Interview with Dale Fraser, March 2, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Dale L. Fraser March 2, 2005 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Mary Palevsky © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Dale L. Fraser March 2, 2005 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: birth and childhood, education, military service, early work experience, hired by REECo as civil engineer to work at Nevada Test Site [ NTS] 1 Goes to work for Lockheed Shipbuilding and Engineering Co. in CA, then returns to NTS in 1970 and works in various management positions for REECo, eventually rising to president and general manager of REECo and vice- president of EG& G 3 Discusses background of REECo and EG& G, their involvement in US nuclear program, and their work at NTS and Tonopah Test Range [ TTR] 4 Details evolution of big hole drilling technology by REECo and other contractors at the NTS in order to meet larger underground test demands 6 Talks about development of construction and heavy- lift cranes for emplacement of larger, heavier diagnostic arrays in underground testing 11 Discusses evolution of tunneling for underground testing 16 Outlines other functions performed by REECo for DOE at NTS and TTR: maintenance of vehicles and heavy equipment, facilities and utilities, power systems, supplies and warehousing, medical services, onsite radiation protection, waste management, housing and feeding, environmental restoration, communications, fire protection, property management, participation in NEST, environmental and ecological monitoring, printing, site- wide training, commuter bus services, plant engineering, and construction of the Stealth fighter base at TTR 17 Talks about Sandia National Laboratories and work at TTR 19 Mentions work on Yucca Mountain Project, discusses contracting process for REECo and EG& G, and what happened when they did not renew their contract after 1995 23 Discusses REECo and EG& G support of NRDS, geothermal experiments in Idaho, gas stimulation projects in New Mexico, offsite nuclear tests, and MX 24 Talks about involvement in JVE 25 Details nature of REECo workforce: manpower levels, union negotiations, labor strife, and workforce diversity at the NTS and TTR 27 Discusses relationships between various participants in the testing program, DNA and weapons effects tests ( example: Diamond Sculls) 32 Recalls involvement in Baneberry 36 Talks about workforce accidents and safety, environmental restoration activities 37 Remembers the “ can- do” attitude and teamwork of the program participants at the NTS, working with physicists, test directors ( especially Robert Campbell) 39 Develops rig transporter system for moving large drill rigs from site to site, talks about working with DOE on budgets 41 Overview of equipment used in testing, review of photographs 42 Conclusion: return to the NTS in 1970, effects of work on family life UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Dale L. Fraser March 2, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: Thank you very much for the interview, and I would appreciate it if you could start by telling me a little bit of your background, where you were born, when you were born, your full name, and how you ended up at the Nevada Test Site. Dale Fraser: Very good, and you’re welcome. My name is Dale L. Fraser. I was born and raised in Ely, Nevada, which is a copper mining town in eastern Nevada. I went on to the University of Nevada at Reno and got my bachelor of science in geological engineering. I spent a couple of years in the Army, then worked for several heavy and highway contractors. Then in 1961, with the resumption of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site [ NTS], I came to the NTS and applied for a job and was hired in December of 1961 as an engineer. And just so we get a sense of where you were, what year were you born? Nineteen thirty- five. And then, so you’re in the Army in what years? Nineteen fifty- nine, sixty, early sixty- one. And you were stationed in the States or—? Yes. I went through the ROTC [ Reserve Officers Training Corps] program at the University of Nevada, Reno, was commissioned, and went in to two years of active duty. I was stationed on a Nike Hercules site just outside of Chicago for two years. So you came to the test site after the moratorium ended. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 Yes. After I got out of the Army in February of 1961, I worked for about a year for several highway contractors, and then it sounded like the Nevada Test Site [ Figure 11] was a good place to go in the fall of 1961. I had some friends here, so I came down and applied for a job, got a job as an engineer. With REECo [ Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company]? With REECo, yes. A mining engineer, then. It was more of a general engineering type, so I wasn’t underground at the time. I was more of a civil engineer at that time. So just a couple of Ely questions. Who were some of your friends from Ely that were here? Bill Flangas. Glenn Clayton. Guys I had known from my hometown who [ I] worked in the mines with prior to going into the Army; so I knew quite a few of the folks that were here at the NTS at that time. So tell me a little bit about the kind of work you did and how things were going, and then we can get to some of the general information about REECo, which I really want to hear. Well, when I came here in December of 1961, the NTS was very active. Testing had just resumed after the Soviets had broken the moratorium. So I think with REECo they’d gone from maybe a few hundred or a thousand employees late in 1961 rapidly up to nearly six thousand employees early in 1962. So if you had any credentials, you could probably go to work at the Nevada Test Site. And I went to work in the engineering office, and after a couple months I was able to get out and get where I wanted to be and that was out in the field. So I worked on a project called Small Boy, and that was the last atmospheric test on the Nevada Test Site, 1 Mr. Fraser compiled photographs, documents and charts related to the interview. Figure numbers/ notations in the original interview were edited to match his supporting materials. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 conducted in July of 1962. And after that was executed, I went to Area 9 in support of the Livermore program. And I worked in support of that program as an engineer and later as a superintendent until 1965. And then I decided that I’d like to go out and do some other things, so I went to work for another contractor, Lockheed Shipbuilding and Construction Company, who was big in the construction business at that time. I worked on several hydroelectric and tunnel projects, primarily in California. And I did that until 1970, and then came back to the test site in 1970 as an assistant division manager, Operations and Maintenance Division, for about a year. And then I became the department manager in the support of the Livermore program, all the construction effort in supporting that program, which I held until about 1974, at which time I was assigned to build the CADAC facility at the control point [ CP] in Area 6 on the test site, which was a new Livermore facility for the CP- One. CADAC? Control and Data Acquisition Center. It was a large computer facility, diagnostic facility. I spent [ 00: 05: 00] about a year at that, and then managed the general construction on the test site, not specifically test- related, for about a year. And then in 1976, I became the operations and [ maintenance] division manager for REECo. I held that until 1979, at which time I became the deputy general manager to Harold Cunningham, who at that time was the general manager. When he retired in early 1986, I became the general manager, and then held that position until the expiration of our contract at the end of 1995. So I was president and general manager of REECo and a vice- president of EG& G [ Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier] during that period of time. Most of that period of time. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 So obviously from what you have just told me, you had skills or interests in administration and management, in addition to your engineering— Engineering, construction, and management. One kind of leads to the other. Does it? Yes. Because you start, I guess, moving up and having supervision over more people and— Yes. Starting as a superintendent, you might have supervision over maybe a couple of hundred, and then as a department manager you might have three or four or five hundred. And then when I became manager of the Operations and Maintenance Division, I probably had two thousand to twenty- five hundred. And then when I became general manager in early ’ 86, we were around fifty- eight hundred— excuse me— yes, about fifty- eight hundred. And that gradually dropped toward the end of nuclear testing down to about two thousand at the end of ’ 95. And remind me again of when EG& G took over, or how did that happen? Well, a little of the background on the REECo efforts here at the NTS. REECo was formed in 1932 by L. J. Reynolds as an electrical contracting firm. And it prospered pretty well, and by the 1950s they’d become one of the major electrical contractors in the United States, electrical construction contractors. Was it founded here or—? At El Paso, Texas, actually. And then they became involved in the nuclear program very early on. They did a lot of the electrical construction at the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos [ National Laboratory]. Then continued on into the fifties with some of what was called the classified ABC projects. They were the prime electrical contractor on the gaseous diffusion plant at Portsmouth, Ohio, which was a very large project. Matter of fact, I believe on that one project, REECo had UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 like two thousand electricians on that job. And then about that time, I think it was December of 1950, REECo and two joint venture partners, Robert E. McKee Company and Brown and Olds Mechanical, were given the contract at the