Mission-Critical Ephemera: The Unsung Heroes of Industry and History
	JAMES R. CHILES

Last fall, while visiting a worn-down industrial neighborhood of Cincinnati, I followed a blaze of lights to the American Sign Museum, which has a collection of advertising signs, from hand-painted messages on wood planks to a wide selection of electric signs.

I was drawn to a section that featured neon signs that had been sold but never installed. The logos – Blood’s Paints, Hamm’s Beer, Keepsake Diamonds – were visible through the slatted, wire-bound packing crates that housed each one. Although the signs were brightly lit for visitors, what caught my interest was the packaging. Custom-fitted, carefully crafted wooden crates protected each sign. These crates had been hand-built for only one purpose: transporting the delicate glass-tubed signs and their transformers.

Like any antique browser, I’ve seen plenty of old wooden storage boxes suitable for storing stuff on basement shelves, but I’ve never come across fully preserved, single-use transport crates from long ago. Each crate carried stenciled addresses and a “This side up, handle with care!” warning.

Many signs at the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati are kept in custom-fitted wooden crates.

One might presume that of the thousands of collector groups, there would be one that prizes old shipping crates. Apparently not. The closest thing could be the Ephemera Society of America (ESA). Ephemera is a catch-all term that means “things lasting a very short time,” such as single- use items. ESA collectors mostly chase after small paper items like 19th-century theater tickets, calling cards, and New York vendor permits.

Whether or not the following short-lived items ever prove worthy of interest to the ESA, I’d like to suggest a category of interest to the mechanically minded. Let’s call it “mission-critical ephemera,” meaning single-use items essential to good operation and then discarded. It’s not hardware and not software, either.

Three kinds of mission-critical ephemera come to mind. The first, called packing or stuffing, has a history as long as steam power. Trainmen managed friction inside journal bearings by cramming the niches with oil-soaked absorbents. Waste fiber from textile mills and woolen yarn were common packing materials.

The other two kinds are seals and gaskets.

Those who produce such products say that seals are generally used in rotating machinery, like the rear main seal in a car’s engine compartment that keeps crankcase oil out of the transmission. There also is the circular seal between a diesel engine’s turbocharger and air intake. This seal stands between a safe, throttled operation and the terrifying mishap called a runaway. That’s when the turbo leaks lubricant into the engine’s air supply; the diesel gorges on this and, its rpm ungoverned, races toward a mechanical explosion. A diesel runaway in my dad’s bulldozer repair shop once sent a chunk of flywheel through the roof.

By contrast, gaskets are used in stationary equipment, making leak-tight junctions between the faces of flanges and fittings. An example from the car world is the head gasket that joins the engine block to the cylinder head. This gasket keeps engine oil out of the coolant and vice versa.

A failed seal or gasket can be vastly more expensive than the retail cost of the expendables themselves. It’s as true now as what W.E. Sanders wrote in “Power and the Engineer” magazine in 1908: “One blowout may cost far more than a hundred gaskets.”

And exact a ghastly toll on lives.

Going back to railroad history, investigators traced one recurring cause of boiler explosions to problems with a tiny rubber ring connecting the engineer’s water glass to pipes that communicated the true water level in the boiler. In September 1931, a poorly installed gasket swelled and blocked the upper inlet to the water glass on an Erie Railroad locomotive, fooling the engineer into thinking that plenty of water remained in the crown sheet. The starved boiler exploded, killing four men.

On April 2, 2010, a heat exchanger
cracked at the naphtha-hydrotreater
unit at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes,
Washington. Seven people died in the
incident.

Casualties attributable to a leaking gasket aren’t always in the direct line of cause and effect. These can happen in a peripheral manner, especially after heedless neglect of a growing danger. For example, on April 2, 2010, a heat exchanger cracked at the naphtha-hydrotreater unit at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Washington. A jet of scorching, flammable vapor belched from the fracture. As nearly always happens in such cases, ignition and a fireball followed.

From the earliest news headlines, it might have appeared that no gasket was responsible for the carnage at Tesoro because the vapor had leaked out of a fractured length of pipe rather than from a gasket fitting. The cause of that breach was feedstock embrittlement of carbon steel adjacent to non-heat-treated welds. Metallurgists call this high-temperature hydrogen attack (HTHA). Refiners did not have a strong understanding of the risk factors that led to HTHA at the time.

