up my stuff and threw myself into the backseat – someone was already seated there. A pair of ice cleats got thrown at me and I put them on my boots as he drove us to the gate.

Me and another guy hopped out at the gate to sign in and grab our passes for the turnstile. While we waited, he grumbled that he had gotten the call on Saturday, and he had been in Kapuskasing. I asked him if he knew anything about the job, and he said it was a steam plant shutdown. Which told me that I had been one of the first ones called in, a nice feather in my cap. But also, the steam plant has 2 small, wood-fired boilers. A regular shutdown would be three weeks to do one of the big boilers, but these ones, once the pre-load was done, we could just build up and tear down the boilers one after the other. They’re literally next to each other in the same room. It’s still probably 3 weeks of work, but less guys, all local, which is nice to meet some local people.

Once we got to the yard, we piled out and grabbed coveralls. This yard has a small area tucked in behind the men’s locker room for females to change, but I never bother using it because I never change. I just pull my coveralls on over my boots and pants, so the only real problem would be if one of the guys disliked me plonking my butt down in their change room, and no one has expressed that to me yet.

Then we went back out into the yard for the safety talk and to find out who’s crew we were on. I was put on the yard with the teenage apprentice and the guy who drives the fork truck. We were just loading up carts with piles of stuff we’d need for the build, and then he’d drive it over.

The site manager did address the ‘fireball’ with us, but obviously he didn’t go into identifying detail. Once we were left to ourselves, though, people came over and told me who had been hurt. They were insistent it wasn’t an ‘explosion’ because the building hadn’t caught fire or been damaged in any way. If our guys hadn’t the bad luck of standing outside when it happened, no one would have been hurt. A bearing had worn out and seized, which ignited the sawdust in the room. Totally random, a freak accident you couldn’t plan for.

One of the guys was back at the site already, although I know his name I’m not sure I’ve ever met him, so I couldn’t put a face to the name. The other three I know and like. The second guy seemed to be mostly fine, he went to the local hospital and was upset they had to cut off his mullet and great big walrus mustache to clean his burns. The third guy was the usual yard detail, we nicknamed him Fabio because he had really long hair. He was a nice guy, super nerdy, a couple of kids. I was upset to learn he had been hurt because the last time I had been here, I had meant to ask for his number so we could hang out, and forgot, and got laid off before I had the chance again. And now I couldn’t, because he was one of the two that had been air-lifted to Toronto. The fourth guy, also air-lifted, is one of the higher ups, he was the guy who told me to let them know when I moved back to town and they’d have work for me. So I couldn’t thank him in person. Also, don’t say the higher ups never put themselves in the line of fire. He had just gone there to check out how things were going, stick his head inside the room and see what it looked like. He got the worst of it, from what everyone was saying.

The 18-year-old kid I had to work with is clearly suffering. Every time we had to go into the steam plant to push the carts to where they needed to be, he would jump at every little noise. As you can imagine, a 150-year-old brick building that had been retrofitted into a steam plant makes a lot of noise! He was on the crew that had been hit by the fireball until Fabio was swapped in at the last minute and you could see it weighed on his mind.

I was also surprised because there was a female there, but not the same female as before. The woman before, her job had basically been to go around behind us and double check all of our scaffolds. There are lots of little site specific rules, like every ladder over a certain height has to have a cage. It’s not a job that endears you to anyone (because your job is to point out their mistakes) but she was very… eccentric… on top of it. I can’t say I’ll miss her, although I don’t dislike her as much as the others seem to. This new female is just a teenager and she reminds me of what I’d be like if I had been a carpenter out of high school instead of a cancer patient. I’m trying to think of a way to tell her that responding when the guys try to rile her up will just make it worse, without being patronizing.

The Metamucil is working as intended – I only had to go to the bathroom once, which, when your only available facility is an unheated porta potty outside in the snow, is something you want to avoid at all costs. It’s probably not so bad for the guys, who just have to unzip, but I have to sit down and you can feel the ice cold air coming up from the reservoir.

It was my first day managing long hair with my hard hat. Yes, I consider this length long. Adrianne’s hair is even shorter than mine used to be. I decided to wrap it into a high bun and tuck it above the strap for the hard hat, just below the rim.

Day 1 back to work: 51 minutes of elevated heartrate, 15k steps, 2’600 calories burned.

Luckily for me, I didn’t have to sort dinner. K dropped by with the beef stew from the day before, and some fresh yeasty buns he had made himself, so soft they easily tore in half. He was on his way to this end of town for another reason, but it was still very kind of him to bring me something I didn’t have to cook, and I appreciate it.

