Boiler explosion question

Str. SAM P. SUIT, May 9, 1937:
Jo Ann;
*The steam towboat SAM P. SUIT, exploded a boiler here in Cincinnati [*WAY'S STEAM TOWBOAT DIRECTORY Entry No. T2248]. Veteran Emory Edgington was master and Clyde Morrow pilot. It was some big BANG! here at the time heard by members of my family up the hill at their home. Lumber/debris shot up in the air and rained down on the water. Emory Edgington was reported to be visiting the boat's lavatory when a porcelain skin shot up in the air in front of his face. She was rebuilt but sank in ice Feb. 13, 1948 at Hungtington, W. Va. and destroyed in the ice. I remember that big ice gorge being led by my dad out on the ice near Coal Haven Landing to see another steam towboat frozen in solid. I 'think' it was the VICTORY but will check with my 91 year old mother. Anyway, they had steam up and the cook tossed out a bucket of food scraps that landed on the ice. Things we remember.

*The famed packet SENATOR CORDILL [WAY'S PACKET DIRECTORY Entry No. 3080] exploded her main throttle at Pt. Pleasant, W. Va., March 2, 1928, killing three men--two engineers and a boiler maker. Attributed to a 'cold hammer' in the steam line. My grandmother's brother was there when it happened describing the men as "boiled like chickens."

*The steam towboat JOE COOK [WAY'S STEAM TOWBOAT DIRECTORY Entry No. T1384] exploded a boiler April 1, 1947 at Ravenswood, W. Va. killing three. This also just after boiler work when raising steam. I 'thought' I heard some story that a plane was flying low taking pictures of the river at the time and caught the whole thing just as it happened. Locals around here recall the COOK as always "scapin' hard and sharp." Can some poster/lurker with a longer memory confirm this story about the explosion being caught on film? Hope this helps a little.

Cheers,
R. Dale Flick

Thanks, Dale, for this info. These explosions happened far later than I would have thought for such a thing. Now, maybe Capt. Walnut or Dennis Schenk can get on and let us know: was this type of thing before the USCG required a cold "press" test of a boiler before raising steam on a repaired boiler? Is such a test always an indication of what will happen after the boiler is hot? Were these boats operating with a tampered-with safety valve?

HOT BOILERS/TAMPERED SAFETY VALES:
Hi, Bob,
Good questions above and I don't know any of the answers. Doc Hawley stood many a watch on the AVALON with Capt. Emory Edigington and, no doubt, heard accounts/memories of the SAM P. SUIT directly from the lips of one who was there then. I knew Emory until his last days at an ancient age but, unfortunately, didn't think to ask him about the explosion. I figured there were some things you just didn't bring up or press the point too much. Like in our military from my experiences, there no doubt have been some 'close calls and near misses.' These things also just not mentioned after the sweat dries on the palms of your hands.

John Burns, son of Jim Burns, recalled the incident on DELTA KING, I 'think,' during the big maritime strike in San Francisco when they attempted sneaking the boat from her pier for Sacramento to dock in fresh water up there. She was going along when John, then a licensed fireman under his dad, walked to the boilers and saw all of the indicators showing no water level!...Dry!...Zilch...-0-. Old Jim Burns was manning the throttle. John's eyes bugged and he quickly pulled the fires to prevent a virtual 'melt down' [Or worse] and the boat drifted against the battlements of Alcatraz Prison. She grounded there on the gravel while prison guards stood on the ramparts with machine guns pointed down. Problem was debris had been sucked against her intake pipe during the time the boat was moored at the pier and no water was being pumped in. John was a good swimmer and jumped over the side, dove down and cleared the debris. John told me that story in person and Stan Garvey incorporated it in his 'KING & QUEEN of the River book.'

Cheers, with chills running down my neck,
R. Dale Flick

Dale the famous plane photos were of the Str. J.C. Rawn blowing up at Huntington on December 7, 1939. The aircraft was photo mapping the city and caught all of the explosion in sequence. The J.C. Rawn blew two of her three boilers, killing three crew. There is a book written by I believe Michael Walters on boiler explosions on Western Rivers up to 1965, the date published. In it he stated there were NO boiler explosions after the Joe Cook.

