Oh my Gosh, What Have I Done

This true story is rather technical, but I needed to explain some of the electronic systems in order to get to the funny part; so please bear with me.  The year was 1963-4.  I was a just married young Staff Sergeant in the US Air Force when I received what was then called an unaccompanied duty assignment to remote Alaska.  The unit to which I was assigned was the 714^th AC & W Squadron at Cold Bay, Alaska.  This organization had more than one mission.  Primary duty was to operate a chain of Distant Early Warning (DEW) radar stations which stretched about 700 miles along the chain of Aleutian Islands from King Salmon Air Force Station to Nikolski Air Station on Umnak Island.  The secondary mission was to extend the Alaskan Communications System through a wideband system called Forward Propagation Tropospheric Scatterwave (FPTS) from Anchorage all the way west to Shemya Island 2000 miles southwest of Anchorage.  Our stations were at Port Moller, Port Heiden, Cold Bay, Cape Sarichef, Driftwood Bay, and Nikolski.  This bleak black & white photograph is of the station at Nikolski.

Another mission was to provide long distance telephone service to persons living in the Aleut Indian villages along the chain.  The FPTS Radio System transmitted and received a communication system called Western Electric K & L Carrier, a Frequency Division Multiplexed system which through the miracle of electronic technology allowed a large number of separate communication channels to operate simultaneously.  Another mission was to provide Air Traffic Control (ATC)  Communications using VHF and UHF Radio equipment to aircraft enroute to the short gravel runways at each of these stations.  These stations were minimum manned—at Nikolski the number of assigned people was about 32; the personnel complement consisted of electronic technicians, radar operators, cooks, power production technicians, vehicle mechanics, and civil engineering specialists.  The Commanding Officer was usually a Captain.  The facility was designed so that most of the time it was not necessary to leave the building, and even the 2 or 3 vehicles were stored inside in the garage.  I cannot remember going down the mountain more than 2 or 3 times during the entire year.  The Aleut Indian villagers from below visited the station only once that I can recall while I was there.

All this equipment required electrical power to operate; and because the technology at the time had not yet advanced beyond vacuum tubes, the electrical load was high.  The power was provided by 5 large diesel generators in the power plant.  Normally only two of these generators were required in order to carry the electrical load, but in order to equalize the wear and tear on the engines and to perform maintenance, the power production technician would occasionally switch from one to another.  Now this switchover had to be carefully accomplished in order to ensure the two generators were in phase just before the switchover was performed.  This was accomplished by using a phase meter connected between the generators.  This meter read in degrees from 0 to 359 marked in 1 degree increments.  The switch was thrown at the moment when the meter read 355 degrees, which allowing for a few seconds of switch time resulted in the actual change occurring at 360 or 0 degrees.  I watched once as this was done.  It was a little scary in a noisy power plant wearing noise reduction headsets to listen while relays and switches slammed open or shut as the switch occurred.  This, however, was not my normal job.

My job was as an electronic technician in what was called Lateral Comm, the room containing the FPTS Radio Equipment, the Carrier System, a complete small dial telephone system, and the ATC Communications Radio Equipment.  Although my Air Force Specialty was ATC Communications Radio Technician, I had prior experience both with Scatterwave Radio in the US Army and with L Carrier equipment working for A.T. & T.  This was an advantage for me, and I quickly became the ‘go-to’ guy if the other technicians had a problem.  I learned the station well and began performing preventive maintenance routines which had been ignored in the past due to lack of knowledge of how to operate the equipment and perform maintenance.  After a few months of this duty I knew the job well, and I may have become overconfident.

It might surprise you to learn that almost all electronic equipment, even today, actually operates not on the 60 cycle AC Power supplied to it, but on DC.  The AC Power (in this case, from the Power Plant in the building) is immediately converted to DC Voltage and distributed throughout the circuitry to provide the necessary operating potentials.  For the K & L Carrier equipment and all the rest of the telephone central office at the station 130 Volt Power was supplied from a large bank of batteries—I think there were more than 100 of them connected in series.  The electrolyte was contained in clear glass containers with open tops.  The negative and positive electrodes were suspended in the electrolyte.  An approximate dimension of one battery was perhaps 12 X 12 inches square and 18 inches in depth.  They were mounted in racks.  These batteries supplied power to the Carrier System, and in turn they were ‘trickle charged’ by several racks of Mercury Vapor Rectifiers which were supplied AC Power from the Power Plant.  So the power chain was from the diesel electric generator to the mercury vapor rectifiers to the battery bank to the electronic equipment.  Preventive maintenance of the power chain included testing the electrolyte in each battery with an instrument called a hydrometer and recording the results, and testing the mercury vapor rectifiers to ensure they were performing properly.  This was the one facet of Lateral Communications which I was the least certain about.  Considering the amount of electrical power available from that large number of batteries I was usually pretty careful in that part of the station.

On the day I am remembering, however, the maintenance routine I was performing required me to remove a control vacuum tube from an operating mercury vapor rectifier, and to measure how long it took for the now defective equipment to switch off and transfer the DC load to a spare.  So, following the maintenance instruction I went to the rack containing the rectifier, made very sure I was doing exactly what was instructed, pulled the control tube, and began timing the changeover.  I was standing there with the control tube in one hand and the maintenance instruction in the other when to my astonishment everything seemed to go wrong at once:  The rectifier alarmed, the station minor alarm began ringing and major alarm began sounding: bong, bong, bong, and suddenly the overhead lights began flickering dim to bright to dim over and over again.  Some fellows who chanced to be watching from outside the room said I got so excited I ran around in a big circle about 3 times trying to plug the control tube in my hand back into the rectifier.  I was in an absolute panic; thought somehow I had made a mistake, possibly ruined the batteries, and caused an outage which might get me thrown off the DEW Line and court martialed.  To others it may have been funny, but I was frantic.  After what seemed like forever I plugged the control tube back in, and shortly afterward the overhead lights returned to normal.  I silenced the alarms, made sure all the systems were back in proper operating order, answered calls from other stations, and began trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

Within a few minutes I discovered that It wasn’t my fault.  What had happened was that at the exact same time as I pulled out the control tube, the power plant operator was switching diesel generators, and somehow had made an error using the phase meter causing two generators to be operating unsynchronized resulting in extreme power fluctuations.  Whew!  I was relieved.

I never did go back and complete that preventive maintenance routine.