ML20133C645

Affidavit of Hs Nunn Re Quality of Const at Plant

ML20133C645
Person / Time
Site:	Catawba, 05000000
Issue date:	11/16/1983
From:	Nunn H DUKE POWER CO.
To:
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References
FOIA-84-722 NUDOCS 8507200545
Download: ML20133C645 (46)

Text

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Co m oeo w t AFFIDAVIT My name is Howard Sab.uel Nunn, Jr.

I am making this statement freely and without threat or promise of material reward to Billie Garde and Emily Ansell, who have identified themselves to me, respectively, as Director of the Citizens Cls.nic and investigator

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and to Phil %ttligc. k !J L Me L

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with the Government Accountability Project, who has identified himself to me as assisting the Government.

W 5'T Accountability Proj ect..w-i,.h 'thi; intcr.icu.

$\\y I' am making this statement because I am concerned about the quality of the Catawba Nuclear Power Station being built in Clever,

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South Carolina.

I believe that as a result of my being a censcien-tious e. ployee at the plant Duke Power Company (DPC or Duke) waged a campaign to get rid of me.

This campaign negatively af f ected my cconomic future, my health and wellbeing, and my family relation-chips.

In 1961 I graduated f rom Hanes High School in Winston-Salem, Scrth Carolina.

After that, I attended college for one year.

In addition to this, in the spring of 197E.I received certificatien and Robertson Testing Laboratory cs a welder frc= the Freehline p

ony'cedbon 54u \\ usmq phk. c< P P coq den. in This certified me to dog -i f;: ' :c-r h, pit:

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I worked as a welder for Duke Power Ccmpany at the Catawba plant from November 19E0 until October 2C, $983, when I was fired fer, I believe, being a conscientious e=ployee who raised ccacerns over the quality of the plant.

Prior to my job at Catawba I worked fer Duke from September 1978 to Never.ber 1980, as a welder at their

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... McGuire Nuclear Plant on Lake Norman.in North Carolina.

Be fere that, from 197& to September 1976;I worked as a welder, doing bridge and highway work, for Crowder Construction in Charlotte, N.C.

At Crowder I worked mysqlf up to a position of responsibility, where I was frequently called upon to be a troubleshooter.

Although I had to d'o a lot of travelling for the company,. I enjoyed my work and the trust they had,in me.

From 1974-1976 I worked for the Blythe Bros., construction centractors, Charlotte, North Carolina, as a field service welder doing bridge work and highway work.

Bef ore thac, f rem s u=ne r 19 7 3 Ali 6S$sk,\\4D to about January 17-~,

I was a welder with Dresser Engineering in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I also worked as a barge welder, for about one year - from 1972 to 1973, for Paducah Marine Ways in Paducah, Kentucky.

Before becoming a welder I played saxaphene in a ' band that travelled throughout the United States.

This was during the period of 1965 to March 1972.

In early 1973 ny f ather had a stroke and I decided to leave my band and return hc='e.

For a short time between welding $chs, I went back to playing with the band, apprcximately between March 1973 and August 1973.

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7 I was hired by Duke in September 197E.

I.- crder fer ne to be a welder at McGuire I had to pass a ceriificatien test, the

rrt procedure'",which I passed the first time I took it.

I was there-af ter a low paid welder, working in the Auxiliary Building at the 750 elevation.

My job duties included helping CIG welders by fin'ishing up their welds with stick rod.

On my own time, I i

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'pradtic~e[d[dgiWId4ork.

At the end of my first 90 days at McGu' ire my foreman,-C. E. Allison, told me that I was 'an excep tional welder.

Af ter seven months I became a middle-pay welder, and another seven months later I became, a top-pay welder.

k* nile at Duke I became certified in numerous welding procedures, c11 of which added to my qualifications.as a welder.

Af ter a year of welding on hangers and some piping in the Auxiliary ' Building at McGuire I was very satisfied with my job.

My foreman, C. E. Allison, was also well satisfied with me.

In fact, Mr. Allison becan to count on three of us in our crew to werk over-Som: Mk 6 Ad.Y U

w. of (de overtime p" Junior" Johnson,andme.

time:

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work and weekend work was high ricrity safety work.

For example,

% mp6eir_sa there were recessed areasA n the floors that contained enormous i

amounts of piping which required that the welding work be done in close cuarters and in extremely difficult positions.

This work was often done on weckends by the three of us because of its difficulty, e.u.m mar M c's D In about A ;;ric-r 1980 Duke began to ask for volunteers to go m d - W i.w M to Catawba.

In-int C r.:.i-c ;n;--ly November 1950 I transf erred

.te Catawha, but I was sad to leave Mc Guire.

At McGuire, I had a tremendcus foreman, with whom I had a good werking relationship; I had a good reputation there; also, I had heard a let of things about Catawha that I did not particularly like such as no adequate rest

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room facilities and no canteen to provide cdkes or cof fee.

I was oven more concerned about the comments I heard about the Catawba management.

Going to Catawba was considered by many workers as bei:ig ' sentenced to Siberia, but jobs were hard to find -- so I went.

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I had some exp2ctations of what my job was geing to be like at

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Cntawba.

The week before we were sup' posed to go doen there Bill Rogers, who was welding superintendent of Catawba, came to McGuire and was going to meet with the welders who were going down to l

Cotawba.

He was goin'g to tell us if.there was any difference be-tween the welding operation at McGuire and the one at Catawba and what we could anticipate.

If we could not' make that meeting we could send a designee to that meeting for us.

Unfortunately, my ox-wife had me in court on that day for increased child support.

I asked my f oreman to go to, that meeting for me.

He asked Bill Rogers if there were any openings in the pipe fabrication ("f ab")

chop.

secause I'm a large person it is hard for ne to get into come of the tight places that welders have to get into.

My foreman realized that I could do good x-ray quality work, and he thought it

. w;3d be advantageous to everybody if I was put in the pipe fab shop where I could be out in the open and get to the pieces I was work-ing en with relative ease.

I was able to do the good, high quality werk that was needed in that area.

Mr. Rogers promised my foreman that that was,hhere I would be pt: when I arrived at Catawba.

Naturally, when 'I went down to Catawba in November 1950, I had every expectation of being put to That cid not turn out to be the case, g werk in the pipe fab shop.

I was assigned to Larry Rudasill's crew (5chby Hoyle was s

.p Ins tead, ge the foreman when I arrived).

I knew that the pipe fab foreman was d he'

%'sce... Jones and I asked the woman in the office if there had been a mistake, but she told me there had been no mistake.

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,, Larry Rud2cill'c crew's primary worf, area was the refualing l

canal and the annulus in Reactor Building Number 2.

I was first

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cssigned to work in the bottom of the refuel'ing canal in close proximity to the reactor putting stainless steel liner plates onto the angle iron embedd' d in the ' concrete wall.

This was safety-e

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rolated work; all of the metals had to have non-destructive tests tri:/er(PT)done on them.

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I could not believe management's attitude toward workers at Cctawba.

Whereas at McGuire if there was a problem with a work ossignment you went to your foreman and talked about it, as reason-able people, at Catawba it was much different.

For example, because I was expecting the pipe f ab job and got a dif ferent assignment, I csked for a meeting to iscuss it.

About two weeks after I arrived Ac1\\e.

at Cat'awba Bobby *::yl, y foreman, Billy Smith, my general foreman, and I finally had the$ ~meeting I requested.

I just wanted to clear the air and find out why I was being placed where I was, rather than in the pipe fab shop.

Billy Smith commenced to tell me firs t of f "I would werk where I was assigned to work and if I didn't like that I could hit the road."

Eo pulled out my calendar from.v.cGuire and then said th'at had an cwful attendance record for the previous year, that I had been out 19 times.

I teld hir that was ridiculous, that there was no way I an He pointed to my,3 attendance on the calen There werd$qpic6medelp;,,,,y 19 times.

had been out c

y 12 Fridays that were marked that I was out.

I was dor.

esteunded by

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Smith's naivete.

Those days were "early cuts'"

It b

was normal policy that if a worker was going to work Saturday and[Cr 4'

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.. Suhday, hs could gat of f early on Friday, around 3:00 or 3: 30 to t

e,et his check cashed.