I was hoping I’d be tuckered out and sleep well that night, but sleep continued to elude me. I had a hard time dragging myself out of bed in the morning. Then I got blocked by a train on the drive. Then my swipe card wouldn’t work at the gate. I had to call security and endure them swiping my card and going “well, it works fine for me”. Grumble grumble. I jogged into the yard as everyone was walking into the foremen’s trailer for the morning debrief and slipped in behind them. Not a good look for day 2.

Mercifully, I wasn’t in the yard again today. Being in the yard first day back is fine, because it lets you get back into the swing of things at your own pace, but two days in the yard is being benched. I got put on a crew with two guys I’ll call Jim and Jay. Jim is short and scrawnier than me, mid-twenties. His dad was a scaffolder before him and he’s got a bad case of being measured by his dad’s reputation. He likes to keep moving and is constantly futzing with stuff. Jay is tall and twice my weight, at least in his thirties. He’s a pretty relaxed, jokey guy and sees no need to rush through jobs. Neither of them are good teachers.

In the morning, we were just tearing down scaffolds that didn’t have a use anymore, which is pretty simple work. In the afternoon, we got given a build in the steam plant. It’s the kind of job I did a lot of last year, wiggling in between hot pipes leaking steam into your face, and you have to step outside every half an hour to cool down and chug a bottle of water. You’re soaked head to toe in a mix of sweat and steam. The plant does a good-ish job of making sure there’s enough light, but it’s hard to get back into those nooks and crannies, so we use headlamps.

The day before, I’d worn two layers under my coveralls, which was good because I was outside. I’d done the same on Tuesday and it was a mistake, because it was way too hot in the steam plant. Fortunately neither of them asked me to build, and I stayed on the ground and was able to run outside to grab gear fairly often and keep my core temp down.

Shortly before break, Jim burned himself. I saw it happen – he reached back to get his hammer out of his belt, and the back of his bicep brushed the flange clamping two pieces of pipe together. He screamed and swore, but checked it – no marks on his coveralls, so he kept working. It wasn’t til we got back to the lunch trailer and he shrugged out of the sleeves of his coveralls that we noticed the large blister on his arm. It had barely burned the top layer of his skin, and the coveralls still had no marks on them. Nothing for it – he stomped off to the first aid station.

I got home Tuesday and was instantly enraged. I got an email from my work benefits provider that my benefits had been cut off for non-payment. Before I sent an angry email, I double checked my facts. Early on in March, I had emailed them asking how long before my benefits switched over and if my self-payment details would be different, and received no response. I had paid my self-payment a week later. What the frack?

To save you the suspense, I got a reply before noon on Wednesday. Transferring basically counts as getting a new job, so my benefits had to start anew, which meant I had self-paid for no reason. They were refunding me 800$ I paid erroneously. 800! I could have not had to go to the soup kitchen if that money had stayed in my pocket, if someone had answered my damn email. Possibly I should have called and made a fuss when no one had replied, but I didn’t think it would just reset like that. Now I have no benefits until 600 hours, which means no dentist until June at the earliest.

Tuesday: 107 minutes of elevated heartrate, 22k steps, 3’044 calories burned.

Wednesday I was feeling it. The lack of sleep meant my body hadn’t had time to repair itself, so I was sore, tired and run-down. I decided to buy sleeping pills on the way home and try to get 10 hours of sleep that night.

We were surprised at the morning meeting. The guy I usually called for work in Dryden had been let go, quietly, which explained why he wasn’t answering anyone’s phone calls. We were given a new name, but no phone number. As we hopped in the van to go back to the steam plant, Jay off-handedly mentioned that explained why he had gotten calls from the new guy the week before. Pre-shut had already started at Dryden and the shut-down was definitely starting on April 25th.

I was lost for what to do and I’m still lost for what to do. I wanted pre-shut at Dryden, but obviously I wasn’t going to get it now. Had the list of numbers been passed on to the new guy, or was he just calling people he knows? Should I try to get ahold of him? I was still unsure how long they’d need me in Thunder Bay, and I didn’t want to make enemies by bailing on this job.

Wednesday’s work was much the same, so I’ll just set the scene what working at a paper mill is like.

