River World Field Trip, Alton, IL to Lake Charles, LA and back on a working towboat, 1956

April 13, Friday

At 2:15 this morning we quietly pulled up at Cities Service docks, after having parked our barges around in a bay of the Galoasieu River to await loading later on. After all our rush in charging down the Atchafalaya at break-neck speed of sixteen miles an hour, in which we had covered 120 miles in nine hours, we were too soon.  Our cargo was not ready and wouldn’t be for several days, until several tankers were filled.  So there we were at daybreak, tied up at the usual place at the end of the docks, with the rumbling of the refinery close by, and tugs corning and going alongside us, while the GANTIGNY tanker sank deeper and deeper into the river. Laughing gulls dashed about, cackling. I fed them remains of the breakfast biscuits which they scooped up from the water, while the fish crows hopped about on the rip-rap rocks and complained in thin voices how they couldn’t possibly get out to pick up the provender — and my aim didn’t reach to where they were.

After breakfast the boys let down the motor boat (yawl, rather) and attached the new outboard motor, of which they are very proud, and Captain Griffin took Mrs. Todd and me out to see the burned SALEM MARINE, the tanker which exploded and burned, with a loss of twenty-two lives last January 17 at the Cities Service docks. The docks have been pretty well rebuilt, but the tanker is an awful sight. It is being worked on, however, so that it can be towed around to Wilmington, Delaware for rebuilding.  Before we departed, an emissary from Cities Service came aboard, seeking me out to find out if I really had arrived, and if ten o’clock would be quite, quite satisfactory for my tour of the refinery. This was quite, quite all right with me. When we came back from the trip to see the burned tanker, I changed out of slacks and put on my best grey suit and white blouse, because although I had had my wonderments about just what a lady wore to a refinery, a good squint through the fence assured me that everything was most wonderfully clean, and a suit would be correct. Thank goodness I had that much sense.

At ten sharp Mr. George Keller, coordinator at Cities Service, called for me, and with the goodbyes of my men and their rather wistful wavings, I was helped solicitously ashore and taken through the Marine Gate. Here we were stopped, politely but firmly by the guard — likely the one who stopped my picture-taking last trip, It seemed that there was a rule which forbids any employee of the refinery to take a woman off a tugboat and take her through the Marine Gate … even though the employee was one of the higher-ups and the woman was a guest! Anyway, Mr. K. was firm, and we were inside, though he called the superintendent a little while later to explain and they had a good laugh. Poor guard, though, was only doing his duty.

The refinery grounds were more like those of a college campus than what one usually associates with “dirty black crude oil”. There was no sign of oil, no dirt, no litter. All was extremely clean and beautifully landscaped.  Grass was thick and green; there were azalea bushes the first magnolias in bloom   (a stiff fine for picking a Cities Service magnolia), bottlebrush, palms, tall, long-leaf pines, gums, willow oaks, live oaks, water oaks, with mockingbirds singing wildly over all.  Where there wasn’t grass, there was dazzling-white oyster-shell paving, from which rose the beautiful functional architecture of the refinery, shining white and silver and black and russet against the brilliant blue of the Louisiana sky, and accented by the flaring orange flames of the pilot fires at the tops of the tall chimneys.

At the office we picked up Edward Vorman, a young chemical engineer with a horribly technical education, who tried to break it down to understandable terms for me, and did pretty well most of the time. I learned that the refinery processes 175,000 barrels of crude oil each day, which comes by pipeline from a mass grouping of wells in Kansas and Oklahoma. Oil is fed into one tank station, where nine reservoirs hold crude to be pumped to the refinery. One hundred tank stations feed in to Sour Lake, Texas, for storage of crude – – a million barrels at a time. From here it is piped to the refinery, at least 90%, the remainder by barge.

My main purpose at the refinery was to find out what happens from the time the crude oil comes in until it is pumped into tankers and barges. Since storage space is limited to 175,000 barrels a day which must be pumped out to make room for more each day.

Crude is piped first to the topping unit, which is the fractionating tower. The big pipes carrying the crude run through big rectangular furnaces burning gas to a heat of 675 degrees. Vaporizing the crude sends the vapor up the cylindrical topping tower. The volatile gas is lightest and goes to the top, and is piped off. Cooling at 200 degrees is gasoline, at 350 degrees, kerosene, at 500 degrees, gas oil, 600, 700 degrees, the reduced crude which is at the bottom.

Kerosene has a bad smell until piped over to the plant which deodorizes it with sulphuric acid.

Gasoline vapor is heated in the cat cracker (cost 8 ½ million for the three, each handling 40,000 barrels of gasoline a day). Catalytic powder, alumina, fine as face powder, is shot into the oil, cracks each one, powder drops down, and the high octane gasoline is piped out.