That way he was clear to co:e in on Saturday and Sunday $

That's what happen on a dozen of those nineteen The other absences p$. dmmci %is mped u cnr i en

,.m _J -- were obsences.

oither illness or cotirt dates resolving conflicts with my ex-wife.

I tried to explain that this was normal practice, called an "early out."*

My foreman at McGuire was told by the Duke personnel depart-ment that if a man,did 'not work a full day just to shade it in, light blue.

But it was not anything detrirnental to a worker, and l

in =y case he would find that I ha worked from eight to ten or (b

ooE cr twelve hours on the Saturdays l,+r,4 Supdays af ter the "early out."

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this@ % %.0 l

ith-Iil_.

I t old them about i

I attemeted to clarify dd och O \\L" coming to work on Saturdays sa4 Sundays and that I was one of three A

l people on my crew who did this.

I told them that if they did not believe me to just call my foreman at McGuire and he would ver_ify l

f that what I was saying was true.

Billy Smith responded by telling me that it was not the way they did things at Catawba; that any part of the day that you do not work goes against your record.

I l

ter,inated the meeting pretty quickly when I saw,that I was not sci.

to cet anywhere with them.

I went back to work in the ref ueling canal, for approximately three months :"Tigged"the plates or the containment wall.

Larry P.udasill took the crew over frog Sc':by Hoyle soon af ter I started.

He found out that I was efficient in naking repairs and'soon I was dcing nothing but making repairs.

i As soon as I became a repairman I identif'ied a serious problem l

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,' with laminated metal used for piping on the containment wa the Unit.2 Reactor. ' The containment wall is

, to the best of my knowledge, three-quarters of an inch thick and it runs the entire height of the building and across it.

It is put in in sections and solidly welded and installed.

All this work was done prior to my getting there.

These sections are formed together to make a big barrel; this is the containment.

There are holes cut at specific places and there are std:>s of pipe that are already welded in there.

These are vendor welds.

I was told that these' vere done by another company who supplied the steel.

It was to these that we welded bellows to allcw the wall to expand under pressure We had one weld on the second course.

It was on the N2 system.

I do not know how long it had been welded prior to my getting there, but it had x-rayed as a bad weld several times.

Shortly after my assignment there, a fitter was down there working with a torch He was cutting the bellows off the stub of pipe that came throuch the t

wall in order to do some repair.

I was aware at that time that they wanted to do something different than usual in fixing it

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The bellows had x-rayed as bad so many times that they decided I guess, to just cut it off the wall and try again.

I was doing repairs in the various parts of the annulus when they prepped the surface up again to put the bellows back on, This was en the NI system'and, to the best of my knowledge, it was 24-inch.* diameter pipe.

This was one of the first times I became aware of a lar.ination problem l

in the steel stubs of piping there.. 'I believe the weld was either t

2NI-16-2 or 2NI-16-22 F?. : :...., -

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p,0FT.tE W ' C p o I also noticed problems with. the stif feners on the wall.

I asked some of the people down there wh'y on these stif feners that went around the containment wall had places been ground out so deeply beside the welds or ground as if they were removing some cort of defect.

I was told that there were literally not inches but feet of lamination that had been found. in the metal itself.

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A lamination.i.+. an extremely dangerour; flaw.

It had been axplained to me, by several people more knowledgeable than I cri, how steel factories work; that in order to make sheet steel, molten metal goes through a press and is heated and pressurized, then it, is rolled through again.

Sometimes in the rolling process cone of this steel bunches up and it starts rolling back under and it actually does not fuse.

It is red hot but it does not fuse with the other steel.

So, there are layers of steel, like layers of formica.

The a: ea that is not fused together is called a lami-nation.

Several people down there told me that several places on contain.,ent wall had been ground and rewelded, and ground and the rewelded, in order to take care of la:r.ihations.

here was. a procedure that Duke Power had, ca' led CF-EE.

CP-

.ns d, W M \\tb R

E E :. ll:--c.d-dorkers to grind three-eights of an inch deep into a.

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lar.ination when it was found.

Once the welder achieved the croper r

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i-N could fill this back up wA itM r "M m.1 p

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it inscector.

Then he N $:

ci @r.;t.fc2 hen grind k be.ch :ff,A

.wy then an NDI te st w,--

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I became a little bit suspicious that perhaps this stub cf D

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c metal that had been vendor welded in, was 'perhaps j ust a rotten piece

-O%:SW of steel and had too many - 1 rinttion:&

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in it.

I asked some of the fellows who.had worked on that pipe before, and who had repaired it before, what type of. def cts had shown up and they had all been cimilar linear defects.h Cn t'. :

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-.2.w rtr'i;ht :nd it ::uld-hc - mil..c '.' cap MY To me that would

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f indi ca te, perhaps, a lamination.

s I did not believe that so many welders could have welded badly for that long.

So, rather than the normal magnetic particle test, I suggested to Mr. Rudasill that maybe we could get a penetrant dye test do.ne on it.

I knew that if it did not " shoot cood" the next time, the repair was going to come back on me since I was the re-pairman.

For the penetrant test the steel is cleaned off and dy.e put on for a certain amount of time.

Then it is cleaned of f again, th e dye sits, and then a develcper is put on it.

If there is the slight-cst crack, even a ten thousandth of an inch, it will start bleeding through and red lines will appear.

That will indicate that there is something wrcng with the metal.

Mr. Rudasill agreed that even though this was carbon steel, and magnetic tests were normally, done on carbon steel, perhaps the penetrant test would be the 'best way to go,on this pipe.

I was workinc down in about the same area when the PT tester, k M S) name d KeitPi, came down to do the penetrant test on this new surface.

It had been bevelled at a 37.5 degree angle and it looked good to the naked ey,.

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-u-both protested to Mr. Sullivan 'about this safety abuse. We cfallenged the Prartice independently and did not discuss this specific point with each other.

I first learned of Hoop's criticism cn this point when I read his

Septs-ber 23, 1983 interview.

On page eleven, Ecop is right that worke s thanked him at first for trying to straighten out the job. He is also right that scr:e workers u:ned on him when they thought his crit-i. - could get the jcb shut dcxc. In

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fact, I overheard one.or,.m worker telling arcther that if the job were shut 6r., Ecop would be "a chad scn-of-a-bitch."

Cn page twelve, Hoop described a transfer order supposedly written to protect.him from violence.

I can confirm the transfer, because maraga.ent care aro hd and told evervone. that Hoop had been sent to the cooling to.er. As rentioned before, we took this as a warning about our o,n jcbs. It is not accu ate that the transfer was to p ttect him, hcuever, it was just the coposite.

Managerent put Hoop in nore danger. You are a lot more vulnerable to having so ething drcpped on you in the cooling tcuer than where Ho::p was wrdr.ing in the auxiliary building. Tnere wasn't the spam in the auxiliary building for a big enox:h drop to kill him.

I overheard the 6sath t'.reat by irone.r..ers after Hocp had been tra.sferred.

On page fourteen, I can ocnfim that in the au>iliary building, retal eler:rical boxes were restin: on retal r '

-lectrycal cables were resting in water.

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I can cr.r. firm the state:nents on pace sixteen that rebar pipes and flanyas were laying on the ground instead of being preserly secured.

I can co. firm that the diesel gererator was fico63d.

It was disetssed areng the workers; we thou?.t that was a trajor event.

I also ca. confirm that at least the diesel generators in Unit I were not properly covered.

I kno.,

/$6f 79

tell me things like, "today we started out with 2 8 laminations and now we have cot it down'. to 25. "

s f' There was not a new NCI written for eve.m.y repair on that piece ichb:.d c% M\\tb of pipe A Although I was not [ure, I believe that the correct proh s

euhindem4 ion.

cedure was to have documents for every repair on a diffc r--t 21d.g\\g But the PT guy would just come back and check it.

If we had im-proved anything, fine; if not, we still had areas to continue to repair.

It took two, perhaps three weeks, to finally get that surface to where nothing bled through.

Although I am not a metallurgist, I wondered all the time how all this repair work resolved the prob-lem of the piece of pipe itself being bad.