Str. J.C. RAWN explosion, Dec. 7, 1939:
Hi, Bill:
Thanks for not only shedding light on the 'airplane photographing the explosion' story but for adding the J.C. RAWN to the list of casualties. I'd plumb forgotten about her. Capt. Fred Way had lots to write about her in his STEAM TOWBOAT DIRECTORY Entry No. T1236. RAWN exploded two boilers killing three men. The RAWN, according to Fred, ran aground twice and, like the celebrated packet VIRGINIA, was twice floated out by building earth works etc. to aid the process. Sounds like something of a 'bad luck lady.'

*A 'shy lurker' on the web E=Mailed asking why they wanted to steam the DELTA KING out of San Francisco and up to Sacramento? Well, the big maritime strike was going on and on with the KING laid at the pier in San Francisco--and salt water. The QUEEN was already docked in Sacramento. The company officials, in tandem with Jim Burns etc. wanted her out of town, away from any potential danger, and free of the rapidly growning barnacles on her hull. John Burns on the boilers, his dad Jim on the engines and throttle, and a skeleton crew composed of the captain and a few others, formed a plan and casually slipped aboard to steal away.

Cheers,
R. Dale Flick

Bob, I do not know when hydrostatic tests were first required by law, but it was well before 1900, not only for steamboats but for practically ALL boilers On the Belle of Louisville we called it "squeezing." The technique was to run the pressure up to 1.5 times the allowed pressure, close the valve at the pump and wait a required time watching a pressure gauge. If the pressure dropped a search was made for the leak(s) throughout the steam system and repairs made. Safety valves had to be gagged to prevent their opening at the allowed pressure. I do not recall how long the test pressure had to be sustained. The reason for testing with water is that water under pressure will not explode - at least not like steam. In addition a water leak can be seen. Steam is invisible. The tests had to be observed by a Steamboat Inspection Service inspector.

There are a lot of reasons for boiler explosions other than tampered-with safety valves. Dirt, excessive foaming, tubes or flues not covered by the water in the boiler, dirt, scale formation, tools carelessly left inside, the list is endless.

Chet Foster, engineer on the Belle of Louisville served on a couple of boats with the old-time lever safety valves. He said they did not hang extra weight on the lever because it could still open and they would "lose their water," so they jammed a post between the lever and the deck overhead! That way the valve absolutely could not open. They were careful to let the pressure drop before removing the post.

Those lever safety valves were "grandfathered" into the 1930's.

A JEE Story About Boilers

A picture of Capt. J. Emory Edgington hangs in my pilothouse on the GV2. Although my exposure to that sage 19th Century riverman was not as often as Cap'n Hawley's, I did spend every moment with him I could on the AVALON.

A story he told concerning steamboat boilers was that there was a fellow on a certain steamboat, sometime before the turn of two centuries ago, who was especially hateful and therefore despised by most of the crew. So much so that when he was working in a boiler on "cleaning day", he was shut up inside, the water pumped up, and the fires lit.

"There was nothing left next time the boiler was opened a week later. Not even a bone."

JEE was just a young lad on the steamboat and had no participation in the foul deed, but whenever the AVALON was laid-up for cleaning boilers, it always brought back the memory and consequently the retelling of the tale.

Alan, this brings up yet another question from a dummy: Does regular cooling, then refiring to operating temp weaken boilers more quickly than holding the fire for a very extended period? I realize the modern chemical additives and (at least) every watch water tests keep the scale, etc. to a minimum. So, which is better -- cooling and manually cleaning the boilers every week, or using clean, treated water and keeping them fired for weeks or more, and keeping the whole package at temp?

Today's boilers, in most applications, are kept hot all the time. With the water treatment, there is no need to physically clean a boiler on a regular basis, and in most facilities, that would be out of the question. Factories, for instance, are usually 24/7. And, as you know, most of our favorite contemporary steamboats are kept hot during the operating season. It takes a long time to cool down a humongous boiler and then fire it back up and get it on line, and time is money. It is also inconvenient. They are like air in some situations, something you don't want to do without for long. We cool ours down every day, but it doesn't get that "cool" from one day to the next. Even without a fire for several hours, the water is hot enough to scald you. It is stressful to cool down and fire up frequently, but today's steel can handle it. If the water is really cold, you might want to take your time, getting everything hot gradually. We do hear popping sounds as the steel expands, but that is normal.