test site, which is now called the Nevada Test Site, to start building the infrastructure: the roads, the buildings, the utility systems. And then during the first atmospheric testing, Operation Ranger early in 1952, REECo also provided support to those activities, things like the scientific cabling, the power, and those sorts of things for the atmospheric tests. And then continued supporting the program in the remainder of 1951 and ’ 52. And then late in 1952, REECo and its joint venture partners were awarded a prime support contract to the then AEC [ Atomic Energy Commission]. REECo held that contract for the next forty- five years, clear through 1995. Now in 1967, EG& G Incorporated acquired REECo. It was ’ 67. Nineteen sixty- seven. And EG& G had also been in the nuclear business on the technical side from the very inception. And then shortly thereafter, the joint venture between REECo and Brown and Olds and Robert E. McKee was dissolved, and REECo operated as a separate entity, a sole, wholly- owned subsidiary of EG& G. So that’s kind of where we wound up for the remainder of the forty- five years, as a wholly- owned subsidiary of EG& G. [ 00: 10: 00] Well, we can back up a little bit from the jump from ’ 67 because you have some material you were going to go through about REECo. Because as much information as you can give me about both your personal involvement and what you observed the nature of the company because from what we have said, it was a very complex undertaking. It was a very complex and dynamic program. And when REECo got the prime support contract in 1952, they began doing a broad, wide variety of diverse functions. REECo did most of the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 construction work on the NTS and the Tonopah Test Ranges [ TTR], both the permanent construction of buildings, roads, utilities, as well as the test construction, which was very significant for each test. So we performed virtually all of that on the test site and the Tonopah Test Range. Now explain something to me because I know that Holmes and Narver was an architectural engineering firm, so I’ve never been clear on divisions of labor between the two or the kinds of things the two were doing at the test site. We worked very closely with Holmes and Narver. Holmes and Narver was basically the architect engineer. They did the design and we did the building. So that’s the way that worked. We did a tremendous number of different activities for the AEC and later ERDA [ Energy Research and Development Agency] and later the DOE [ Department of Energy]. In addition to the conventional construction, both test and permanent, we did virtually all of the underground construction, what’s commonly called mining, and this was also a very big effort. Between the construction, test and permanent, and the underground construction, we would normally have several thousand employees engaged in those activities. It was not unusual in the underground to have four to six major tunnel complexes going at one time, and employing a thousand personnel underground at any one time. REECo constructed fifteen major underground complexes, which represented more than forty- three miles of tunnels, and something like twenty- four vertical shafts excavated conventionally. In addition to the underground and surface construction, one of the big efforts was drilling. That would be both the large- diameter shaft drilling and the slim- hole drilling, exploratory, post- shot, and drilling of that nature. And REECo provided most of the drilling that was ever done on the test site. During the early years of underground testing, ’ 61, ’ 62, when I UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 first came to the test site, there were something like thirty- plus drill rigs drilling in Yucca Flats, drilling primarily emplacement holes. So this was before the real advancement of the technology of shaft drilling, so it took a lot of drill rigs to accomplish the mission at that time. After we evolved and improved the techniques of shaft drilling, we could normally get by with three to five drill rigs [ Figure 5] drilling emplacement shafts on a three- shift- per- day, seven- day- per- week basis in order to keep up with the program. Let me understand this, then. You need more drills for a single shaft, or is it one per, or—? Well, when we first went into the underground nuclear testing in 1961, it was obvious we had a great need for vertical shafts. And you have two options. You can drill them or you can sink them conventionally, in a mining fashion. Mining was too slow and too expensive for the number of shafts they needed. So it was obvious that the shafts had to be drilled. And the state of the art of shaft drilling at that time was that you would start with— and I’ll call a shaft at that time thirty- six inches in diameter or something in that range��� you would start by drilling a twelve- inch hole from the surface to the terminal depth, and then you would come back and you’d go down with a twenty- four- inch cutter and drill it to twenty- four inch, and then