Doing spot repairs by grinding 3/8ths of an inch deep and filling it up with metal and smoothing it back over does not eliminate the lamination in the pipe.

There is no way to know how far into the pipe the lamination Only ubsnce 4cdiq:can dektmine h4. M*i:s.&ip

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goes.

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Of course, this was supposed to be none of my concern; I was the worker and not it supervision.

Finally, sc=ebody got to weld the bellows back en.

Once again it shot bad.

There were approximately five bad indicaticns and they were linear type indications, as they had been before.

As I knew it would, the repairs finally dropped in ny lap.

I ns te a g f.~ ;..1.. ; T u r 11 t t i :pcxck cuccx s-

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ux c knc, en %c. se

.t pil:c-t c.g e th e r, I just opened up two -

enc,t<nFAssin the be. 6%\\ki long areas A The long'$

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areas.could be described as being clockwise from 12 o' clock down to almost 3 o' clock, and another area that pi$ked up a-4 o' clock and went en arcu.nd to about 7 o' clock.

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gin this area I took the arc air and very carefully cut the weld m2tal out.

Af ter I ground and buf fed these two areas, they looked like new joints to be welded.

I almost went all the way through the pipe (i.e. removed all old weld metal).

Then we called PT back and the laminations showed up again.

I was told by P.r.

Rudasill to take the F.-4A form for the repair "up the hill" for resolution.

We were going to use CP-88 again on it.

There were four people who had to sign off on any resolution.

One was quality control, one was quality assurance, one was techni-cal support; the final signature that had to go in a box on the p ' s VD v

for was from the ANI C. :r_r - " -1 r T r'i'"t--'

inspector.

I understand this man was from Aetna, the insurance company on Catawba.

It had been my experience that their word was law, and whatever they said was final.

The process of getting the signatures took me about half I day.

I finally got everybody 's signature that b as needed on the forn excect the ANI signature.

Then I went down to their office.

A Mr.

YbhO)

Cosgrove was there.

I had heard before 'ont on the, jcb site that he was the t6p ANI man, or the most knowled.gea'rle persen on the site.

I asked P.r. Cesgrove for his signature so I could proceed on repair-ing this weld that had shot bad again.

He wanted to know the de-tails behind it.

He asked me what CP-8 E, was.

I told him it is the

' procedure used to repair laminations in the containment wall.

He commented that this was not' dealing with the centainment wall, that it was dealing with a piece of pipe and with that pipe weld.

I con-firmed that but told him that.I had been told to use CF-88.

He got V5 4 79

his book of constructions procedures down and he looked up CP-EE.

He hit the ceiling.

He started pacing up and down the office and he caid he could not believe it.

He said he did not even know that a 4

I CP-8 8 existed.

He asked me if CP-88 had actually been used on the containment wall.

I told him that I had not seen it used myself, but I understood that was what the procedure was created for, to oliminate the laminations as' they showed up.

He told me that did not " eliminate a damn thing."

He said all that CP-88 did was to cover over something but that the problem was still there.

He told me that he was concerned that this procedure directly affected the saf*ety of the Catawba plant.

He told me to give him the paper-work.

So I turned the paperwork over to him.

He said that he was going to have to take the paperwork home with him to think on it, and he reiterated that as far as he was concerned it directly Ef fec-

.ted the safety of the plant.

He even said that he may have to " shut l

the place down. "

Then it was out of my hands.

I went back and reported to my foreman about what had happened

.but he did not seem too concerned with it.

He just told me to do two more repairs that had shot bad.

The word got out that Mr. Cosgrove was pretty mad, but I did not hear any m:re about the welding.

I went ahead and taped cver

.the two cuts that I had made with yellow ta[e and went on about my business making the next repairs as Mr. Rudas'ill had instructed me.

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In about two weeks' time the paperwork came back to Mr.

3 Rudasill and he turned it back over to me.

Fe started working on YWb

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_14_

s the weld again.

I am not sure whether we used another procedure, CP-123, o; CP-88 to do the repairs.

'CP-123. was of ten used to

" butter up" a " prep" surface to achieve proper gecmetry.

Rather than grind 3/8ths of an inch deep, I went ahead and really opened some nice grooves where these laminations had shown up.

I went about 3/4ths of an inch deep.

I wanted to make sure if there was anything there that I was going to try to 'get everything out that was bad.

As I always did, I would blend the ends and sides out so there would not be any abrupt starts or stops.

Once I gouged these places out and cleaned them up, I had an inspector look at them and okay me to continue to do the ' repair.

Through my extra effort the welds shot good the first time, at least in Onat weld area.

This really concerned me because the re-pairs still did not solve the problem of multiple laminations.

For example, although I did not see it firs th an d, I had seen these welds on the stiffeners.

The workers had taker. grinders and ground too much metal away from the weld.

There is not very much grinding involved when a good welder does a weld.

I worried then, and I worry tc this day about how much metal in that contaihment wall is lamina-ted and could perhaps somewhere along the way cause a safety problem.

If something blows in that plant and there is a little crack and the it cou15 cause a rip and tear that pressure starts. opening it up,

.t could possibly splinter the containment wall.

If the containment wall goes, I do not know how much radiatica eculd get out of it, and I do not know how many people could be hurt, but I do know I am con-cerned about i t.

4 V70/ 79

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~15-I was and still am convinced 'that the vendor who supplied the i

steel and, Duke fell down on their responsibil'ity to insure that the materials used in the construction of Catawba were of the quality needed to build e r as safe as possible nuclear f acility.

I often wonder if the department that was supposed to inspect materials received on the site actually checked out the reactor containment plates.

On several of the pieces of steel I saw the words " Deliver to Doug Beam in care of Duke Power Company."

I wonder if the fact that the materials being shipped to the project manager, by name, exempted them in some way from corplete receiving inspections.

Even if that happened, I think Duke fell short in its respon-QQ n hole.

sibility when I pol

.ed c t thi; n

e in40<.o M d c h; h t :

p 'c th-p;di.:~ c f, 3/ 8ths o f an in c eep./\\ I pointed it hut to an inspector, I pointed it out to my foreman and asked them how in the world we could ignore something like that.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody made any effort to file a report on it, or to put an NCI on it, or to do any-thing about it.

To the best of my knowledge, CP-88 was created to " cover up" the problems.

But according to P.r.

Cosgrove, and my own suspicions, it does nothing but disguise the real problem.

It does not elimi-nate the p.roblem.

I questionef the possibility that if there was one damination four feet long, couldn't there be 50 that have not

.t been found.

I believe that the incident with the laminations and the CP-88 procedure put my Catawba supervisors on notice that I was not going to look the cther way" at construction flaws.

Because of my ti f y 1 9

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.) N -

conscientiousness in this incident, a's well as others describe d below, I believe that Duke used my later health problems as an f,h cxcuse to get rid of meh Mhte k h bt C0 5 Another example of poor quality work on the containment vessel o

itself was the vendfr welds.

These welds, which were done prior to the installation of the containment plates at Catawba, had numerous flaws.

These included porosity, lack of fusion, holes, and were generally j ust shoddy work.

The vendor welds were located acre s h one.

D the entire containment wall.

In one vendor weld I found-::cc:

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hole [ 3/E of an inch deep,OE Im<

@MP* %~U The containment wall is only 3/4 of an inch thick.

A 3/8" hole is 1/2 of that thickness, or 1/2 of the strength of the containment vessel at that one point.

I do not know how this poor quality work nctually happened, but I pointed this up to one of the OC inspe_ctors, I believe it was Harold Eubanks.

I also pointed it up to Larry Rudasill and asked him why we velders had to be se perfect with our welds when the vendors could get away with junk like I have described abcVe.

He told me it was because the vendors are 2he ones that are re sp cns i'r le fer the welds, not us.

I asked hir what about an acci-dent en the site, such as Three Mile Island.

I told him that people are net going to know or care who made that bad weld - all they are gcing te know is that Duke Power had an ccident at Catawba.

To the best cf my knowledge, bad vendor welds were never touched.

As it was tcld to me, that was not our responsibility.

