By Chuck Bird, Vice President of Engineering
As told by Chuck Bird:
Back in the '90s, a service engineer from Numed’s engineering department and I rented a Ryder truck to pick up a Numed GE Nuclear Systems. We started in Denton and our destination was downtown Detroit.
After arriving in Detroit, we began deinstallation at 2:00 a.m. and yes, you read that right, 2 a.m. in the morning. As anyone has ever been to Detroit in the winter knows, it’s brutal. The temperature outside was -30 degrees. Everything was moving along smoothly until we winched the camera gantry up the fiberglass ramp we had stored in the back of our truck. This was the same ramp we slept on when it wasn’t our turn to drive.
Halfway up, the dolly wheels broke through the slightly frozen ramp, and if not for lots of huffing, puffing and pushing, we would have been stuck there until the spring thaw!
Once we loaded the system securely in the truck around 5 a.m. we began our drive back home. The service engineer, Bill took the first shift sleeping in the back of the truck on the ramp which we had now converted into a mattress. About an hour later, I heard a knocking from the back of the truck. Worried, I pulled over, lifted the back-sliding door and found Bill standing there shaking with his skin BLUE. He had fallen asleep but thankfully he was awakened up by his shivering. Thank goodness he did because that would have been a long and lonely drive by myself!
Here at Numed we have definitely seen and experienced some crazy things during our day-to-day routines.