Every cooling and reheating cycle takes its toll because either way stresses are inflicted on the boiler. As in most engineering there is a choice: accept the stresses or run the greater risk of scale accumulation. Water treatment minimizes the scale, etc., but does not eliminate it. The rule is, as my mother often said when scrubbing my ears with a barbed wire wash cloth, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." Boilers absolutely must be kept clean.

Thank you, Captain! I had assumed there was some trade-off.

Alan is absolutely correct about the stresses of heating up and cooling down. In our industrial boiler we recovered some one third of the steam we produced in condensate...the rest had to be make-up. Make up was from well water (Southwestern Ohio Water Co) or city water. We did hot lime softening and got the feed to ~25 parts per million of hardness. We then put that across an ion exchange resin bed and got the feed to zero hardness...we got NO scale inside. We also used hydrazine as an oxygen scavenger (another great distructor of ferrous boiler tubes). We then ran continuously for 51 weeks with out any going off line or outage. We analyzed the water every two hours and adjusted the blow down (continuous at about 4%) Such ancillary equipment to do this would be very heavy and space-taking on any vessel I would hope that the DQ, having cross-compound/condensing engines, should get nearly all of her condensate back and need very little make-up. We had more trouble with laid-up boiler corrosion than with the big boiler that we ran all the time (500,000 lb/hr...62,500 gallons... of water turned to steam each hour...this was the capacity...we usually ran about one fourth lower than that...we burned some twenty tons of coal/ hour to do that). Lay-up can be done either "wet" or dry. If wet, the water quality had to be monitored and preferably kept heated to eliminate air (oxygen) or absolutely dry. We had trouble with corrosion in the superheater tubes due to water being trapped there. The BOL exhausts to the open air and I know that she recovers heat from the exhaust but don't know if she gets any condensate back...if so, it is small. The BOL water treatment would be primarily dispersants to keep the silt in the river water suspended and not plate-out on tubes and heating surfaces. I am embarrassed to say that I do not know if she uses river water or tanks up on city water before tripping. This might sound very sophisticated and learned, but it was all worked out by others years ago...my operators and engineers (21 of them spread around the clock and holidaze) just tried to keep her up and running...like most of the river engineers and firemen.

Thanks, Tom, Lexie & Alan. I guess the bottom line of the whole thing is this: Wonder what the situation was on the J.C.RAWN and SAM P. SUIT? Was it due to scaling buildup? Did either/both those boats use river water? (I am ashamed to say I do not have the towboat directory, only packets) Were the water tests and treatments as sophisticated as those in use now? Safety valves tampered with? With modern methods of water monitoring and modern boilers, is this sort of thing more than a slim possibility?

Tom,
The DQ runs a river water distiller 24/7 for feed water. She has steam atomizing burners. All that atomizing steam is lost up the stack. When everything else is tight, that amounts to about 8 - 10 tons a day. That varies with the firing rate.
Boiler water is tested daily. Hydrazine is continuously metered. Everything else is dosed daily.

Dennis

Ok, I've been reading this thread with great interest. In my business, I also specify boilers, not necessarily boilers to make power, but boilers to make heat. Now Bruno's rules number three and number one: "a Btu is a Btu" and "there is no such thing as a free lunch" and with that we'll try to provide a little bit of my side of the story.

I just finished the specifications for purchasing some rather large Watertube boilers, the biggest single boiler being 45,000,000 Btuh output, that being 1343 horsepower. The total combined output of the heating plant for this campus project is 195,000,000 btuh or 5820 horsepower between five watertube boilers. The boilers are operating at 240 degrees "medium" temperature hot water, firing natural gas with Number 2 fuel oil as back-up. The client originally wanted Number 6 fuel oil as back up but I talked him out of it. Point of reference, Number 6 is the same as Bunker C...