It’s hot, even in the winter. The plant is steam-powered; anything that can’t be used to make paper goes in the “hog feeder”, but also, they just need lots of steam to make pulp. Some of the buildings are retrofitted brick factories, I forget what it used to be, but they weren’t built for purpose. They keep the heat in, with all the doors closed in the winter, so when you go outside soaked in sweat and steam you freeze immediately. It’s dark, we go to a lot of places no one ever needs to go except when something is broken and they need a scaffold to reach it. It’s like a mine, there’s no windows, and there’s grate-floored catwalks everywhere woven with pipes carrying who-knows-what, barely enough room to squeeze by in some places, and steep stairs like you’d find on a boat. There’s water everywhere; pipes hissing steam, water leaking around the flange, or just condensation on the outside of a warm pipe. Occasionally you find a place where pulp was spilled and it looks like fluffy white snow. There’s little piles of woodchips and sawdust everywhere, on some of the roofs it’s even become a mini forest with grass and small trees as the bugs feed on the rotting wood and birds crap out seeds on it.

There’s a few smells. The black liquor is the most prominent and the one you’ll be familiar with if you live near a mill. It smells like a curious combination of overboiled broccoli and fish, getting more fishy the closer you get to the digester. Bleach and chlorine, in the bleach plant or the DI room, where they filter the water after they pull it out of the river or before they put it back into the river. Near any of the woodpiles, cedar and pine. And the smell of burning wood near any of the wood-fired boilers.

Safety signs everywhere. Watch your feet; there’s grate flooring to let the water run off, cement curbs to protect vital equipment, or just plain old uneven floor, plus it’s slick with water. Watch your head; low pipes, low beams, places where they just shoved in stairs or a floor because you needed one and there isn’t enough clearance. You have to carry a respirator with you in case there’s a chlorine leak in the bleach plant, but there’s other places with other signs. A light will be on for a gas leak, don’t enter. And occasionally, you walk past the good ol’ fashioned radioactive sign. Just cobalt, the same thing you’d run into in a CT scan, nothing exciting but also nothing you want to hold a picnic near. Wear earplugs, everything is clanking or hissing. There’s still asbestos in the mill, although it’s all been signposted and in some spots it’s being removed. There’s been more than once where someone, eager to get going, has pulled out their hammer and tapped on a wall, only for someone to yelp and point out the asbestos sign on the wall that wasn’t readily apparent in the twilight of the mill’s belly.

There are two ways to build a scaffold (in Ontario, anyway). The first is systems. You put down 4 jacks, throw a standard (we usually just shorten it to ‘stand’) on each one, then connect each standard with a ledger. Each side is completed, usually with a bay brace, but sometimes it’s in an odd spot and you throw in a tube and a couple of swivel clamps instead. A lot of pictures of scaffolding have a staircase, but we usually use ladders – they take up less space and are more versatile in placement, since mills are tight spots.

The second one is tube and clamp. Tube and clamp is considered ‘more complicated’ than systems, because there’s more room for errors. Ledgers just click onto stands and then you hammer the wedge in. Tube and clamp requires more measuring, more double checking that your clamps are tight, more checking that everything is level. Once you base out in standard, the rosettes are equidistant and should maintain levelness, but tube and clamp is you choosing where on the tube you want to throw a right-angle wedge (also known as clamp or ‘rights’) and thus you could be off on each level.

There is also this curious tendency in scaffolding to refer to tubes and ledgers by feet, and stands by meters. It does make it easy for passing gear, if someone yells 7 you know they want a seven foot ledger, because there are no 7 meter standards. Usually we use hand gestures because with everything clanking, groaning and hissing, and your earplugs in, and the other guy is 20 feet up, you can’t hear each other.

Towards the end of Wednesday I hurt myself. By the end of the first week I’m always covered in bruises. I get bruises on my knees from kneeling, I’m not yet rich enough to buy knee-pads. I also tend to get bruises across my shins from pushing the carts. If you’re at the back pushing and the guy in front decides to turn suddenly, you’ll get whatever is sticking out of the cart (and there’s always something sticking out of the cart, because they’re only 4 feet long and most of our gear is 7 feet or longer) whack you across the shins. We were handing gear down the stairs, and my gloves with slick and my hands were tired. Jim, in his infinite impatience, let go of a ten foot plank without making sure I had a good grip on it, and it slipped out of my grasp and I caught it with my thigh. How much does a ten foot plank of indeterminate wood that’s been marinating in the steam plant for most of the week (at least) weigh? I don’t know, not enough to break my femur anyway. I didn’t say a word beyond cursing under my breath and kept going on. It’s a bad bruise when it doesn’t show up til the next day, and on Thursday I couldn’t help limping a bit.

