ML20133C641
| ML20133C641 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Catawba, 05000000 |
| Issue date: | 11/16/1983 |
| From: | Mcafee W DUKE POWER CO. |
| To: | |
| Shared Package | |
| ML20132B649 | List:
|
| References | |
| FOIA-84-722 NUDOCS 8507200544 | |
| Download: ML20133C641 (16) | |
Text
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Af f idavit. Een.v.: Af et AFFIDAVIT
-s My name is William Ronald McAfee.'
I am making this state-ment of my own free will to Emily Ansell, who has identified herself as an in'vestigator for the Government Accountability Project.
I am. speaking without threat or promise of naterial benefit.
My reason for making this statement is to expkess my continuing deep concerns over the quality of construction at the Catawba Nuclear Power Station being built in Clover, South Carolina and its ability 1to operate safely and without harm to public health.
I was employed by Duke Power Company (DPC or Duke) at the Catawba plant from March 1977 to March 1979.
I quit ny jcb there as Electrical Quality Control (OC) Inspector in mid-March 1979 because I got fed up with DPC's deliberate efforts to force me to do my job improperly.
Prior to working for Duke I was a substitute teacher for the York School District Number One in, York, S.C.,
teaching grades nine through twelve.
Before that, I was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, frca 1975 te Decerisr 1976.
Prior tc that,.
in 1975 I received a BA degree in Biblical Literature and Language frc= Gardner-Webb Colleg,e in Boiling Springs, Nortn Carolina.
I held several jobs with Duke at 4he Catawba plant.
From March 1977 to approximately December' 1977 I was.a concrete pourer; from December 1977-to about March 1978 I was a concrete prepour runner, helping to coordinate the pouring of concrete by dealing with the paperwork; from March 1978 to about May cr June 1978 I was secretary of the Utility Department office.
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May or June 1978 I was promoted to Electrical Quality control Inspector, where I remained for -nine months until I quit in mid-March 1979.
The reason I wanted to be a Quality control Inspecter was that in the approximately fif teen months.that I had been working in' the Utility Department I had seen that many things were not done the right way.
However, during the course of my QC Inspector job I found out that this was not the case.
I observed severe deficiencies in the way the OC program cperated.
That is, I ob-served prcblems regarding Design Control, conflicting policies regarding Non-conforming Item Reports (NCI 's ), and a general QC/0A breakdown, as illustrated below.
Before I was actually certified to inspect work on y own I had about four or four and a half months of on-the-job training, frc= abcut July 1978 to about Novenber 1978.
I received three er four half days of classroom instruction in wh,ich we went through inspecticn precedures and were instructed as Ec the specific points we had c verify in order to approve the particular item we were inspecting.
We were given a list of different procedures for fifferenu items we inspected and we were tcld that that list was to be cur "3ible" for performing inspec'tions.
Also, I learned what I was supposed to do by accompanying various inspecters and watching them do their jobs.
Electrical OC Inspectors were responsible for inspecting cable tray hangers, cable tray supports, cable trays, and cable e
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pulls in certain areas of the plant, notably the Reactor Building One Pipechase and several areas of the Auxiliary Building.
During my training time we had to verify work so that the work could proceed, for example be painted, but we did not.have to sign off on anything -- nothing had to be documented, If we' found that some item of work, for example anchor bolts on a uni-strut in the Auxiliary Building, was not done right -- if it was not done according to blueprint -- we went to the craft supervisor and told him about it, that the bolts were not right or they were in'the wrong place, and told him to fix it.
Generally, craf t would fix it; sometimes we had to go back a second time and tell them again.
But these errors were not documented.
During my QC training period, from about July 1978 to about November 1978, I did not see anyone documenting inspections of unistrut installations, in the sense that no one hung inspection tags on them or signed off on them It was my unferstanding that this was just the way the system was set up.
Although we had specific procedures to follow fcr each inspecticn we did, to my knowledge those procedures did not have a form fcr documenting the results of the insp'ections.
If there were fcrms, we were
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not using them at the time.
The one'eicep; ion to this was for cable pulling verification; we did sign off en those inspections.
If we found 'a construction deficiency during our initial inspection, there were several ways available to document it.
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We could write an R-2A Variation Notice, an M40-C (a minor defic-iency report), or a 0-1A Non-conforming Item Report (NCI).