(The weld with the hele in it was located approximately in the fif th course in the Reacter Building Number 2 annulus. )

Y7 0/ 7i

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Yet another deep concern of nine, which care to light when I.

was a repairman, was the ' inaccurate identification of problems by the x-ray department.

When I worked with other companies, the x-ray departments were top cuality.

I remember one job in parti-cular up in Williamsburg,' Virginia, where I had done 148 feet of wald.

I had one half inch of weld that was rejectable, and when the x-ray man told me it was bad and in what particular place, the flaw itas exactly where he called it.

At McGuire, also, the x-ray d partrent was pretty accurate.

If x-ray called a " bad spot" some-where and a worker cut into the metal, pretty soon he would start finding what they had called.

If they called porosity, the worker would start seeing a few dots of porosity.

If they called slag, he would start seeing some slag and with lack of fusion it was the came way.

S At Catawba, however, I did not find this to be the case.

For ins t ance, the x-ray department would call a half an inch of lack of f usion en the weld and it would appear to be in the cen' r of the agr s sQ cutting there lightly with my arc'anc sw\\s \\*,

art weld.

I would start gouging deeper and deeper.

The deeper the cut, the longer the alcngation tc facilitate smooth transitions.

At Catawba I consistently found that rather than the defect bei~ng where x-ray said it wab, it would be somewhe re els e.

Cften I would be almost all the way thrcugh the pfpe, and no defect would be there.

I could tell by the color of the metal that I was almost through the pipe and, in fact, sometimes I did go all the way through it and never found the flaw.

(That is allowable te do, to se ef 79

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rook cpen it up and to run a new weeee pass in, but it certain1v is not

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Esa & ss u w k (\\ M dre.sirable to have repairmen doin j-ust to find flaws that do not e xis t. )

What was even more upsetting, however, was when I would find a flaw that x-ray had not identified, somewhere else in the pipe.

I.would be digging into a pipe at the location x-ray identified, and I would

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find, for example, a patch of porosity the size of a silver dollar Q 'P five inches from where x-ray had identified one-half inch of fusion.

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The practice of the x-ray department to identify incorrect problems in the wrong locations concerned me greatly.

I wondered how many orchlers. renain unidentified.

Many tim,es, I brought these concerns to the attention of Mr.

YAMD Rudasill and c hcr inspectors or anybody who wculd listen.

I just f

j cculd not understand it.

My foreman would try to explain it away, saying it was just from the angle that they shot it, but I did not believe it.

It happened too many times.

~This led me to wonder how many were good that were called bad, but mere important, how many were. bad that had been called good.'

Us ually I would go ahead and dig the area cut th a t I fcund as had and then reweld it.

After it was re-x-rayed it would show a new defect where there previously had been none.

There was no consis-tenev.

To elaborate on this a little, when I was on Henry Best's crew in the Nurber 2 RSS area in April 1982, one cf Henry's better welders had an experience with the x-ray department, wh'ich he told re about.

gw 19_

I was standing beside Number 2 RBS 'one day and Mike Pridemore came

~

in raising " holy dickens. "

He told me that a weld he had made

. about a year and a half ago had just, been calleddad.

He said that the x-ray. department had already accepted it, and sent it to QC and

.QA, and the approved finished forms were locked away in the vaul-t.

.(That meant the work was finished and accepted, ready for systems

. turnover.)

Then a design change required that a valve be added into this line.

So they made a cut and, I believe, John Bryant looked up in the pipe and could see the weld.

It was maybe two I

feet down from him and had already x-rayed "100 percent good. "

He

.aaw dro*p-through, unconsumed filler material, and a bunch of things inside on the root pass that would have made the weld absolutely rejectable.

That was' in the Unit 1 Reacter Building.

This weld l

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was in f act then " red-tagged" by Bryant, or one of the inspectors,

, and Mike Pridemore was charged with so many inches of bad weld on his record.

That weld had to be redone.

This is just on,e example where the ' x-ray department had approved something that later had

,to be repaired.

While I was on Mr. Rudasill's crew other pecple o.. the crew 1

would come to me from time to time and discuss problems with me that ma.he the. oucht to have been discussing with the fereman.

Maybe I was a little more outspoken about'pioblems and working

~'

I conditions.

In any event, once in late spring 19 81 we had a batch of bad carbon TIG wire.

When a worker is using the TIG process, I

he hc%ds a TIG torch in one hand which has a nonconsumable tungsten c

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that extends out from it. ' He starts.with his, are and it heats the

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l metal.

This is never supposed to touch the metal, so the torch is i

held with the right hand, and with the lef t hand a piece of filler

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i is added in.

The TIG wire we had sparkled like a Tourth of July cparkler.

We would be running along on a weld and it would sparkle, j

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flake,'and get all over the tungsten.

Goo,d welding procedures require stopping at that point to identify the problem.

If the deposited material had porosity it had to be removed.

In this case, welders were definitely having problems with the wire.

Carbon TIG wire comes with a copper coating on it as a pro-tective device to keep it from rusting.

14, M started sanding it off we would find an area like a seam, wher.e it would be rolled g

M.iM M Mu h 9NM N* Mg\\qht's over and down A In that seam there was filth and trash.

All of f

the fellows on Larry Rudasill's crew de ated me to be the p6rson Shs h

to go up and present the bad wireA o oreman and tell him what t

was going on, which I did.

I am not sure whether Mr. Rudasill or his " lead man," Danny Wallace, was running the crew that day.

I explained the problem and gave him the little bun *dle of TIG wire frc. all the welders.

I told him that each welder had given me twc or three stubs and I had a whole piece to show him.

I sanded it of f and showed him how bad it was.

I told him that somebcdy needed to know about this and that maybe we' needed te scrap this hatch.

Either the lead man or Mr. Rudasill carried the problem back "up the hill" to his superior, ' Billy Smith, who was our j

. general foreman.

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The word came back to me that I was% paid to weld and to weld with what I was given to weld with.// I was told that that wire had

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been sent to the test shop and a couple of tests had been run on it.

I was told that there was not a thing wrong with it, and for us to go ahead and work with what we were given to work with.

Billy Smith, through Rudasill, also said that our crew was the only one that complained.

The message for us to kee.p working and not worry about cuality was very clear.

The wire continued to be bad until that lot of wire was used up; and when the next lot of wire was s

p urchas ed, we did not have that problem anymore.

g not6 q32stickrods.

There would We had similar problems with the 3

be a period as long as a month where not just my crew, but every welder on the job seemed to be having the same problems with the s ti ck ro ds.

We were picking up mainly porosity.

For example,O I would look at the rod and halfway down it there would be a split in the flux.

Flux must be bonded to the rod properly, or it will j us t drop o f f, creating porosity.

Af ter a welder has this problem so many tires he gets pretty disgusted.

I know'that the attitude cf many we'ders toward bad rods was to just keep welding.

Then the porosity would get covered up.

I am concerned that the bad wire and Eods have lef t an undetermined. number of bad welds at the site.

Although I raised these prob 1ck.smany times no one in aupervision wanted to hear them.

Their attitude was to get as rany welds done as cuickly as possible.

There are other examples of these problers -- laminations, bad e

p welding rods and wires, an'd situations where the x-ray department failed toriBentify flaws in pipes or welds.

Those that I have described, h'owever, are illustrative of the type of activities that

~

were a daily occurrence at Catawba.

During these months I got along well with my co-workers.

Even though I was troubled about the quality of construction, I was not too worried about retailiation or harassment from my supervisors, cithough it appears now I should have been.

In the fall of 19E1 the Catawba workforce went through a major shake-up.

Although I never knew the details or the cause of the shake-up there were major changes during the f all.

Rumor on the site was that Catawba had done very badly on seme NRC inspections.

There was a marked change in the attitude of the craf t supervisors to QC inspectors who found hardware problems, and to the constTuc-tion workers like myself who were known to argue with foremen over bad construction practices.

I sensed that I was on the " list" of people who were to be getten rid of because of the CP-8 6 and TIG wire incident.

It was a mistake en ny part that cave Duke the first cf many opportunities to make my life as a Duke employee miserable.

