[TowerTalk] Regalvanize

[Tom Anderson]

Fellow Tower Talk members:

Years ago my family owned a company with plants in Fort Worth TX, Tulsa 
OK and Ogden UT (Riverside Industries) that made huge steel high voltage 
electrical transmission towers that were installed all over the western 
and central US.  

As part of the process they had huge galvanizing vats some as long as 
200 ft. where the steel tower pieces were first dipped and heated in an 
acid "pickling" solution to remove rust and any contaminants and then 
galvanized. From what I was told they had to heat the pieces in the acid 
pickling solution because if they dipped them straight into the 
galvanizing solution it would explode in a shower of hot metal solution 
all over the place.  The inside roof  over the vats bore evidence of 
someone occasionally forgetting to "pickle" and heat the metal pieces 
first.  They said the pickling solution both heated the metal and 
removed any contaminants (rust) from the tower pieces.  I saw many 
pieces of steel being dipped into the acid bath that obviously had some 
corrosion on them, since much of the raw steel, prior to being stamped 
into shape and the holes drilled for bolts, etc, was stacked out in the 
open.  

I never worked for the company, instead I was a newspaper reporter for 
20+ years at several Texas newspapers, but on my vacations and when I 
could get a few days off my father and brother would pay me to fly up to 
Ogden and Tulsa to take photographs and interview the employees for the 
company employee newspaper and the annual report.  

We've since sold the entire company (thank goodness).  Some of those 
winters in Utah and even Tulsa could be brutal.  Even though I was often 
next to those heated vats, the plant buildings were open air and by the 
end of the day my fingers and feet were numb.

73 de Tom, WW5L