- However, the decision as to which of these we would use -- or if we would document a deficiency at all -- depended upon the then prevailing policy of any of our supervisors in QC - whomever had the "last word" at the time.- Those supervisers were:
Larry Davison, head of QC; Tommy Barron, Mechanical OC Engineer; Dick Hannay, my im-mediate supervisor; Jim Allgood, QC Electrical Engineer.
To my understanding, based on my experiences in QC, there really was no clear policy as to which form, if any, we were to use in any given in stance.
It seemed like the supervisors were always changing their minds as f ar as how they wanted to document deficiencies or if.they wanted to document them at all.
At one point, for one day only, in December or January 1979 (on the day of Tommy Barron's lecture', discussed below), I thought I had a real clear understanding of when we were supposed to use the.NCI form and when we were to usk the M4 0-C, although I never was civen a clear understanding of shen tc use the Variation Notice.
But since Duke 's policies on documentation arbitrarily changed frc day to day, the clear understanding I thought I had one day did not hold.true for the next day.
Fe,r example, on one occasien in January or February 1979 we - my partner Johnny Eyers and I -
were called to inspect twenty-seven cable tray hangers.
We found that seven of them were not installed acccrding to print; the most common error being seismic bracing running in the wrong direc-o
c tion or missing entirely.
The very day before, Tommy Barron lectured us (all the OC Inspectors) on how to use the NCI report and told us to use that form to report deficiencies.
So, in this
. instance we told our supervisor, Dick Hannay, about the seven errors and told h'im we intended to document the problems on NCZ's as we had been instructed.
However, we were told in no uncertain terms by either Jim Allgood or Dick Hannay or both not to use the NCI's; in other words, now we were being told not to do the job in the way that Tommy Barron had told us to the day before.
Instead, Dick Ha,nnay talked to Cecil Cox, the steelrigging foreman,and the next day Cox or his crew corrected errors en the spot.
Dick Hannay sas alarmed that.there were seven hangers that we could NC1 but he did not want us to write that many NCI's because it would not look good for him or the steel people.
He was concerned because Larry Davison disapproved of writing a lot of NCI's.
A1.1 of us knew from experience that Davison's ' attitude re-garding NCI's was that he sas generally against writing them.
, My understanding frem Tommy Barron's lecture as to why we were given this lecture was that Duke 's attitude or the attitude of OC was that we had not been. documenting deficiencies well enough in the past and that the documentaticn was nc: as goed as it should be.
Sarron stressed better documentation.
However, it was made clear to
'us that the main reasen,.if not the onby reascn, for documentation was for the benefit of the NRC, not fer Duke.
We were told, though, that the only time we could use an NCI was when we found a deficiency during a preplanned inspection.
In other words, we could not red-tag a deficient item unless we were called by craft to inspect.
6-Instead, he encouraged us to get the deficiency resolved without documentation.
Davison reserved writing NCI's usually for very serious deficiencies; i.e.,
only.if the deficiency could not be remedied quickly, quietly, and easily would he not.usually override
- the NCI documenting it, if written.
So far as I know, no documen-l tation of the seven cable hanger errors exists to show they were initially installed improperly because neither my partner, Johnny Eyers,'ncr I wrote them up and I feel sure that no one else did because that was our area of responsibility.
To my knowledge, the prevailing attitude was that if the NRC did not recuire it, we would not have to document deficiencies.
It was our feeling that Duke's attitude was that if Duke could get j
away with it they would just as soon not document the proglems.
Ei-her Jim Allgood or Dick Hannay told us, the QC Inspectors, that every time we wrote an NCI that meant at least $700.00 in expense for Duke -- in paperwork shuf fling and people's time.
Thepolicyofpreplannedinshectionswd(veryclear.
We had l
te have permission from craft supeivisien to inspect their work before we had a right te non-conform something.
In fact, craft i
l get rather " bent out of shape" because sene of us were inspecting before they1 called for us and we we're #infing things wfong.
Our i.,
QC supervisors came down on us and told us not to inspect anything l
until we were called by craft to do so.
This, of course, presented problems when on a few occasions we were just walking through the plant anf spotted construction deficiencies.
For example, in Unit 2 Auxiliary Building 560 eleva-tion we found cable tray hangers which were not seismically braced
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according to the blueprint.
They alrea'dy had an inspection tag hanging.on them from another inspector (Bill Heffner) who had inspected and approved them as being done according to print.