.During Neverber 19 81 on one of my repagrs I skipped a " hold poin t. "

I had ground 'out what I felt was the bad part of the weld

'I was working on and had started putting' the new metal back in it.

I was first to have gone and gotten a OC inspector to look at it to m,ake sure it was clean.

He would check the paperwork and sign f

8

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it off.

I just got in a hurry and forgot to get him to sign the clean up 'off and went on ahead and started putting new metal back in it.

Soon I realized my mistake, and immediately went to get the inspector.

He wr'ote.an NCI or a rework on it.

In the past, having an NCI' written on your work was a profes-The paperwork that ' ou were working with was cional embarrassment.

y taken from you by the inspector and it was sent "up the 1111" for 3

resolution.

Then it was sent back to you.

Workers were verbally reprimanded by their foreman to be careful and not to let it happen again; they knew you skipped up on a# poin t."

Notmally, what I would have to do to rework the weld would be to take out all that metal that I had put in af ter skipping the held point, let the inspector sign of f what he was supposed to, then finish the weld.

That did not happen.

I got a verbal reprimand and was told that more than likely this was going to result in an "A" Violation," which was a disciplinary measure.

I screamed to high heaven, "How in the world can this be?

This is the, firs t one I've had like' this and I've been making all the repaiEs.

I've had ten times the paperwork on me that anybody else does. "

Not only had I not heard of this happening before, it also was net fair.

As a repairman I had te go back and rede wor)7 thgt others had messed up cnd therefore had many more hold points than others would have.

I was the first one that I had known to have gotten an "A" violation over something so insignificant.

Others had ha'd similar things happen to them and they had gotten og a verbal reprimand.

My "A" violation came about two weeks af ter the skipped hold-point incident occurred.

I was called up to 1!he office.

My fore-N #/ Y

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man and Billy Srith were there.

I was told that the NRC had men-tioned thAtg so many NCI's were happening on t' e job that DPC decided h

a reprimand was not going to be enough any more.

They said they were going to have to take stricter and sterner measures to prevent this from happening.

This was going to be the new policy.

I did not believe it.

I told Billy Selth and Rudasill,both by his violation, but I had better not find out that I would that anybody else on the job was being " red-tagged" (NCI ' d) on any of their work and was not getting an "A" violation or I would be back up there s crear.ing.

I went back to work.

Shortly thereaf ter I was transferred to the nignt shif t.

Larry Rudasill just came up en a Friday af ternoon and told me that I would be going on the night shif t on Monday.

I took this as a clear message that I was being punished.

It was ccmren knowledge that Billy Smith used transfers to the night shift, or places like the cooling tcwer, as punishment.

This transfer caused me hardship..I had bought a new car to get back and forth to work and was running a car pool with other workers frc ry cret.

This shift transfe r jus: des trcyed it.

I was counting en the riders that I had en the day shif t to help make I

the payments en that car.

It was a pretty low blow.

(f ra on the night shift I worked on Unit 1. Once again I was doind. \\,Y h d cru.MN N\\'

repairs.

My new foreman, Arlon Moore (Billy S.ith 's -14cthor4r4

)

told me af ter a month or so that I was about his best welder.

He enc to:n pnched y,Qf(is

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really hated to de thi+, but th fs scmething that told me that he

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Billy Smith was making him do.

In fact, he told me that he heard ne neitio.>

od fer a ""l'ead man" position and that he was going to try to help l

l me somewhere down the way.

l l

I worked the night shif t for about three m:nths although I was scheduled to work it six months.

J. R. Wilson took over the night shif t around December, soon af ter I started.

He told.us that

..he just wanted us to try to work within the Code and if we got a

" red tag" or something he was not going to ju=p down our throats I

about it.

He told us he just wanted us to try to hold our mistakes to a n!.nimum.

I raised my hand and asked if this was his policy or Duke's policy.

He told us it was just kind of the way he thinks cbout it.

Af ter the meeting I explained to him what had happened and asked him to get me an answer on my mandatory "A"

violation, l

received back in November.

The answer he came back to me with:.was that at the start of November the NRC had 'made it a rule that any-i t

body who got a red tag would get an "A" violation and they had dropped that rule at the end of November.

I never. heard such a

)

bunch of ' hog wash in my life.

That rule' was in ef fect just for the menth that I go mine.

So I dropped the ma-ter.

In February 1962 I asked for a hardship transfer back to the day shift.

This was important to me bec&use,,my littic girl was beginning to have nightmares and becoming fearful as a result of not seeing me at home.

That is, I would have to leave for work before she came home from d@ool. Viy wife and [I could see a signi-l ficant, change in her personality.k The hardship transfer was t

1 opp cved.

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-2s-l PRCPF.lE~AM E7 I came back to work o'n the day shif t f6r, Henry Best.

This was about February or March 1982 Henry Best's crew worked the Number 2 R3S area. ' That is just outside the reactor vessel itself, on the other side of the wal'l.

It is a very important area, alcest ev,ery-thing in it is safety related.

Therefore, almost everything is 0

stainless steel piping.

Henry Best supposedly had the cream of the cropof welders down there.

It had a reputation as being one of the most important crews on the job.

Henry was a tough foreman.

He had to " test" you for himself for a long time.

When I.

started I just did little menial things like tacking a hanger or a te=porab hanger; first one thing, then the other.

In other words, I had to prove myself to Henry.

I tried to do that, but to no avail.

Even on Best's crew there were serious problems that affetted the quality of construction on the Catawba site.

(I described one incident on page 18. )

Another of these was the problem of fore-men overriding the craf t people in order to meet construction dead-lines.

Ter welders this had a very personal inpact.

Each wclder l

1 had a stencil nu.ber.

Mine was P19.

It was pretty much up to the l

welder who'n he was given a weld to stay within the code, to know how to do that weld, and not' to exceed the Anterpass temperature, Then, when he gets through with the weld, if it is thicker than a quarter of an inch, he takes the hammer and knocks the stencil number on it.

It is like a signature and it is going to be there for..as long as the plant is there.

A lot of people take pride in I

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that, and a lot of people do not.

I always have, but it puts a lot l

l cf pressure on a person too.

If something breaks later on, the 1

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welder's stencil number is on it, and everyone knows who the man is who did it.

I was never overridden too much personally in the way I would l

weld something.

Mr. Rudasill did override,me a couple of times to rake something look more uniform, specifically on a cold bell on the wall.

But in a case of a welder who has not had years of ex-perience, when a foreman overrides him it implies that he is doing something wrcng.

When I first went to Catawba, a man named Malcolm Young had an cxperience with this situation.

Some crew cut into a line that Malcolm welded on two years previously, a class G weld (We were told that class G should be welded like Class A. ), and Malcolm lost L

his stencil because of it.

Malecim told me he well remembered that veld.

He was on night shif t at that time, and the fitters made a sloppy fit on it.

They did not put the proper bevel or proper land on itj They slopped it tog e th e r.

He went to his forema,n and told him 'ah ut it.

I do not know who his foroman was, but Malcolm told him the fit was"stovo-piped # The foreman told him it was just class G and to ge ahead But it, gapped open ir, end place and was slar.med and weld it out.

together at another; it did not have the proper gap or proper land.

j i

Malcolm has about the same nunber of years of experience that I do, j

t but he lost his stencil and had to retest.

He came very close to l

qd tting.

What happened to him was known all over the job.

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man is going ' o, be given a stenci,1 and given a responsi-j If a t

bility, then certainly a foreman should stand'back and let a welder do it to the, best of his ability.

If he does not have the' ability, then he should not ha,ve had the stencil to start with.

l Another example of overriding occurred when I worked for i

Rudasill.

I was set up on the floor above us in the Reacton* Building l

i Number 2 to work with Ed McKenzie's crew.

They cut up one-foot lengths of stainless steel pipe that was to be joined to 90-degree couplings.

They wanted me to tack them in and said the paperwork would follow.

But I refused to tack them in until I had gotten the paperwork and my foreman got on ne about not tacking them.

He said t

the paperwork was coming.

I told him that I did not have it yet and that I was not going to do it.

I was very concerned about this practice when the pressure to

, ' get the plant done increased.