Now boilers can be cooled down and heated back up on a regular basis as long as a cold boiler is heated up to operating temperature slowly. In our business a boiler may be instructed to fire up from cold every day. Typically we will instruct the digital control system to fire the boiler with fuel input held at lowfire until the boiler approaches 10 to 20 degrees below it's operating temperature, before we release it to "automatic" operation. Depending on the whether the boiler burner is a fancy-schmancy one or a generic plain one, the instruction for low fire hold will be in the range of 1/10 to 1/6 of the maximum firing rate. Now all boiler styles and sizes have problems with metal expanding improperly (i.e. too fast=metal fatigue) but some style of boilers can cope better than others, a "watertube" style boiler can handle this rapid heating better than a "firetube" or a cast iron sectional. However if you are careful and heat a cold boiler slowly, any style boiler will give you decades, typically 40 to 50 years of service.

Now, if you physically put more heat into the water than can be taken away to do work, i.e. you're putting more energy into the water than can be carried away from the boiler, then you have a huge problem, and if the excess heat input to the boiler is not reduced the relief valve should pop open to release this excess heat, protecting the boiler from exploding. Think of a pressure cooker that has the vent at the top of the lid, and it lifts to release the pressure at just the right pressure, that's what a relief valve on a boiler does. The thoughts of physically jamming closed and making inoperative a relief valve is just scary, matter of fact, stupid scary. A boiler explosion is a very, VERY dynamic thing. Just think about the power behind 1343 horsepower all released within a millisecond...the word that comes to mind when a boiler lets loose violently is Chernoble...I guess they had to do what they had to do, and higher than design boiler pressures equated to more horsepower, more ommph...but Geeze louise, what a huge risk...

Others posting on this thread are correct, boiler water needs to be treated so that scale doesn't build up on the hottest parts of the boiler, especially if that boiler water is initially river water. That scale acts as an insulator and again if certain parts of the boiler can't absorb the heat from the burning fuel due to scaling than non-scaled areas will be required to accept even more heat than designed and the scaled piping will not allow water to take its heat away overheating the piping...both recipes for early wear and early boiler failure. Now in my business, our boiler systems are typically closed loop, i.e. all heating water is returned to the boiler, none is thrown away, and once the water is treated initially very little additional chemical treatment is required. Unfortunately, on a steamboat, you have all kinds of pesky things that need steam but once the steam is "used" it does not return back to the boilers to be reheated, such as the capstans, the calliope and in the case of the Belle of Louisville, the engines. The "chuff-chuff" of the B of L 'scape pipes sounds lovely indeed as that used steam is released to the sky, but to a boiler guy all it spells is even more river water that is needed to be fed to the boilers, with subsequently even more chemical treatment and the classic engineer's nervous worry.

If my memory serves and please correct me if I'm wrong, The DQ's and B of L's boilers are watertube boilers, while the Natchez are firetubes, previously enjoyed Cleaver Brooks, correct?

Ok, I just read Chief's post...I guess I completely forgot about the atomization required and never realized it required that much water...wow!
With our boilers we use compressed air when running on oil, I guess that wouldn't do too well with that sludge the DQ uses as fuel...Does the AQ use compressed air?

The Belle of Louisville has a battery of three fire-tube boilers with 13 5" flues in each boiler. The feedwater is chemically treated to keep down the formation of scale and the boilers are periodically blown down to get rid of potential scale. There is no condenser. It has a closed feedwater heater and the delivery from the heater to the boilers is through the exhaust line to pick up more heat. Snowden heaters are in each boiler.

A Snowden heater is a feed pipe that goes horizontally through the boiler in the steam space, turns down into the water, then turns toward the mud drum inlet to establish a current toward it. The end of the pipe is open - no screens, etc. Traveling all this distance inside the feedwater heater, the exhaust line and the Snowden heater delivers boiler feed at very close to boiler temperature and reduces shock.

You are dead right about the chuff, chuff.

You are also dead right about jamming safety valves - it was stupid. The only thing that saved the people was that the engines were using steam as fast as the boiler could make it. Any sudden change in feedwater rate or consumption could lead to an explosion. The engineers were aware of the risk, but when power was needed, by golly it was needed! Before removing the post they would reduce the fire and increase the injection of feedwater to calm things down.

All make-up water on the Belle of Louisville comes from the river. The chemicals entrained in it are tested at every watch and the results are recorded in the log.

