Its ALIIIIIIVE!!!!

So Griffin and I have been here in Texas for about two weeks now, and we are pretty well settled in. We're about to start our second full week of work, and I must say, the plant has taken on a life of its own.

The plant is visible from a mile away, and I'm not being figurative. When you first see it from said mile away, it looks like a giant, black wart on a skin of desert. The lake that it pulls brine from (more in a sec) is about 5 acres. Just in case you didn't know, thats friggin' huge. The plant works by pulling brine (heavily mineral-ed water, with excessive amounts of salt) from the dry lake through strategically placed  wells. A dry lake, for your purposes, can be loosely equivocated to an old sponge after being left out in the sun after two many car washes. All of the runoff from the surrounding region ends up in this washed-up sponge (ooooohh, I couldn't resist...), picking up its goodies on the way. CNR has drilled wells in the places that produce the highest brine strength. They are of a simple design: 100 feet of galvanized steel straight into the earth, with a pump and a motor at the bottom attached to 100 ft. of PVC, which is routed into the mainline.

Now I've spent a fair amount of time among these wells. They break down a lot, and then they need fixin'. You do that by commandeering what is known as the "Well-Puller," which is a 70's-era Ford (I swear, CNR endorses them...) with a 30 ft. crane attached to it. You back up to one of the wells, put up the crane, and pull out the PVC/motor and pump. The first time I went down to work on one of these was with a guy named Vince. Painfully quiet, Vince was born and raised here in Brownfield. He's worked at the plant for 24 years/3 different companies. He has a son and daughter, both who live and work in Brownfield, and 3 grandchildren. If only you can understand how difficult it was to obtain this information; Vince likes to keep to himself. He was very understanding of what Griffin and I are doing and put up with all my questions, and even started to volunteer information on his own.

Like this nice little tidbit: Black widows really enjoy dark, wet places. Coincidently, the brine wells are both. So for the next paragraph, if I type "brine well," you read "100 ft.-of-space-that-is-black-widow-heaven." Right as he told me this, we pulled up the last length of pipe, and lo and behold, the Woman Scorned herself. I ended up working with Vince and the brine wells (...) a lot that week, and we saw two more. Grand total of black widows I've seen here: 3. Grand total of black widows I've seen in my entire life: 3. 

From the wells, the brine is pumped back to the plant, where it undergoes a complex cooling process involving enormous machinery and large amounts of concentrated anhydrous ammonia. Lets take that in two parts:

Enormous Machinery: Everything is super-sized here. You know when you're working at home, and you need a 5/8 wrench? As in 5/8"? Everything here is at least 11/8". The wrenches are HUUUUUUUGE. Very popular is the pipe wrench here, and the King of the Pipe Wrenches is the 24. As in, a 24" pipe wrench (ohmuhguuuuuh...). Gears are twice the size of my head and turn with enough force to slice me in two and not miss a rotation. The chains that turn said death-gears are like super-sized bike chains, with links bigger than my fist. Loose tin is lying everywhere, usually from being blown off by the Texas wind. The noise is like nothing you have ever heard. Every little part (little meaning massive) seems to be speaking to every other little part (again, massive...) in a complex code of squeaks, rumbles, groans, and roars. The system is so complex, and absolutely dependent on every aspect, no matter how seemingly insignificant, doing its job. The nature of the plant is to destroy itself, merely because of the raw power that it produces. CNR runs it around the clock, 24/7. All night and day, the operators and maintenance crews struggle to keep the plant from breaking itself down into a million rusted shambles. The scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (book, of course) where Hagrid and the trees are trying desperately to restrain Grawp seems to be the best illustration for the temperament of the plant.

Ammonia Anhydrous: This crap is nasty. Its useful as a refrigerant because in a liquid state, it boils at 0 degrees F. CNR uses it to cool down the incoming brine and make certain elements bond to others. I failed Chem 1, so I'm not going to able to BS my way through that explanation. However, I do know that coming in contact with it will burn you somethin' fierce. Oh, I forgot to mention that there are ten of thousands of gallons of this potent liquid flowing through the veins of the plant. Sometimes it leaks, and when its not under pressure, it turns to a gas, making it almost untraceable, save for the smell. I blacked out the first day, due to a leak of the sort.

As we spend more time around it, Griffin and I are learning that the plant has moods. If you push it too hard in one area, it throws a tantrum in another area, and then you spend the next 5 hours calming it down and fixing its cuts and scrapes. The operators continually amaze me, as they have learned to keep a watchful eye on the emotions of this plant, and to say or do the right thing at the right time, keeping the plant in a workable mood and keeping the production on schedule.

In addition to the widows, machinery, and liquid death, the other hazards of this monster-that-is-called-Plant includes rattlesnakes (they're EVERYWHERE), and what Mr. Cooper calls, and I quote verbatim, "NFGs: New F***ing Guys. They get you killed."

Just in case, he is referring to Griffin and I.