It is so easy fer a welder to, for cxample, have a groove that is a half-inch deep and then fill it up with root metal and put a nice cap on it.

A 0; inspector or fore-man could look at it and think it was all fine but there vruld be no way to know it was a weak weld unless it was x-rayof pr:perly.

Becau.se 00 inspectors did not come to inspect until walds were comple te d, the workers could'do any quality of werk they wanted.

~ Because the feremen actually were " inspecting" work, they had the outhority to make on-the-spot changes that would nev'er be detected by QC inspectors.

Foremen on the site knew which workers would l'

put up with the pressure and which ones would nett it was a cen-l sta$t struggle to try and do the job' the way it was supposed to be l

l done.

N yyf l

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-29 4

Many times I was told by my foreman to do work "his way" --

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there was" a saying on the site:

"There is the Duke way and there is the highway. "

This meant, of course, that a worker would be fired if he did not do it the way his supervisor said.

Another saying that foremen used was:

"You do what I told you to do, not what you'know how to do."

In the Duke Code. of Conduct, violation A 11 reads, " Failure to follow instructions, either written or oral" will result in an "A" violaticn.

If a worker gets three "A" violations he can lose his job.

So workers were of ten in the dif ficult position of choosing between f ollowing the foreman's instruction or following proper procedures; that is, violating the laws governing nuclear power plant construction or risk losing their jobs.

In other words, you were " damned if you did, and damned if you didn't."

This was particularly bad on Henry Best's crew.

As I said before, Mr. Best had one of the best crews on the si te.

He also had three workers, one of them myself, who were du ped there to teach ur' a lesson er try to get rid of us.

Bert's crew was re-sp:nsible for welding the cooling loops fer 61 and 6 2 reactor with c special welding process called the hensy wall TIG proccan.

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!;one of the th ree o f us, my s el f, Wo'o dy pe + m p er Jerz'?

Wilkinson, were allowed to do the heavy TIG welding.

In fact, we were only allowed to do menial labor, like cable tray supports.

Once, Woody got so fed up with things harassing.him that he hit the c c i,1.in g.

I heard him tell Henry that he was "cich and tired of doing garbage-shit work," that Henry hadn' t given him any decent

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_30 work to do for months. ' Woo'dy told him that e% anted a transfer to @

tw another ocew or a check.

22 pt. -..fer erry was also very+g

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N frus trated, he was a 13-year, well-liked welder f rom 0;.......e.

He l

decided to put up with it, put in his time and draw his check.

I kept trying to have Henry give me some Work -- finally he let me take the heavy metal TIG test.

I passed the first time.

However, two weeks later, Henry came and told me that the ANI i

man had pulled my test weld and rejected it.

He didn't of fer any i

proof, and I didn't believe him - I knew I passed.

I just took it cs another kick in the teet.h for trying too hard to get back to l

decent work.

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I felt continually under pressure at the Catawba site.

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wanted to do high quality work.

In fact, I took an extreme amount of pride in the welding repairs that.I did at the site.

My repu-totion as an excellent worker was very important to me.

Ecweve r, it was becoming increasingly apparent to me that the Catawba manage-ment did not want high quality work, they just wanted to get the plant finished as quickly as possible.

It seemed that eve:y prob-lem that was identified, every " red tag" that a welder got caused supervision to get rneaner and meaner with the work force or the wo rke r.

Because I had larned a reputation as being a worker who identifled prcblems and was not afrai'd to bring them up to super-vision, the pressure on me was getting intense.

I felt as if the a

caly reward I was getting for being a conscientious employee was o " kick in the tee th. "

'"he pressure at work eventually began to af fect ::y health and my he e life.

I was also receiving an extreme amount of pressure from r y ex-wife for mere and more child support.., he argunents at work cycr censtruction and the arguments at he e' cver reney, and the argv. cnts with rny ex-wife over child support threw me into a d pression.

Everywhere I went there was,more and mere pressure,

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'Cnd I felt there was no one to support ra.

In April 1982 I began socing a private physician concerning this p rcblem.

He recorr.monded that I begin taking a " mood elevator" to relieve rny depression from the numerous pressures I was under.

I had been under a " cloud of depression

• for seme months.

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Unf ortunately the doctors and my f amily und,erestimated the " tail-l Opin" tha,t, I was in.

In July 1982 I had to be hospitalized for cight days for a period of deep depression.

Following the hospitalization I returned to work.

The doctors who were' treating me attempted to find a " mood elevating" drug which would lif t my spirits and bring me out of the state of mind I had fallen into.

Although they sincerely tried to help me I believe that they made matters worse--switching medications frequently and paying little attention to the physical side-ef fects of the various drugs.

Besides that, things at work continued te degenerate.

After I con-my hospitalization I felt more isolated f rom my co-workers.

fided in my foreman about my problems, and he seemed sp. pathetic '

l l

but it did not change the situation.

The work atmosphere was still the same -- pressure to get jobs done in a hurry with no atte'htion to quality.

The morale of the entire workforce seemed to be at an all-time low.

Many of the workers whc' did talk to me sympathized i

with how dif ficult it was to come to work and do work that we knew would just be ripped out on the avening crew and have to be dene over again the next day.

The tension at the site was terrible.

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33.

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In November 1982, af ter checking my rods out, I had a grand mal *stiture on the job.

I had just started to check my rods j

out and soon af ter 10 o' clock I woke 'up in York Hospital and my head was being sewed'up.

I had fallen down and had kept attempt-ing to get up, and get up, and my head had,gone underneath a little shed they had there'with sheet metal to the bottom of it j nd every a

time I would get up I was hitting my head on the sheet metal.

I was out of wor (M MWh7for eighy days.

hed V I had a previout seizure in 1968 af ter I had genu through five 3

or six days of extreme, heavy work.

The cause of either of these seizure,s was never pinpointed.

I returned to work af ter this medical absence.

I was assigned

'to Herschel Brewer's crew doing very menial jobs such as welding hand rails, etc., on ground level.

I was welding for the steeJ-riggers.

As stated before, I had volunteered earlier to work in i

the pipe fab shop.

Having the good x-ray record that I had and the experience I had, I felt I could pass that on to the company.

Be-cause I was now required to do ground level wo:'k i' volunteered for the pipe fab shop again.

I was still told that I would no be put k n6 m de fM O

there.

I was going to be put on welding f:.t.

1&, etc or the

, steel riggers.

This was a slap in the face /

I had been a good worker for Duke Power, and was highly qualified.

My personal O vL.

l Icms 'did not make me a bad. welder.

For years @.e workforce $ ad i

known that some of the top level management on the site were alco-holics, and they still were allowed to supervise construction of a i

66 ty 'h?

- - - - -. - - - - - - - - - (

s nuclear plant.

During the spring of 1983 the job situation was painful.

It

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is almost impossible to describe the effect that having nothing to do and no one to talk' to for eight hours a day, five days a week has on a person.

Although I knew, pragmatically, that all of these actions were being taken to get rid of me I was determined to keep my job.

I was then, and still am, a good welder.

I continually asked for work but it was of no use - the message for me to quit was very clear.

For days on end I would be given nothir.g to de.

Then if I was given some work, it was meaning'less.

If Igwas ever caught MYs Fviolation M 4-400%E a,.:ni;r of fense, so t

sleeping on the job, 'it was a I did not even dare to sit down.

There were many, many days of this just " marking time."

The work situation was also affecti_ng my health.

It was more and more dif ficult to go to werk, I would actually get sick on the way to work at tires.

During March and Each April I took about a half dozen vacation and sich leave days.

cf those sich days counted as an occurrence.M I do net know why my atser.ces mattered.

There was nothing for no te de at wc k anyway.

third week of, April 1963 my suprvisor suggested About the

.i

1. I was told that an " occurrence" is any day that you did not work the f ull day, even if you were missing only one hour.

Any day that you were sick, that you were tardy, or that you 1cf t early,d said that your or you called an had a doctor's appointment, house was on fire and you wouldA c late, or you called and said that your child had been N(+ppand you had to leave, all of

, th,i s, any of these statements would count as an " occurrence."

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35..

t that I talk to Employee Relations about going to the Employee l

Guidance Program in Charlotte.