We just happened to notice that they were wrong; there were two hangers and one was physically in the way of where a cable tray *,was sup-posed to run.
We told the approving inspector about it and he promptly removed the approval tag.
As I recollect, he told the foreman it would have to-be put in the prcper place.
To my knowledge, this deficiency was not documented, although I believe an NCI could' haye been written up.
Because of'the contradictory policy en writing NCI's, I believe that if I had tried to write an NCI chances were good that I would have been stopped.
This problem of having to fight for NCI's was very discouraging; af ter a vihile we just stopped writing them.
There is yet another example of this situation.
This one took place in the cable rocm directly below the centrol rocm for Units 1 and 2.
We were inspecting the grid system that supports the cable tray under the cable room and we were finding a let of deficient work -- work that was nowhere near being right; basically unistrut and cable tray hangers put in the wrcng.p' aces.
Echby Land, electricians' foremad, had called us to inspect,,
meaning that the work should have been completed properly.
Land told us to mark whatever we found that was wrcng (we tied yellow ribbon tc these items).
We found literally dczens of prcblems; Ms/ 79
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the cable tray room was filled with yellow ribbons and when Land and one of his over-superintendants, Max Davis, came in and saw it they both.got very upset.
A11 their mistakes were marked by yellow ribbons for everyone to see.
They promptly' fixed the errors'.
a'nd removed the ribbons.
No documentation of these mistakes or the corrections was made.
As far as OA documentation is concerned it would appear that the work was done right initially.
Sometimes, the work was not done right the second time either, still it would not be documented as a problem.
In general, we were encouraged by our supervisors not to write NCI's; we were told to tell the craft supervisor about the problem and see if we could get him to fix it -- without docamenting it.
To my knowledge, most of the Electrical 00 Inspector ( handled discrepancies in this way.
This was exactly the opposite of what was written in our procedures " Bible. "
There were also problems with Design Centrol.
That is, blueprints were changed to reflect construct,iEh errors.
The result of this is that the prints reflect the "a s-bu ilt " conditien of_the plant instead of the plant "as-built" reflecting the blue-print.
In other words, ccnstruction errors that were not physically corrected were " corrected" by revising the prints.
Construction errors were reflected in revised blueprints to appear as approved
" design changes" made prior to construction, nct af ter the f act to cover up the errors - the nonconforming items.
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i To my understanding, the correct and most efficient procedure to follow when we found a nonconforming item that could not be fixed easily by craft was to write an NCI to document the problem and let Design Engineering and Technical Support handle the decision.
But, the conmon practice was that NCI's would not be written.
Design Engineering would write up a Design Change and revise the print without an NCI documenting the mistake.
'So, there would be no evidence that a mistake had been made at all.
It would appear that the mistake was, in fact, not a mistake but proper according to,the revised print.
In some instances Variation Notices (R-2's) were written and were reflected in the print, but this would not necessarily indi'cate a construction error -- just a variation.
In other instances, the deficiency was merely noted but not docu-mented in any formal way and the print was revised to accommodate the error.
The most typical example, in my experience, of prints being changed without NCI documentation happened in the Reactor Building Sur.ber one Pipechase.
The prints called fer all cable tray hangers in this area to be seismically braced acccrding to a specific cen-figuration and a specific direction according to degrees.
What I
- n a let cf cases (involving i
fcund, during my inspections, was that Cecil Ccx's crew) the seismic bracing was inconsistent with the blueprints -- it'was installed in the opposite direction or perhaps ninety degrees of f from the direction called for by the prints.
We told Technical Support about the problem (and were told later that a gn
,4 10 they contacted Design Engineering).
In most of these cases, Design Engineering changed the prints to reflect the bracing as installed, although no NCI's were written documenting the errors.
Since our inspections were done by comparing the work to the print,- when we we're given this new print -- the one revised to reflect the construction foul-up -
we had no choice but to inspect by this print.
Therefore, we were now approving undocu-nented construction errors that had been legitimized by a revised print.
Another example of this situation occurred in the Auxiliary Euilding.
Again, the seismic bracing on hangers I inspected was run in the wrong direction from what the print called for.
- Here, too, the print was revised to reflect Obat as-built condiIion without NCI's being written up.
.i While we thought it was a very serious natter, the OC Inspectors i
had a running joke that Duke will build the pl, ant and then draw the blueprint's to reflect how it was built.