Thanks, Dennis. I did not think of atomizing steam. We used it too when burning oil, but you can imagine how eager we were to do that with oil back then costing some $28,000 per day over the cost of coal. I have no idea what the difference might be now. Ours was initially Bunker C (No. 6); more recently No.4 to get lower sulfur for the feds. Of course we did not use atomizing steam with pulverized coal...something seldom, and I think mebbe never, used on the river. This was low sulfur Eastern Kentucky coal in stoker size...pulverized on site. I would guess that the DQs still is run by steam and condensed by the in-coming river water?? Is it a pan still to ease cleaning out silt?

Bob: I don't know what might have been the cause of the RAWN & SUIT explosions, but I do know that a fire tube boiler is a lot more dangerous than a water tube boiler in the event of a rupture. Water tube boilers do not have the gross amount of hot water available in a vessel to flash into steam in a nano-second. Over twenty years, we experienced several ruptures in our water-tube boiler. If you were standing in our boiler house, the chances were that you would never know it was ruptured until you saw the engineer running. Sometimes we could bring up another boiler in time to catch the load before shutting down to repair it. Of the 25,000 gallons of water in the boiler, most of it was in miles of tubing...any rupture was limited to the size of the tube...about three inches. The steam and mud drums were made of really thick steel...and modern metals are much more uniform in quality than years ago. Our tubes were common A-36. I suspect that a good deal of the trouble on the river was the life style. I have read with great interest the narration of at least one steamboat man in reference to beating a rival boat to a lock...which might translate into more money for the company/and or more time at home for the fireman. I do know...and witnessed as an environmental manager for a large company...what a culture shock OSHA had on safety and EPA had on disposal methods. It was my job to make these things happen in the maintenance dept (over 400 strong) and the production depts (over 200). I am reminded of a story told by old Frank Broering concerning a fellow who owned a big dairy in Covington, Ky. Frank saw Frank T. coming out of the courthouse one day...his face red as fire. When asked what was the matter, he replied that he was fined ten dollars for a hunk of horse s*** in the milk no bigger than that (indicating the size of a walnut). And, no, that is not where Cap'n Walnut got his name! While this was MANY years ago, it illustrates that many things were commonly done back in the heyday of the steamboat, that scandalize us in retrospect. I suspect that a good deal of the nostalgia and romance associated with river transport was served up with a rasher of the stuff old Frank T. got fined ten dollars for back about 1910! I have read where steamboats did not commonly have ANY steam gauge until mid 1800s! Processed by today's standards, it was suicide...back then it was "business as usual".

There is no silt from the distilled water but there is a scum pan near the working water level in the steam drum.

The steamboat I had before the Graceful Ghost was condensing. I decided in the interest of simplicity to make the Ghost non-condensing. I also like the chuff-chuff sound and thought it would be more authentic to the old style steamboats that we were trying to re-create. I am glad we did it that way. Our small size and free fuel makes up for the ineffeciency. I'm really glad I don't have to fool with condensate pumps, hot wells, the cooling pipes and where on earth to put them, and last but not least, all that extra plumbing. We have to completely drain everything for winter so we have an empty boiler for three months. Our piping is especially designed to be drained easily. Again, I do not want to do any more plumbing than is necessary, and that includes replacing valves and pipes busted from freezing. An empty boiler is not a good thing, but that is the trade off for being lazy and not wanting to fool with pipe wrenches and cheater bars and/or trying to heat an open air boat.

What is hydrazine? We test for sulfites and have a conductivity meter. By the way, our blow down valve is piped in such a way that blow downs also act as a bow thruster when we turn around. The steam exits under water. There is a two way valve that can be turned for port or starboard thrusting.

Bow truster?!? We NEVER used to have a bow truster!

Using boiler blowdown as thrust? Quite slick, I'm very IMPRESSED! You guys get the covetted, official 'outa the box' award...plus the issue of returning passively Mother Nature's dirt back to Mother Nature, damn that's cool... Should I ask if the EPA has a problem with you discharging high temperature water into a natural body of water? For ten bucks I won't tell 'em... 🙂

Gotta get to Texas...