I welcomed the opportunity to do that.

I Sult wanted things in my life to go back to normal.

The Duke Power Employee Relations Department was a maze.

In retrospect I can see 'that the Employee Relations Department was really a trap.

Ms. Williamww at the Employee Relations Office cpparently knew something about my personal problems.

I think Mr.

l l

Brewer shared this information with her but I did not mind because t

she seemed really interested and concerned.

I trusted her.

She l

oxplained to me that none of the times that I would see doctors or psychologists at or through the Employee Guidance Program -- be it f

ene time, four times, twenty times -- would count as an " occurrence."

l The next norning I had an appointment with Eddie Young of the

' Employee Relations Department.

He identified himself to me as a i

certified or registered psychologist who worked for Duke.

He also told me that he had been an engineer at McGuire and had done all the cable tray drawings for the Auxiliary Building there.

Then he i

asked me about my problems.

I explained to him that all 2 wanted t

was to de a full day's work for a full day's pay,' but that the je,b l

l situation was intolerable.

I explained that I wanted to reduco

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i down te nothing the varIous medications that I had beer, prescribed

, for nerves, pain, and my seisures.

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He referred me to a private clinic in downtown Charlotte, where i

l 2 had to explain my problems all over again.

But instead of helping the doctors at the Eastover Clinic just make things worse -

me, instead of taking me off medication they just prescribed something c

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cise for depression.

I'tried to explain tha't I just wanted to i

l work and life my life without medication, and that the latest 1

medication made me physically ill.

Unfortunately, because the Duke Employee Relations Department r

l had sent me to this clinic, I was stuck with it.

While I went to i

l this clinic, the doctors' visits and related absences would not l

count as an occurrence (s), whereas if I went to a non-Duke referred i

l I

doctor each visit would count as a separate occurrence, unless Duke sot up an approved medical absence procram Io n;e with them.

If j

v. p,g u y

they did this, these visits wouldAcount as y one occurrence.

I i

should piso point out that seeing Dr. Humphrey and Dr. Williams pks \\c4tkneGwucek..

was costing me out-of-pocket $37.50 per visitA Not only could I l

not af ford this, they were not helping me either, i

l Tinally in mid-May I had had it with the Duke-referred doctors, the Duke ref erred psychologists, the Duke-referred psychiatrists, the Employee cuidance program, and the Employee Relations Department.

I tried to switch to a personal physician, and in fact took three l

more *occurrencos" (partial day absences) to see him, but working with a doctor who did not Onderstand all the various and ridiculous Duke programs was futile.

It, did not mattor that the doctor was l

helping me, he could not take the additionaY timo te send all the l

1etters and supply all the required Duke forms.

l I felt trapped and I felt I had no choice but to stay in l

Duke 's trap -- my health, my paycheck, my f uture, and, most impor-l tant, the wellbeing of my f amily required that I stay within the

'h Duke family circle.o I had requested a meeting with d. h. Wilson and Herschel

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_37 in \\.A<. %9 \\W 3rewer t;

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a 17, 19 ? ? c I told them that the previous week l

I had not been given one piece of work to do and that I couldn't work with nothing to do.

I said that I was tired of being harassed and intirJ, dated.

I went back to my original problems when I was brought over to Catawba dnd laid all of my concerns on the table -

these included both the harassment and intimidation, as well as the hardware flaws.

I. told them that the 5mployee Guidance Program

~

was just a management tool used to play games with the workers.

l Af ter I had my say Mr. Wilson very calmly told me that if I r) wanted to keep my job I would learn to do things"the Duke way."[ b Naither J. R. Wilson nor Hershel Brewer nor anyone else at Duke over told me that I could go to the NRC if I had concerns about construction problems.

My understanding was that only top Duke

, mtnagement personnel could go to the NRC.

I was also not told about the Department of 1.ahor provisions, 42 U.S.C. E5E51, which provide for protection cf nuclear. employees who are being harassed and intimidated fcr trying to do their jobs.

If I 'had been aware of these protections I wo 1d have gone to both gove'rnment a ge ncie s.

Taced with losing my job or trying to keep the one I had I l

went back te the Duke " family circle."

The Empicyee Relations l

.t people and the doctor told me that even,though I had broken o'd relations with them and had' gene to see a private doctor it was all due to my not being on the right rnedication!

2. fcit as if " Big i

Brothe r" was*f e rgiving"me.

They told me they were going to get I

togeth,er with ry supervisor, talk it out, and lump all of ry doctor's

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visit occurrences (seven) into just one occurrence.

Unfortunately, i

J. R. Wi'l~ son at the site did not go along with this agreement. Evi-dently, ther's was a big argument between the supervisors on the site

~

dnd the Employee Relations Department., Then I was told that I had occumulated 15 occurrences.

Despite these problems, in early June 1983 I was sent by my foreman to be recertified for the TIG '200 welding process.

Recertification is required every 90 days.

When I got to the office that maintains the certification printouts I was both surprised and distressed to see my name on the list as qualified.

The roster said that I had "recertified" on April 11, 1983.

of course that was impossible.

I had net recertified in l

oither April or January.

In fact, I had done no TIG welding since i

November 1982 when I had my seizure.

I believe that someone f alsified my certification.

Perhaps this was done inadvertently, but I am 991 sure that it was done deliberately.

There are two reasons why this cencerned me.

First, the f alsification of my cortification indicated that perhaps others who were r.ot certified or qualified to do TIG welding were also being recertified through this mysterious " pen:11 whipping."'

.1 second, I was outraged that serious violations such as this went unnoticed, uninves tigated, and unpunished and that other minor mistakes by craf t were used as tools to ' et rid of them.

g After I discovered the falsi d certification documents I "fe t m M e i repo,rted it to Eddie T...iten t uality Control.

I asked him if H

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ha coul'd pbssibly give me the name of the person who had falsified L*

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N it, but he could not.

j h* hat is incredible to me is that Duke placed such monumental A

cmppasis on something as minor as my ' absences for doctor's appoint-mer s 6i' taking off one hour early for a funeral while they ignored the usonscionable and really dangerous practice of their own f alsi-ficatio'n of welder recertifications.

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i 3,e On[Junday, June 12, 1983 a close family friend died.

His wife called and asked me to help ' arrange the funeral and be there to support 3.-

s hor.

I calleo my supervisor at home and asked if there was any possible way I could be of f one hour early the day of the funeral.

He told x

me no, 2 could'not take it as an excused absence.

If I took the time off it would hEVe count asmy sixteenth occurence.

(On the sixteenth cecurence you got written up for disciplinary action.)

I went to he funeral.

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.v.y supervisor got real mady.nure I was given the sixteenth occurrence as a typewritten letter saying that I had violated management policy related to " occurrences. "

I ref0$ed to sign it.

I tolf tNem'<that I. did not acknowledge their " occurrence precedure" JD boca,*,.se I hae. noQ : been given any written material on it te guide me orfaven to explain it to me.

j Over the.txt several days a number,of fncidents occurred which

+%

led'ne to beliews 'that my car and lunch box had been tampered with.

During this [pntire time period, they would not give me any work to do whatever, not even handrailing work.

Jus.t days and days and days..with nothing, to do, just sitting around.

i Tipally, I called Joe coulter, the head of Employee Relations, s

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s cnd asked him if he coul?d guarantee me that,I could go into work and not be harassed.

I just wanted to go in and do my job.

Joe told me that there was no way he could guarantee that.

He told me that there was an employee recourse procedure to use, if I wanted to.

On Monday morning I called Employee Guidance and asked the'm egain f or a guarantee that I would not be harassed if I went* in.to work, but they would not give me that guarantee; so I did net go into work on Monday.

The same thing happened on Tuesday.

On Wednesday morning my foreman called me and told me not to come in, that I had been put on* temporary medical leave of absence. I had never heard of such a leave and did not know how this affected ry job status.

I called downtown to try and find out who had placed me on this " temporary leave of absence," what it was all about, whose decision it was, and who was going to determine when I could go back to work.

During those next two or three weeks while I was not allowed to go to work I talked to Eddie Young and the clinic people who gave me the tremendous run around that got me into this mess in the first place.