come back and drill it to thirty- six inches. And that was too slow, too costly. So it was obvious that we had to improve the technology there. And that was one of the big challenges. [ 00: 15: 00] So over the next several years, the art of shaft drilling dramatically improved. Starting with the techniques that I’ve just described, we went next to— let me look at my chart here. I described the method of drilling these shafts like in ’ 61, early ’ 62, with the multiple passes. By 1962, REECo, with the drilling architect engineer, Fenix and Scisson at that time, and the heavy equipment manufacturers, began working on new techniques. By 1962 we were drilling forty- eight- inch- diameter holes with a single pass using tandem hole openers. What that UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 means is you have a drilling assembly with maybe a twelve- inch cutter on the bottom and right above that maybe a twenty- four- inch cutter, thirty- six- inch cutter above that, and a forty- eight- inch. So instead of having to drill the hole three or four times, you can drill it all in one pass. Tandem, you say that is? Tandem, yes. T- A- N- D- E- M hole openers, it’s called. By 1963 the hole openers were used for stabilization. We went to larger drill collars for weights and drilling pipe increased to about eight- and- five- eighths inches, and we were drilling as large as sixty- four inches in diameter. By 1964 we had a mandrill weight of up to fifty thousand pounds, and we started using air foam as a circulation system to get rid of the cuttings, and we achieved eighty- six- inch diameter. By 1965 the mandrill weight had increased to seventy thousand pounds with the integral stage bit and roller stabilizers to keep the whole assembly stabilized. By 1972 we had made huge breakthroughs. We went to flat- bottom bits up to one hundred twenty inches in diameter and three hundred thousand pounds of weight, using split weights and an integral dual string. And what the integral dual string means is that it’s a dual drilling pipe. Then the outer pipe would be thirteen- and- five- eighths inches, the inner string would be seven inches in diameter. The drilling media, which was air and water, would be pumped down the annulus between the two pipes and it would jet out across the bit and lift the cuttings up the inner string. So that was a big breakthrough. Let’s stop here for a second so I can understand some of the mechanics of this. You’re obviously working with these various entities. Yes. You have an engineering problem, you have a construction problem, all these things to create these things, and these are being just made for the test site alone? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 At that time we were probably the only ones in the world having the need for that many deep, large- diameter shafts. And the mandrill weight, I mean physically does it have to be lifted onto the drill? You load weights onto the mandrel. You have what’s called a large mandrel, which is kind of the inner structure. It hooks to the bit body at the bottom. Above that you’ll have your roller stabilizers. Then you’ll have a mandrel, which is a round steel structure. You load the weights around that, around the mandrel. We’re going to call that Figure 7 so I know that’s a perfect illustration of it. Amazing. So by 1975, through other refinements, we went up to weights of about four hundred thousand pounds of total weight on the mandrel and bit, and the shafts were drilled at rates of up to a hundred feet per day and with a bottom offset of less than six inches off plumb from top to bottom. Oh, and that’s what you were saying before about the mandrill, that somebody else uses a plumb bob. Yes. The four hundred thousand pounds I talk about, probably two hundred thousand pounds or so of that is applied to the actual cutters. The remaining two hundred thousand pounds is held back and acts as a plumb bob. That’s what keeps your hole straight and plumb. Amazing. And then what did you mean when you said there was a breakthrough with the drill bit, a flat—? [ 00: 20: 00] Yes, I’d talked about the multiple passes starting with the small bit, then the larger bit, and then I talked about the tandem hole openers, which is one above the other. The flat- bottom bit is just cutters mounted on a flat surface full diameter. Yes, this is Figure 8, and this is a picture of it. So then you don’t need to have the tandem. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 That’s correct. It’s drilled in one pass, full diameter, through one cutter face. So there’s something special about all these bits here that allow it to do that? It’s just applying all your cutters on one surface, rather than one above the other. And you can apply a lot of weight. You can get very big and large in diameter. And let’s call this Figure 9. Here’s your evolution of big hole drilling. This is great. Yes, this chart describes the evolution of shaft or big hole drilling at the test site, from 1961 through 1975, when we pretty well had developed the techniques to meet our total needs. Now so I can understand the relations to the test itself, there’s something about the nature of the tests that’s requiring—? The tests, beginning in 1961 when we first started emplacing nuclear experiments into these drill holes, we started with probably shafts of thirty- six inches in diameter. The tests rapidly became much more complex, much larger, dictating larger diameter, deeper shafts, and that dictated the need for the evolution of shaft drilling. So the tests themselves were larger in yield? It could be yield, it could be the amount of diagnostics that was needed underground, the size of the diagnostic canister, the number of cables that went from the diagnostic canister back to the surface to the diagnostic recording part, all dictated the need for larger, deeper shafts. And what were the manpower implications of this? Who’s operating these? People have to go down those shafts sometimes, right? If we’re just drilling a shaft for the emplacement of a nuclear test, normally you do not have to go down that shaft. You just drill it, case it if you need to, but we didn’t have to do a lot of casing. We had to do some. And then you emplace the nuclear experiment in that shaft. We did have experiments where the scientists wanted an excavation at the bottom of those drill shafts. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 So in that case, we’d drill the shaft, we would line the shaft with steel casing, and then we would put miners down to do excavation in the bottom of that drill hole shaft. That was quite a specialty. I guess, because they wanted a larger ground zero or— They wanted certain experiments that dictated an excavation at the bottom of that shaft. How big could that get? Cavities of maybe twenty, thirty feet in diameter, maybe some short drifts. So were there certain kinds of miners that were—? Yes, we had a cadre that kind of specialized in that. We did quite a bit of it, oh, during the sixties and into the seventies. OK. In total, we probably drilled in excess of five hundred and fifty of these emplacement shafts at diameters of forty- eight inches up to generally a hundred and twenty inches, ten foot in diameter. Five hundred fifty over how many years? More than five hundred and fifty, and that would not include the smaller ones at thirty- six inches in diameter, so overall we probably drilled more than six hundred shafts. I’d think, at a total of, oh, more than a million lineal feet, like a million fifty thousand lineal feet of drilling. Depths on the test site to more than three thousand feet. Probably averaged something less than two thousand. So this is underground testing in shafts alone. This isn’t even getting into— In drill shafts. This doesn’t get into the tunnels. That’s correct. Going along with the rapidly evolving test program for the underground, you had the same kind of evolution needed [ 00: 25: 00] on the construction side of it. For instance, in 1961- 1962 time frame, when we were UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 emplacing in like [ a] thirty- six- inch- diameter shaft, the emplacement weight of the down hole assembly – that’s the device assembly, the diagnostic canister, the cables, the down hole messenger, whether it’s drill pipe or cables – might have weighed twenty to forty tons, and there might be twenty or thirty diagnostic cables on it. One of the most critical areas in which we had to deal with on the nuclear program was the safety of lowering these heavy assemblies into the drill hole. But in ’ 61, ’ 62 we were dealing with weights of twenty to forty tons and we would use cranes, generally cranes. Oh, our largest crane at that time, late ’ 61, early ’ 62, was probably a ninety- ton capacity truck crane, something like you’d see running up and down the streets in Las Vegas. And this is probably the most critical time of a nuclear test is when you’re actually doing the lowering, at least the critical time for that type of test. The program dictated almost immediately the need for larger, heavier experiments. So very rapidly we had to start acquiring equipment that would handle heavier loads, and equipment that could finitely control the lowering of these assemblies. So in 1963 we probably went from ninety- ton emplacement cranes to two- hundred- and- fifty- ton crawler cranes. By 1968 or ’ 69 we were up to five- hundred- ton specialty cranes called ringer cranes. I have a picture of one of those here. Yes, let’s have a picture of that. I need to get an idea of what you’re talking about. OK, and this is Figure 14. This would be a ringer crane with a capacity of five hundred ton. And by the 1970s we were using these and emplacing down hole loads weighting up to nearly four hundred tons. So then is this technology of the crane itself evolving, or these kinds of cranes have other applications? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 They do have other applications, but we probably had about as many of these big, heavy- lift cranes as any contractor in the country because you just didn’t see that many of them around. This was another example of that ringer crane in 1972. We’ll call that Figure 13. And that’s the Flax event, U2dj, in Area 2, and that was probably our heaviest down hole load up to that point in time, of almost eight hundred thousand pounds, four hundred tons. The device and its things— All the down hole assembly. The whole assembly. Oh my gosh. And as you can see, by this time you had the large canisters, you had lots of cables, we were going down hole on heavy drill pipe, and there were certain lines- of- sight sections within the— Those are the lines- of- sight on the left. Yes. And this is the hole itself here? That is the crane, and the boom of the crane is sitting right over the hole. Mm hmm. This is an amazing picture! What’s this? This would be a ground zero area. We’ll call this Figure 12. This would probably have been in the mid- sixties, depicting the typical layout of a down hole operation. And you see the buildings that are used, the temporary buildings that are used to assemble various components. You’ll see the crawler crane, which has a capacity of two hundred and fifty tons. We were probably emplacing weights of a hundred to a hundred and fifty tons UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 with that crane. And you can see the drill pipe that’s used to lower the assembly. You see the cable trays from the surface ground zero back to the recording trailer parks. That’s what these things radiating out are. [ 00: 30: 00] Yes, those are cable trays. The cables go clear from the diagnostic rack in the hole, up the hole, and clear back to the recording trailer park. So these recording trailers are far enough away that they’re not going to be— They would be outside the influence of any crater or that sort of thing. These are all shock- mounted and that sort of thing. What kind of distance— it’s hard for me to get a sense of— these are trucks, so would it be a quarter of a mile? From the surface ground zero back to the trailer park in this case, they would vary experiment to experiment, but I would say that’s probably five or six hundred feet. All right. Very interesting. And then I think I’ve described the equipment used up into the seventies, where we had down hole weights of up to seven or eight hundred thousand pounds. By the mid- 1980s there was further evolution, further need for larger cranes because of larger, heavier diagnostic assemblies down hole. We actually by the mid- eighties had cranes [ Figure 16] that would go up to nine hundred and fifty tons, and we actually emplaced experiments of more than a million pounds, or five hundred tons. And the crane would look— here was a picture of one experiment, Contact. I don’t remember exactly what the weight of that was but you— Go back to this for a second, Dale, and I want to put a number on this, Figure 19. This is the assembly? That is the diagnostic rack. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 OK, the diagnostic rack. That’s where the experiments are above the device itself. That is gigantic. And the cables go from— yes. The diagnostic rack at times could be a couple of hundred feet long. When we were out at the test site and saw that British test that didn’t go, I don’t think— were we looking at heights— when you go up to the second floor, you see where the device itself— Are you talking about in the tower? In the assembly tower? Yes. Those towers would be anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet high, in modules of twenty- five feet. But the thing you need to remember is you might only have a hundred feet of the canister hanging in the tower but there might already have been some of it put in the hole and then you assemble these at the collar of the hole. Got it. That’s really impressive. Now this would be a Manitowoc 6000 with the Lampson load extender and it had a maximum rate of capacity of nine hundred and fifty tons. So this is this Manitowoc crane. Most of the cranes we used from 1970s clear through the 1990s were Manitowocs. They build a lot of good heavy- lift cranes, and their control system for lowering was extremely good. There’s a story which I believe to be true. We had bought a new crane, I think it would’ve been in the late sixties or early seventies. I think it was the five- hundred- ton ringer crane. And we sent several people back to the factory for the final tests. One of them was one of our crane operators. And during the load test, they actually set an egg down and lowered a very heavy load right UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 down on top of the egg without breaking the egg. That’s how good the control systems and the operators were, that we had to have for doing this kind of work. Incredible. So this is Figure 17. That’s a good picture because you see it in reference to the size of the guy. There’s another one of it. That’s Figure 15. This was probably a sixty- hundred- and- fifty- ton Manitowoc with a Lampson load extender, and this is probably a partial picture of the nine- hundred- and- fifty- ton Manitowoc with the Lampson load extender. So this is Figure 17, the larger one. Yes. This is great becau