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Chere were numerous incidents in the Cable Rocr also where, although we found construction errcrs -- items installed in the wrong place, seismic bracing again -instplied in the wrong direction
-- no ECI's were written, there was no official documentation and yet the prints were revised to " correct" the construction fcul-ups.
All in all, I would say that prints 'were revised in this way
-- without writing NCI's -- in approximately 25% cf the cases where I found construction errors.
In addition to these pro.blems, ther'e were others that I J7d(19i
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encountered before I became a QC Inspector -- ones that add to l
l the contention of an overall QA breakdown.
For instance, in early 1978 when I was 'a prepour' runner, I witnessed concrete for the containment in~ Reactor Building Number One being poured in'very heavy rain.
There were several inches of water standin't on top of the concrete that had been poured into the forms.
I saw no rain protection and no pump to remove the water from the concrete.
More concrete was being poured directly on top of the water and concrete already in the form.
(I was troubled by this because I know that if you get too much water in the concrete it jeopardizes the integrity of the concrete -- it won' t hold up.
I know this because when I worked on the utility crew I worked with concrete at the point where inspections were made on it and learned from the concrete inspectors what they check for.)
Even though test cylinders were made of the concrete that -
was being poured, these cylinders did not reflect the actual condition of the concrete being used in Beactor Building Number One.
This was se because the test cylinders were protected frcm the rain, whereas the concrete actually poured in the forms for the reactor wall was net protected.
The cy'linders would he' tested
.t for a deficiency cud unless they showed one, the concrete that had actually been poured would not be tested.
So,'in this case, there really were no test cylinders accurately duplicating the concrete used in pour for the section of the. Reactor Buildinn wall I witnessed.
In another instance, I witnessed the waiver of QA requirements.
Initially, QA was keeping construction from pouring concrete, due to some technical reason of which I was-not aware.
This took place
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.J in either the Auxiliary Building or Reactor Building Number One.
The pour was held up for several hours and then OA said they t
would waive the. requirements and' construction went ahead with the pour.
More examples of this QA breakdown occurred while I was an Electrical OC inspector.
In one instance, when I was in the Reactor Control Room I saw water dripping from the ceiling onto and into the control boards.
The boards, which were getting soaking wet, were replete with dials, wiring, and other equipment.
As,far as I know, this was going on for several hours.
We, my partner Johnny Byers and I, informed the control board inspector, Terry Coleman, of the situation.
He looked at it and promptly
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wrote an NCI and red-tagged the area.
The cause of the leak, as I understood it, was that the concrete on top of the control room had net been sealed and because there had been a lot of rain, water cellected on top of the concrete roof and seeped through to the control room.
The NCI was resolved by placing space heaters in the area cf the control beards and also by using hairdryer-type instruments to dry out some of the wire ends.
So f ar as I saw, there was no effort made to protect the. centrol boards frcm the pouring water up until they pumped the.twater of f the roof.
On another occas. ion, when I was inspecting cable pulls I observed improper storage of electrical cables.
As inspector, one of' my duties was to verify that when cable was pulled the 4
excess wire was hung up out of the way so as to protect it from being walk'ed on or from lying in water, if any was on the floor.
If it was not protected in this way I could not sign :the cable of f i
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's as being pulled correctly.
But, once we signed off on it and lef t the area there was no telling what might happen to that cable; a walk board might be placed on it, subjecting it to great stress,
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or it might be cut down and lef t on the floor.
When we found cable ends that were not properly protected we informed the craf t foreman and he usually corrected it.
We never documented the incidents.
We did not write up NCI's because, again, we were discouraged from doing so and especially because we knew that Larry Davisen and Jim Allgood considered unprotected cable ends a*=inor thing and something we should resolve without the expense and paperwork of an NCI.
Still another common problem was low morale and discontent, stemming from a great deal of company pressure put on ersit to meet -
construction schedules.
The result that I saw come out of this was craft and OC being pitted against each other.
When I was pre-pour runner I saw a great deal of tressure put on the Welding Inspecters by the general foreman.
The prevalent attitude among the forenen seemed to be that they did not really care whether the weld get inspected; it was going to be covered up in concrete, nobody would ever see l't or know the dif ference as tc whether it
.t was ccrrect or not.
All the forenen were interested in was havihg the weld signed of f so that they co'uld get on with pouring cencrete to meet their work schedule.
