Willow Island 40 Years Later: A Lingering Cloud

By Carl E. Feather

Two hours into his day sleep after finishing the midnight shift, Bob Doty awoke with a start; it was shortly after 10 a.m., Thursday, April 27, 1978.

Bob was mayor of the Pleasants County town of Belmont and a lieutenant for the town’s volunteer fire department. He made his living at Union Carbide’s Sistersville plant. He’d just finished two back-to-back shifts and was exhausted. Awakened suddenly, he noticed an eerie quiet.

 “I usually didn’t get up until 4 or 5 in the afternoon,” Bob says. “But that morning, I woke up and had this funny feeling. I couldn’t hear anything; it was unusual for the house to be quiet with four kids living there. I walked downstairs, and my wife was gone. I opened the door, and a friend of ours was walking away from it, toward her car. She just turned around, looked at me kind of funny, got in the car, and left.”

The phone rang. Jim Riggs from the fire department had a startling message, “They may need (the building) to put some of the bodies in there.”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?” Bob replied.

“The tower has collapsed.”

The Steeles

During spring 1978, the second cooling tower of the Allegheny Energy Supply Company’s (now Mon Power) new coal-burning generating plant grew skyward at a rate of five feet a day, at least when the weather was warm enough to pour concrete. The tower stood between its 430-foot-tall sister, completed in August 1977, and West Virginia Route 2.

The towers were amazing engineering feats. When completed, the second tower would be 357 feet in diameter at the base and 429 feet high. Built of reinforced concrete, it required a small army of carpenters, ironworkers, and laborers.

None of the ironworkers was more experienced than Emmett Steele, 61, who’d worked up and down the Ohio Valley along with his nephews: Larry Gale, 32; Ronald, 30; Ernest, 29; and Miles, 26. Another nephew, Robert, 35, was working elsewhere on the Willow Island site. And the boys’ father, Lee, would’ve been on the tower, too, but he’d gone on disability due to an ongoing battle with leukemia.

The marriage of Lee Steele and Mollie Blouir had joined two families with a penchant for construction. The aptly named Steeles had been ironworkers for generations, going back to their first ancestor in the valley, who arrived in the 1800s.

“My grandpa raised a bunch of boys who had the value of a great work ethic,” says Angie Colvin, one of four children born to Larry Gale and Barbara Steele. “After they got off from working all day, they’d still find the time to go help somebody put on a roof or do some other project. If somebody down the road needed help, they’d take care of them. They just had this wonderful work ethic.”

Indeed, shop talk was common whenever the clan got together at the home of Paw Paw and Maw Maw Steele for dinner every Sunday. Angie says it was like a scene from The Waltons, as 30 to 40 members gathered to be fed by Lee and his wife, Mollie.

 “We were so family oriented,” Angie says. “Every Sunday, my grandmother would make 30 pies. That is how many people would come to dinner. Her mixing bowls were huge; she’d cook for all this family.”

Building a Landmark

The traditional construction method for a project like this was to keep building the scaffolding higher and higher, with its foundation embedded securely in the ground. But a “lift-form technique” was used at Willow Island. It was really an ancient construction method but not used as commonly anymore.

With a lift-form, scaffolding was bolted directly into freshly poured concrete. After the concrete had hardened and strengthened properly, workers could stand on the scaffolding to secure the next layer—a process repeated daily until the project was finished. Contractor Research-Cottrell’s goal was to add one entire circular lift—a five-foot rise between two horizontal joints—to the structure each day.

Each morning, workers would knock down the previous formwork. Ironworkers would then weave reinforced steel rods into the backbone in preparation for the next pour. This took about three hours. Next came the pours: 3,000 pounds of concrete per lift, delivered in buckets, filled from hoppers, fed by concrete trucks, and lifted from a cathead above the site. The pours were generally done by 3 p.m., when the workers would climb down, head out Gate 6, and go home to their families or to a lonely motel room.

For the scaffolding to be secured properly, the curing concrete needed enough time at the right temperatures to reach a minimum of 1,000 pounds per square inch (psi)—and preferably twice that amount. Ideally, the concrete should have been cured at a temperature of at least 55°F for at least 24 hours. The men’s lives depended on it since the scaffolding was bolted into the concrete. At a height of 166 feet, there simply was no room for error.

The 28th lift was poured on April 26; two-thirds of the scaffolding was set in Pour 28, and another one-third was set in the previous day’s lift: Pour 27. As Larry Gale, Barbara, and their four children returned home from that evening’s church service, Angie listened to her father talk about the day’s work.

 “He [was] worried about the (concrete) pour they’d done that day. But we didn’t know what he was talking about. Mom and Dad talked about that all the time,” she says.

 That night, temperatures in Willow Island hovered in the upper 40s—about average for that time of year. The morning of April 27, workers climbed up on the scaffolding, only about 18 hours after it’d been secured into Pour 28. Investigators later estimated that the compressive strength of Pour 28 was only 220 psi that morning, instead of the recommended minimum of 1,000 psi.

You can read the rest of this article in this issue of Goldenseal, available in bookstores, libraries or direct from Goldenseal.