The McDonnell Group

By Peter Manos

What word comes to mind when you think of an oil-fired power plant?  You’d never expect the answer to be “beautiful."   That is, unless you were me, in the late 1980’s.  I recently dusted off a poem I wrote back then, when I was working as an engineer at Con Edison.  I believed the distinction we make between technology and nature is in our minds.  “Doesn’t everything come from the earth?” I’d ask.

Along with “beautiful,” another word that does not come to mind for most people when talking about fossil-fueled power plants is “efficient.”  But fossil-fired power plants were designed to get as much energy out of the fuel as possible.  For example, after the steam runs through the turbines, it passes through a cascading series of heat exchangers, to pre-heat the water on its way back to the boilers.  Similarly, the hot gasses coming out of the smoke stack pass through a heat exchanger to pre-heat the cooler air going to the boiler.

Was it environmental benevolence that made engineers include these enormous, expensive heat exchangers in their design?  No, it was pure economics. It saves money.

In this way, ultimately, economics could be the driving force for environmentally sound decisions.  If only we knew--and were forced to factor into our decisions--the full true costs of every source of energy!

I know it is certainly in our capability as a civilization to harm the environment if we don’t make good decisions, so I realize I was naïve to think of nature and technology as being the same thing.  But as I re-read my old poem I still wonder…We have two different words for them, because nature and technology are two different things.  But what, after all, would the distinction between them be, if we sincerely tried to apply all our technology in ways that were in accord with nature?

While that’s being decided, 23 years later I’d like to celebrate this power plant.  Again.

The Power Plant
Astoria, NY - 1988

Part I: The main plant:

Five pairs of smokestacks rise
out of the ten-story brick building.
Each is connected to a boiler
120 feet high and 50 feet square at the base.

The walls of the boilers are inch-wide pipes
where water turns to steam
to then turn the turbines.

Oil or natural gas burn in the dual-fuel boilers
from nozzles pointing in from the corners
making four 4-story high jets of flame.

I’ve opened the portholes and gazed at the man-made suns.

The turbines that run off the steam all hum a steady, deafening low “A”
whipping the generator rotors around at 60 cycles per second
where electric and magnetic fields dance in eternal perpendicularity
inside the house-sized cylinders on the floor of the Turbine Room.

You can fit dozens of gymnasiums inside the Turbine Room
and a crane 200 tons strong rides along its ceiling beams.

To tell you each size and number of structure here
won’t help you realize how humbled and struck with fear
seeing the guts of this city leaves you.
It made my feet quake….at first.
Now I stand in its midst
with bones of rock and steel
and veins of electricity and steam.

Stop and see what your electric bill is paying for.  They owe you a tour.

We take the elevator to the top floor
where the floor is a metal grating you can look down through
to see ten levels filled with pipes and pumps
to more than 150 feet down
and up in front of you
the beams supporting the ten enormous boilers
hang freely from an army of compressed springs
with coils thicker than your wrist
standing on perches from which each detached stanchion
faces less excessive stress from heat expansion.

As you look down the long hall
many city blocks
the starkness of the long view is filled
with the steadiness of the general roar.

The Power Plant
Astoria, NY - 1988

Part II: The Tunnel House

Alongside the huge brick box of the main plant
is a small brick building almost 100 years old.
It contains the entrance to the tunnel to Hell Gate.

Electric lines
and gas and steam pipes
cross under the East River there
from Queens to the Bronx.

Putting on my hard hat I went over and met the foreman
who showed me down.

The steel grate floor around the skeletal elevator shaft
allows you to see 260 feet down to the bottom.

Eerie sensations of “what am I doing here?”
as the foreman closed the accordion door
and we descended in the elevator cage.

As we reached the bottom the foreman said:
“This was the eighth wonder of the world
when it was completed in 1915.”

Looking across the tunnel to the Bronx
underneath the river
I could see a perfect vanishing point
so straight was the mile-long run
of large black pipes inside the 30 foot-wide tube.

But there was no bedrock for me to see
because the tunnel’s walls were all lined with concrete.

Then when we turned to start to go back up
I could see a cavern carved into the bedrock.
“They started building a tunnel to Manhattan back then,”
the foreman said, “then they gave up.”

I had only a moment standing there awestruck
before the womb-like tomb of naked rock
to whisper the Native American blessing “All my relations”
before the foreman and I went back up.

As I stepped out of the Tunnel House
and stood in the bright sunlight
the power quaking through my feet sank in the dirt.
Planting my roots, I thanked Mother Earth.