As a QC Inspector I felt pressure net only from my supervisers but also from craft not to document construction errors.
Craft did not want us to write up NCI's because it made them look bad; QC supervision did not want NCI's written because it would show JD sf19
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t that there were lots of construction error problens.
Once the errors were documented they became a permanent record and could not be swept under the rug or altered, t
In addition to all these problems was the problem of defective
' scaffolding; i.e. shaky scaffolding that we had to use in the Auxiliary Buil' ding on, I believe, 522 and 540 elevations.
During the course of my job as QC Inspector it was, at times, necessary for me to be ten, fifteen, or twenty feet up on a scaffold in order to check the torque of a nut or bolt -- taking measurements to a fraction of an inch -- cr to check for a vis-o.k. on a weld and the inspector's initials.
When my feet and the scaffold I was on were swinging under me my ability to do my work was severely impaired.
I would not sign off on the work I was inspecting unless I could see it clearly enough to know whether it was done properly or not.
If I could not see it accurately I would get a ladder, shcre up the scaffold, or de whate,ver I had to do to verify the item.
I would not just euess that the work Vas done properly.
While I can vouch for what - did in these situations, I cannot say that everyone else did the same.
All in all, it seems to me, from.my work experience at Cata ba
-- fif teen ' months as a craf t worke$ anE nine months as a OC Inspector -- and as the above examples illustrate, that there was a pattern of systematic deficiencies at Catawba.
As my awareness about the lax way in which the plant was i
'being built heightened, my growing concerns ever the safety of the plani deepened.
I found it more and more difficult to go along with the haphazard wfy 'in which Duke was building Catawba in V.C @
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e i general, and the f act that the OA/QC program was not fulfilling its purpose in particular.
Finally, in March 1979 : reached the point where my ' conscience would not allow me to be associated with the Catawba project anymore.
On March 15, 1979 I told my' super-visor, Dick Hannay, that March 16, 1979 would be my la'st day on the job.
Mr. Hannay was not surprised at all because he knew how I felt.
My' decision to leave was purely a decision of conscience.
Although I discussed my concerns with Dick Hannay and others at the plant I did not contact the NRC.
In general, I felt that it was a waste of time to talk to the NRC; that the NRC was not going to do anything about my concerns except " whitewash" them.
Sased on how I had seen the NRC operate at Catawba, particu-larly after I became certified as a OC Inspector in 19792. my opinion was that they were basically a rubber stamp for the industry.
That is, the NRC was at Catawba just to make sure the paperwork looked good, but not to ensure that the plant was built to meet quality standards.
One example of this cccurred in the winter cf 19 79 when a visiting NRC inspector came en-site.
I saw him in the QC shack where he inspected mainly blueprints and some cther paperwork.
.t did not see him out in the field inspecting work.
This inspecttr visited my group - Electrical OC Inspecters - twice that I know of.
On neither of those occasions did I see him dealing with my group out in the field.
He just stayed in the OC shack inspectin9 nothing more than paperwerk.
During the entire two years that I worked at Catawba I saw an NRC inspecter walking around out in the field only about ten times.
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Because I felt the NRC was simply " going through the motions" of inspecting at Catawba, I had no confidence that they would seriously investigate my concerns.
The only contact I have had with the NRC was: (1) when I
.made a limited appearance at ASLB hearings in Charlotte, NC in early July of.1979 in connection with the issue of Occonee-McGuire transs,hipment of spent fuel; and (2) when of the NRC called me in the fall of 1982.
That was my last contact with the NRC until now.
In or about July 19'81, two and one-half years af ter I quit my job with DPC, I joined the Palmetto Alliance.
(This was about the time it became an intervenor in the Catawba licensing pro-deedings.)
I became a member because I shared the Alliance's concerns about the dangers of nuclear technology, in general and the unsafe construction of Catawba, in particular.
Since I knew that Catawba was being built not in accordance with ' safe construc-the methods used ',did net assure the tion procedures, i.e.
that quality and safety of the plant, I felt that the plant wculd be a public health and safety hazard and should not ce licensed because of the way it is being bui1t.
I felt that by working with and through Palmetto Alliance we ceuld shew the icensing Scard
.t how severe and widespread the safety problems at the plant really are.
WILLIAM ROSALD MC AFEE Signed and sworn to before me this day of November, 1979.
NOTARY
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