Eddie Young, Joe Coulter, Faye Fowle r, Jchn Hu.phrey,,and Wade Williams all told me to " hang tight"; but they were.the same people who told me they were g'oing to get my seven

.t occurrences from May lumped into only cne occurrence so I didn't have much confidence that anything would be straight'ened out.

I still did not know what my job status was.

When I again asked them for help in. this harassment situation where I was net receiving any work to do and being isolated they 73 t/ ?$

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-41.

told me they could not help re.

They told me that I had to go through nornal employee recourse procedures.

Of course, going through.this procedure meant that I had to co= plain through the very people who were harassing me, and up the same chain of com-1 l

nand that had made my life miserable for aimost three years.

I sincerely believe that Duke was using my health problems 1

as a ploy to get rid of me.. They steered ne into their Employee I

t 1

Guidance Program and then manipulated me round and round, back and forth - they had me bouncing around in a " catch 22" situation.

On or about July 8,

19 8 3, N.

T.

Lawing called me to report back to work on the f ollowing Monday, July 12.

I did so.

My L

. fellow employees were very surprised.

They had been told I was I

fired.

I was still on Brewer's crew.

J.

R.

Wilson then assigned re as a welder on loan to Avery Drake, a powerhouse mechanic fore-ran.

to weld c' nstruction hangers.

The. work I was given was o

I began by collecting my tools and some ecuipment 'to. set up a " turn-table," a work jig to facilitate welding hangers of the same size.

No sooner did I return to the crew th n I was told by Hershel's ScAQq M lead man Wayne Garvin that Ed Geeps, Drake 's, lead man, was already reporting to Brewer about me.

He evidestly told Brewer that I was

" screwing off."

It was then clear to me that I was being watched and that it would only be a matter of time before I was once again forced off the job and out of work.

'I just resolved to keep my mouth shut and do the best job I E

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t could on whatever I was given to do.

That's what I did until I was fired.

Af ter a few days my co-workers accepted me, but my cupervisors never let up on me.

Even though I kept my mouth shut I still saw' problems.

F6r example, I previously described the practice of forenen overriding the craft workers who were trging

~

to follow the correct procedures that dealt with construction hangers.

Constructi n h 7cers were not necessarily safety related; the pro %,b NOh wdki

however, cecures for working on construction hangers were n

'. specified and depending on where they were installed they may be safety related.

Ins'tead of the construction procedures being followed, however, I saw both Mr. Brewer and another supervisor, Mr. Fulgam overriding their employees in order to get the construction hangers finished.

F' oremen and workers were writing "VI ok" or "Vis OK" (meaning visually ok'd) on the hanger itself with a black pen.

I do not know the exact location where the improp'erly f abricated hangers were

' installed, but I know that the fitters were working in Unit #2.

One fitrer told me rhe hangers were being used to support low pressure lines all over Unit 2 -- in the "deg house" and the reactor.

For another example, " Toot" Eackler, a welder en Mr. Fulgam's A

crew who worked with me, was a whole lot newer welder than myself and was trying to make a mark for himself.

He would thrive on getting ten welds to my.five.

That did not matter to me because I was going to do five correctly; if he wanted to do ten incorrectly that-was his business.

Toot asked me to look at his work Several 75 4 'M

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~ N times I went over there with my welding gauge af ter he finished a weld that would call for a quarter of an inch weld and that had already been signed off.

I would slide the gauge up, and it would not have a quarter inch weld on it, it would have 3/16ths or less, and sometimes it would have too much.

(It-is okay to overweld come, but it is not okay to underweld.)

In addition I f'ound poro-s ity, unde rcut,' a rc-s trike s, and all other' rejectable weld problems.

I saw this happen many times over the past feb m a s.

I thought about bringing this to.the attention of -*y s%upervisor but CV. \\

I knew he would just tell me to mind my own business.

In another case, a welder, D. A.

Henry ("Euck"), was loaned over to a welder foreman on Number 1 side by the name of Tim Hollingsworth.

It was a " Friday afternoon special. "

The welding machin e that Buck was using was defective.

Many of the machi:nes are in bad shape.

This one did not have enough power to. push a 1/8 rod.

He had a welding job there on the table, a paperwork a'nd it calged for a partial penetration weid.

The metal

hanger, N dded gc M '

had to be =,tres cd down \\ncs far as it could possibly go.

About 3 of the smaller f32 rods.

He told Iim o' clock he was out Hollingsworth that he was going out to the rod shack and pick up

• another po und of h2 ~ rods, and Hollingswort$ told him not to, that the job had to be done right away.

He told him to go ahead and use the 1/8.

Buck told him that the machine would not push a 1/8.

As Buck told me, Tim said, "I am the foreman, and I'm telling you i

what to do, and you go ahead and use the 1/S."

Well, Buck did the l

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best he could, and-he made,a mess out of it.

Then, somebody over OA man,' I do not know who saw it, but somebody the weekend, a QC, a$d Monday morning Buck was called on the carpet.

saw it, He tried to explain his side of the story, but nobody wanted to listen.

They pulled his. stencil, - took his qualification away from him, made him go back out to the test shack and retest.

Had he not passed his test, he would have been demoted back to a helper, when all the while in my opinion Mr. Hollingswor'th was the one to blame.

rff que:dAj nd qumh $tN-O We had been told before: quantiti,.ve t q u-li tf.

We had been told safety first, but neither was of ten the case.

Every time construction needed to meet a deadline the construction procedures and saf 6ty got thrown out the window.

There had also been a problem with the incensistency of Duke 's welding symbols with the universal (AWS) welding symbols.

This

.resulted in constant confusion, particularly for new welders who trying to read the instructions on field blueprints.

This were could have resulted in many serious problems.

One example, in

. September of this year in the Ungt 2 Reactor, demonstrated tha t wkddbMQM-prcblem.

- _ -. -i.. t - a crew of fitters who could net figure out hcw topinstaal a$.h b ceriuk 06 stif fener by reading the blueprints.

Although I am not an engineer, I know that there are seismic

~

graphs done by computer and studies have bee $ made on how m strain and stress somethine will take.

_; _f the intention was

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chh cd \\MM-%Mthcs J uM cned /hgfh, te put a stif fener every foot apartgand * =-edcrew either could not V

road it or just for the sake of speed, followed a flawed procedure then..there may be innumerable installation deficiencies.

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eMcncs ucc m:Ankk kgV If the fitter:

• lfed according to their interpretation anyone,q'[

cou5.d come along and kick it and it would break.

The b.

wy 20 pound. hammer pounding all day would not break it.

In September I received another 16th occurrence.2_/

This was l

because I missed work to respond to an urgent recuest from my doctor q,

te to check my Dilantin level.

In fact, the check revealed that the dosage I had been taking since my seizure was 25% too low.

, b e, r.,

On October 3rd, although I started out for work, I was forced to return home due to nervous exhaustion and f atigue -- the degenera-Q

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ting work situation was getting the best of me.

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2. 6.k' June 17th', two days after I received my lEth occurrence, it d.ropped off.

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:T 7-pp,OPRIETARY INFO

~~

The situation at work' had not changed;although my co-workers sympathized with me for the pressure I was under, it was impossible for them to do anything.

Many of them told me that they knew that Erewer and J.

R. Wilson were determined to get rid of me.

I have rany friends at the Catawba plant, and if they can provide informa-tion, confidentially, to support what happened to me I belidve that they will.

Although my experiences as a Duke employee at Catawba were ex-

,g tremely costly to me - personally, financially, and erotionally; y'

gre:dhI could not walk away from the problems I was aware of with-h' cut try.ing to insure that something be done to correct them.

That is why I contacted GAP.

The message came across to me loud and clear that Duke was trying to get rid of me.

Sa dly, they never understood that one, I was just trying to do an honest day's work for an honest day ' s pay, and two, that I was just trying to' build Catawba as safely as I possibl/could.e 7

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's lioward SamuQSunn N' C Signed and sworn to before me this /

day of November, 1983.

Y, A Wn dotar fY)[.[l-f C, Q rnn t %c \\b~ wl

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