talk about a way to wake up...
nala was flipping thru the channels this morning and hit the Today show where their newsman was recounting the tale of an explosion and fire at a power plant in West Virginia.
normally, i wouldnt pay much attention, but, i used to work at a power plant in West Virginia.
then they said "Moundsville, West Virginia". and of course, I used to work at a power plant in Moundsville. (there are three).
And then they showed video taken from a helicopter above the plant, and I knew it was the one where both my father and I (and many of his friends) worked or still work.
I havent been able to reach my dad on the phone today, but when I've been scouring the web news, they seem to refer to the two plants I worked at as one entity, although they are split by a distance. In the news, they share a hyphenated name.
From the video, I can guess which it was. While I was watching, I kept thinking "I used to walk right there! They used to take us up in the stack to get a view of the valley."
My dad's friend Tom was quoted in the CNN article. I still havent seen the name of the missing man anywhere, so they must not have been able to find his remains yet. I'm hoping I didnt know him. (Probability is slim, but you never know).
I'm still a little shaken by it -- but for no real reason.
[update 3/6/2006 10:30am] I got ahold of my dad on the phone. He'd heard nothing, because he and my mom had been at the beach all day watching dolphins and having a picnic. The plant was the newer, cleaner of the two (which I had guessed from helicopter photos), and had a new stack which apparently had been under construction for some time, being as how the plant was still operational while they were installing scrubbers. He told me he'd give me an update once he'd talked to someone there. And, according to the local newspaper, I didn't know any of the 4 men involved, which is good news. I did see, however, that they had at least one boiler in outage and some other work being done -- for which the workers were told not to report back to work until Wednesday.