Oral History: Ron Wallace

[0:00] well I'm Ron Wallace and on the Intrepid I was a boiler technician second class A bt2 so I served um from 1968 to 1972 I went to the Intrepid immediately after boot camp and stayed on the Intrepid until I was discharged in uh January of 72 I get a sign to go on the Intrepid you know I've never been around any really big ships at all I you know show up in Norfork and you know walk down the row of peers with my uh seabag and you know and and I reported for Duty on a Saturday and I walk up to the ship and I had that experience I think a lot of people you look up and go oh my

[0:52] goodness look look at this thing and um I reported a board and they weren't exactly sure what to do with me for some reason because it was the weekend that everything wasn't totally set up and I remember the first night I just uh slept in a room that had a bunch of extra mattresses in it and it wasn't until the next day that things really got um you know going and of course for the first few months you're a mess cook and um so you know as the ship was first deployed um over to Vietnam for the first a few months of that I was a mes cook so when mes cooking was over I I don't remember

[1:35] exactly how this happened I was you know reporting to boilers Division and the first couple days I was there uh we went you know down into the boiler room and you know the Boiler Room when the ship is running and ambient temperature is probably 140° and there's no really no air conditioning anywhere and they had these blower events that blew down and you know people would kind of huddle into those vents in between the time they'd um be going around to take readings on the different gauges and and things like that well the boiler rooms are in the lowest part of the ship that you can go to so you have to go down um

[2:13] quite a few decks to get to them but they're um you know this is when the ship is in operations they're um tremendously noisy and hot and dangerous um the ship uses what's known as superheated steam so you know if you're boiling tea in your at home in your teapot and it it whistles you see the steam coming out superheated steam uh you can't see so if you suspect that there's been a break in a steam pipe you'll hear the noise but you won't see anything and the way that you would search for that is you'd have a 2x4 or something and look for it that way now this wasn't particularly common but it if it happened that's how you would

[3:05] address it so um I I just remember feeling um you know this this tremendous wall of heat and noise whenever you'd go into the engineering spaces the boilers Division and the the boiler technicians would um uh take care of operating the boilers keeping them you know you have to maintain them as well as operate them the the boilers need to be running at a different number of them and and at different um rates of power depending on how fast the ship was going and for launching and recovering aircraft you'd need to have all the boilers online running you know pretty much Full Steam to keep the ship moving while they did uh launch and and Recovery operations

[3:55] nothing was automated in on on the ship on this ship it um to increase the fires in the boiler you had to insert what's called a burner Barrel in and turn like a little valve on that would spray very fine mist of oil into the fire and would cause more fire and then depending on how much fuel is being burned would change the pressure and also change the rate at which the water that's being turned to steam so there's another person that's Manning a big feed water valve that they would open or close to keep the water a certain level by looking at a sight glass which is um uh a big pie a big thick piece of glass

[4:41] that you can see in where the water level is and and they would maintain that so all that stuff was manual so somebody had to be there and in the super hot area and if they were lucky there was something blowing down on them that steam would then go to the turbines which would ultim ly turned the shaft so um the um so that was one whole aspect of of B division now one thing lucky for me I I actually only worked in the boiler rooms for a short period of time and I I mean for one reason or another attracted the attention of the lieutenant who was in charge of our area and he assign me to what is known as the

[5:25] oil and water Shack and um and part of this I expect was the fact that Isa had you know a year of uh college education which wasn't particularly common in fact all the other guys I worked with were as me and called me college boy and stuff like that but um uh it worked out good because I I had kind of an affinity for what they did in the oil and water Shack which was to um maintain uh there's a um about a million and a half gallons of fuel oil in all the tanks on the ship so that have to be received and then burned in the boilers and that you have to do it in such a way that you

[6:11] don't affect the list or the trim of the ship uh also we were responsible for uh the feed water this is the water that's used in the boilers and of course it has to be made basically um you know through a sort of a distilling process because it has to be very pure so in the um the the team of 16 or 17 of us that were in the oil and water Shack we were um when we stood our watches we were monitoring the amount of uh fuel that's being used as the tanks draw down because you need to switch to a different tank to run the boilers um you know for the fuel oil uh

[6:56] as U as time would go on um we'd also so be responsible for just generally you know keeping an inventory of where everything was and the how the tanks were doing and then periodically we would refuel um either underway or import from some sort of a barge and the underway refuelings are are pretty dramatic another uh ship comes alongside and they shoot a small line across and then a bring a bigger line back and the bosons do this and eventually they're able to bring um a pretty good siiz fuel hose over and connect it up to our receiving station and we start to fill and um and then as it's coming in it needs to be

[7:46] directed to the appropriate tanks uh on board we we also there was a similar process If you're receiving fuel from um a barge if you're in a port somewhere and uh and then of course we're able to fuel the Destroyers that escorted us so we would have um we would have people on sowed phones stationed in various places and we would have a specific valve lineup so we had before refueling started we would open and close certain valves that would direct uh the oil we were receiving to specific sets of tanks and then someone would be monitoring um the how how they're filling and in most cases this was done by some sort of a a sounding tube so in

[8:50] a birthing compartment somewhere there'd be a little um brass uh screw that you know a couple inches in diameter you could open up and drop uh something down like a like a like a tape measure down and you're able to see where it is and um sort of monitor it it that way and that was called taking a sounding so um where where the tanks um in some cases when they're full flow into an adjacent one and some of them when they're full overflow over the side and this was the thing that wasn't being done particularly well and something that I paid a lot of attention to understanding how that worked and developed a series of uh