But here’s the tragic coincidence that was predictable. A large crew happened to be near the leak when it happened. They were stationed at a second bank of hydrotreater heat exchangers that had been taken offline for cleaning. That second bank had been deemed ready to return to service.

The startup of this second bank was known as hazardous, and – according to standard operating procedures – the operation needed one employee and, at most, a second one to help. But on this night, the supervisor summoned an extra five staff to the second bank, significantly increasing the toll if anything went wrong. The reason for so many additional people was that pipe fittings on the heat exchanger banks had been chronically leaky, particularly during startup. The supervisor wanted the extra hands to manage leaks that had come to seem routine and unavoidable at the gasketed connection whenever flow was restored. Workers would stand ready with steam lances. Even as the crew prepared for trouble at the second heat exchanger bank, the first operating bank failed at the worst possible time.

Here is another sign at the American Sign Museum on display in a custom-fitted wooden crate.

Tesoro operator John Moore was the first to hear from those at the scene. Over the radio, the foreman called out, “Get someone up here – we’re all dying!” And it was true. Seven died; three at the scene and the rest later from burns and organ failure.

According to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), “Refinery management had normalized the occurrences of hazardous conditions, including frequent leaks from the NHT heat exchangers, by using steam to mitigate leaks, ineffectively identifying methods to prevent leaks from the heat exchanger flanges and gaskets … the refinery process safety culture required proof of danger rather than proof of effective safety implementation.”

And danger there was. The CSB found that six months earlier, a maintenance team working on the second exchanger bank had reused a gasket rather than discarding and replacing it after the connection was opened. Reusing the gasket was an important cause behind leaks at the joint after the most recent upkeep. Reuse was contrary to guidance from manufacturers and industry experts.

The cause of the breach at the Tesoro
refinery was feedstock embrittlement
of carbon steel adjacent to non-heat-
treated welds, which metallurgists call
a high-temperature hydrogen attack
(HTHA).

Reusing a gasket might seem like a no-brainer to a novice or someone in a hurry. After all, industrial gaskets are cut to shape from a specialized sheet of metal or elastomer. The installer at the job site knows the old one has been cut and made to fit this connection and the chemical environment. If that gasket has been doing fine so far, why bother hunting through inventory or chasing a purchase order for a replacement? Retain the old one, bolt it tight, and call it good.

Gasketeers say there’s a good reason to make the replacement. After a gasket has been tightened, it imprints the flanges and any irregularities. Elastomers grow thinner and lose flexibility under heat and pressure. Regardless of how much care an operator takes when restoring a connection, a reused gasket can’t reliably equal the performance of a new one.

Even when human life is not likely to be at risk, seals and gaskets deserve respect – otherwise, much avoidable expense lies in wait. A leaky gland seal in a steam turbine wastes energy. A natural gas compressor station will waste vast volumes of methane into the air if just a little oil leaks into the supply of filtered gas to the compressor’s dry-gas seal. Having trouble with leaky gaskets around manway closures in an HRSG drum? This causes costly downtime if not discovered until late in the return-toservice cycle. Some operators with suitable nitrogen-gas circuits now pressurize drums with air to test the manway gaskets before refilling the space with inert gas and firing up the gas turbine.

On what I call the machine frontier, ephemeral items don’t have to be highly engineered or expensive to be mission critical. Even painter’s tape can bring catastrophic results.

AeroPeru Flight 603 departed Lima, Peru, on Oct. 2, 1996, bound for Santiago, Chile. Soon after takeoff, climbing over the Pacific Ocean, the pilots found themselves unable to trust the Boeing 757’s instrument panel: indicated airspeed veered from low to high; the altimeter reading made no sense, and the stick shaker warned of a low-speed stall at the same time that other alarms advised dangerous overspeed.

When the airliner crashed into the Pacific, killing all 70 aboard, its instruments showed 450 knots and an altitude of 9,500 feet. Accident investigators found that an aircraft-washing crew had finished work without pulling masking tape that covered three air vents, called static ports. Static ports, like pitot tubes, were necessary for the airplane’s instruments to report speed and altitude.

Late in writing this piece, I discovered that, in a manner of speaking, at least one variety of ephemera has found an honored place in museums. These are gaskets that prevent oxygen and humidity damage by sealing the glass panes on display cases. How high of an honor? Next time you stop by the Louvre Museum in Paris, look closely at the display case holding the Mona Lisa. You’ll see self-compressing gaskets installed by Goppion SPA of Milan.

Engineered seals and gaskets: expendable but not optional.