Wednesday I did grab sleeping pills on the way home. I took them around 7, knowing it had been a while since I had used them and they’d kick in fairly quickly. I finally slept well.

Thursday we had what everyone kept ‘jokingly’ calling a therapy session, although I suppose that’s really what it was. They brought a therapist in to talk to us about the explosion. It was a good idea, ish. We certainly needed it, but there is a level of macho “nothing bothers me” and I felt like as a young woman, I need to express weakness as little as possible. I wasn’t even there, but I can’t stop imagining it as I lie in bed at night. The pictures of Fabio’s face, the video of the explosion itself. I couldn’t believe the one guy was back at work already, although he was absent more often than not.

There is a curious tendency, I’ve noticed, the older tradesmen love to talk about their feelings. They’re past the point of impressing anyone and starting to feel the past weighing on their shoulders. The young guys, as I observed earlier in this post, refused to talk at all about how it was affecting them.

After lunch, we got given a job in part of the plant I’d never been to before. Jay sent me and Jim ahead while he signed in at the operator. We got to the doors and stuck out heads in to check it out.

It wasn’t the same building. The building that the explosion had happened in was roped off and shut down for an investigation. But this was the same in every other way – a conveyor carrying woodchips, piles of sawdust everywhere. Dust in the air. I looked at Jim and saw my panic reflected back in his eyes.

“We could just tell them we don’t feel safe here.” He pointed out.

“I’d rather die in a fiery explosion than tell them I’m afraid of something.” I replied, and he nodded.

I think Jay was thinking about it to, because when we got up the stairs he asked me if I felt like tearing down the small scaffold. Deck height was only 3 feet, just enough for them to easily reach something to change it, but everything was coated in sawdust. I agreed – why not. I’m braver than the big burly men, like always. It was quick to tear down, and when we were standing back outside waiting for the forklift to come get the cart, I looked down and realized my legs were coated in sawdust. I panicked – like someone had doused me in lighter fluid – and brushed it off, then retched, anxiety twisting my stomach.

“You ok?”

“Yup, just sawdust stuck in my throat.”

Friday morning we got sent off-site for a fit test. A fit test is to make sure our respirators work well and we know how to use them. Just half-masks, it’s fairly simple. They put a hood over your head and spray this bitter chemical in the hood, to establish a baseline for how sensitive your sense of smell is. Then you wait a bit for your sense of smell to clear, and try it again with the mask on. If you can smell the chemical, your mask isn’t fitting properly in some way.

Everything was relaxed and easy, except for one older guy. He had been in the bleach plant the day before, using a different kind of mask. But no matter how much chemical the trainer used, he couldn’t smell it at all. He asked the trainer how many ppm the mask he was using was rated for, and the trainer coughed awkwardly before saying the mask is rated for dust. Meaning, not gas. So the poor bastard had been chlorine gassed and probably wouldn’t be able to smell anything for a week at least. We waited half an hour and he claimed he could smell it now. Not like he hadn’t been fit tested before anyway.

Our last job was a tear down near the digester. The scaffold had been up for 4 years and was absolutely covered in some sort of white dust. Jim and Jay decided it was quicklime, but I don’t agree with them. The pipe above the scaffold was leaking water and it smelled fishy. I think probably the pipe carries whatever chemical makes black liquor smell fishy, and as the water evaporated it left the scaffold covered in the chemical in the form of white dust. But I don’t know what chemical that is.

It was bad, and since I was at the bottom of the chain, I got the worst of it. I’ve taken to wearing this thing that someone gave me at a meeting. It’s long enough to cover my entire face and neck, but I fold it in half. I tucked it around the collar of my coveralls, wrapped it around my hair bun and pinned it into the back of my hard hat before pulling it up under my glasses, covering my mouth and nose. This way, it stops any dust from going in my mouth and nose, or down into my coveralls.

Jay started hitting standards with his hammer, and the vibrations let off a cloud of dust right away. Safety glasses are useless – honestly, you need goggles in there, cuz it will sweep in under your glasses and get in your eyes. We tore down a good chunk of the large scaffold. Me and Jim had to clear out a bit when he started picking up decks and dumping large piles of the dust.

Also, because we are just lowly contractor and not mill internal employees, we get to walk more than a kilometer into the mill from the farthest parking lot.

So that’s the week in the life of someone chasing mill shutdowns. I also included this music video. I like the song, but I also like the video because it also captures the feel of working at a place like the mill (minus the meta coal monster at the end)