[9:51] procedures so that when we were filling the tanks we were carefully filling one until it started to go to the next one and and filling that one till it went to the next one and stopping filling the final one before it went over the side and in fact you know the time I you know for the almost two years that I was involved in that I don't think we ever had an oil spill which was dramatically different than the two years um prior so it had a lot to do with this um uh understanding the systems and how they work and um you know there's tremendous L complicated piping systems I you know went up to the the

[10:34] engineering room and um really studied all the drawings to really get a feel for how all that worked to to implement this Improvement you know it had a lot to do with um why uh after I uh left the Intrepid I was awarded the Navy Achievement medal um because the executive the EXO and the engineering officer felt that this had improved their operational Readiness but it was really the efforts of um the uh of Commander Norby and Lieutenant peler who were my immediate superiors on the Intrepid who who pushed this through and you know if you saw the paperwork there's other names on there but really they're the ones that made it happen and um as uh the uh petty officer of the

[11:27] month um was really pretty interesting and and you know I had no idea that that was happening but as part of it there was a citation from the commanding officer um uh Captain Williams I believe it was and uh there was a there was an in there was something in the bank he said well if you have time I'll I would like you to join me for lunch or something to that effect of course I took him up on that it was fantastic um I remember being so um taken with going into his quarters and and seeing um it was like being in you know in a five-star restaurant particularly compared to having been eating in the in

[12:09] the mess hall and there was you know really nice uh silver and China and things like that and of course he has a a steward who served everything and it was really quite elegant and I wrote home to my parents uh around the time that happened kind of describ in the experience which I think in the letter I even mentioned what I what we had but I don't remember it at the moment but uh we um and and we had a really great conversation as I reported in this letter and the the the captain was really interested in my opinions on a number of things and and one of the things I had suggested was someplace

[12:56] where they post um like like a a map of the world and show where the Intrepid was at the time and and they did that and so that was pretty cool so when when we get the fuel oil particular if we get it from the Navy it's usually very good quality fuel oil but you know the the stuff we used was only a couple grades better than than you know bunker C you know was U not particularly refined but before we would um put put a a tank into service we had this um device that we uh would drop in the sounding tube to the bottom of the tank and take a sample of the oil near the bottom of the tank it's

[13:45] called The Thief sample so you pull that up and then we had a centrifuge in the oil Shack where where you would put the sample in uh something looks like you'd see in a chemistry lab is kind of a a wider bulb that narrows down to a very fine point that has you know like little percentage marks on it and things and you spin it and you spin it for a certain period of time and you look at oh you know it's only got 0.001% water that's good we can use it so we're we're steaming and I'm on Watch and Lieutenant pelleter the boilers officer comes in and he is furious and it is obvious and

[14:28] he says you can't tell me you tested this sample sailor and he's got a a Jar full of the fuel oil only it's not fuel oil it's like water and so we went through the you know they they nearly put the fires out in a boiler which was not a good thing and but they got everything going again and we tested this tank again and we gotten it not from a Navy ship but from uh uh some Port we were in and it wasn't the reason we didn't see that it was a certain percentage of water it was basically all water so the person who had done the test when they looked in the centrifuge they didn't see any

[15:16] difference you know normally it'd be pretty dramatic difference because oil would be floating on the but it was was basically all the same sort of dirty color and that person thought oh it's just all oil and so that was nothing really bad happened but that was very memorable during the course of the time I was on the Intrepid we changed home ports um you originally it was nor fork then we were in the in the yards in Philly but at some point we changed our actual Home Port to quanset point um so we were coming into quet point and it's quite an arduous um channel that needs to be followed in around a Newport RH Island

[16:02] into quanset Point RH Island and it was a beautiful day and we were going along very slowly with tugs and everything there was a flotilla of Civilian craft every it looked to me like every skiff and sailboat that could float was escorting us and we were in sight of the pier there was a band playing on the pier there were dign Aries on the pier and we ran ground and where we ran ground it was a very sort of Sandy Bottom so it wasn't particularly jarring but all these things like the uh condenser and things like that sucked up all the stuff so we had to immediately shut the whole plant down and it set off relief fowser steam going

[16:56] off all over the place and um and we were basically dead dead in the water and it was I'm sure very embarrassing for the captain who I believe was a new it was a new command for him but um that area is it's not particularly deep to begin with and it tends to sh up with shifting sand so maybe it wasn't his fault who knows but um then we were sort of stuck there and they had to wait to for an extra high tide and get tug to push us the rest of the way to the pier I mean it was you know probably hundreds of yards it was visible you know and then we had to take

[17:38] a lot of this equipment apart and clean it out in order to uh light the plant off again so that was pretty exciting the long-term benefit in in my career and life of being on the Intrepid I couldn't measure it um I went on to work in the nuclear power industry even though obviously the Intrepid was not nuclear powered but my understanding of systems and steam plants and things like that directly applied to that I worked um in the uh for engineering companies building a couple different nuclear plants and then went on to work in the area of plant maintenance with a company that developed software for plant maintenance when I was on the Intrepid we had to do maintenance on P

[18:29] and machinery and things like that you know check uh oil and check bearings and check different things like that and it was all done with a system that the Navy had that were a series of sort of index cards that you know obviously we called them PM cards PL main or preventive maintenance cards and on the back of the door in the oil Shack um where we worked out of there was a a a bunch of little pockets with these cards and you know we there were some that were daily some that were weekly some that were monthly and we it was our job to check those off and perform that maintenance and I ended

[19:05] up working um for years and years and years with a company that developed a computerized capability to do that kind of thing a lot more sophisticated obviously that was uh used at about 300 um globally Electric utilities on their um power plants and um transmission distribution lines and things like that so it was the basis that I got uh in the Intrepid and then I did go on and get an engineering degree and it it just worked out tremendously so I'm eternally grateful for my uh time on the Intrepid and and it's been uh led me led me to have a great career