This was the stupidest job I ever did, until another one came along that was even more stupid.

In the summer of 1990 I was working periodically way out passed the West Side Highway on the passenger ship terminal piers, 88, 90 and 92.  This is where the QEII and other cruise ships dock in NYC.  The next pier down, 86, is where the USS Intrepid is permanently on exhibit as a floating Museum.  Residents call it the USS Decrepit, due to it’s lack of apparent upkeep.

The passenger terminal area is also used for ‘pipe-n-drape’ events.  For example, the annual NYC Flower Week uses all three of the terminals for exhibit space.  The space is divided up into booths and the carps put up the pipe and drape walls of the booths.  Our job was to supply electricity to the booths that needed power for their exhibits.  We would walk along with work tickets, heavy-duty extension cords and a 10 foot ladder.  We would locate the right booth, then the nearest power box.  The power boxes were just like the circuit breaker panel in an average home, except that instead of wires coming out of it and going to the lights and sockets in your house, these boxes just had ‘quad boxes’ of power outlets attached to every side surface.

We would use plastic cable tie wraps to cinch the extension cords to the rafters and run them along to the nearest power box, and then double-wrap the cables where they would drop to the floor along the back wall of the booth to which power was being run.  Some booth would get lighting, too, which were metal conduit with 4 or 5 clip lights on it that we would hang from the rafters using aircraft cables.

Then came the Stupidest Job I ever did there.

It was the summer that the Bush Administration was goading Saddam Hussein into war, the first Gulf War.  An arabic nation was sending a tour around America to ‘educate’ the American People about itself.  The event was completely free and stayed about a week, maybe two in every place they visited.  It took about a week to load the show in and two days to load it out.

The show was pretty huge.  They had 6 96-channel dimmer packs and 2-48 channel dimmers.  These were 1980s dimmers, before ETC’s Sensors, so they were large and heavy.  Each one wanted 3 phase power, plus neutral and ground wires, so that was 5 wires to each dimmer rack.  There were two power rooms downstairs to feed these racks, so the room was divided into two, and each half of the dimmers were fed from one of these two power rooms.  They rented step-down transformers and stashed them in the power room, each one taking the house 440v and dropping that down to standard 120v AC power.

I was one of the only crew that knew how to balance power loads, so I was put in charge of running the feeder cables down stairs from the power rooms out to the door that would lead up to the main floor.  Because of the distance and power loads involved we had to use the largest diameter multi-stranded copper cable available, called ‘4-ought’ (4/0) (although the ground wire was smaller gauge, ‘2-ought’).  4/0 cable is almost a half inch thick copper wire and weighs about a pound per foot, so a single wire of 4/0 100 feet long would weigh about 100 pounds!  Each dimmer gets 4 individual strands of 4/0 and one of 2/0 and there were 4 dimmer packs needing to be fed, so we wound up with 20 cables in the feeder bundles that we had to run to each of the two power rooms.

So that’s almost 20 pounds per foot and we had to run 200 feet just to get it inside the main floor.  And to make matters worse, the Port Authority told use it could not lay on the ground, but had to be up in the air!  So we had to ‘fly’ 4000 pounds of copper and rubber.  OK, then.

We had block and fall rigs to do this with.  We went up to the i-beam and hung cable clamps and then hung aircraft cable ‘safety chains’ off of those and hung the blocks from that.  Then we used spansets to attach the cable bundles to the long end of the fall.  And then we lifted.  In the middle of this about half a dozen people showed up to stare at me and my crew.  After we finished off the first point, I asked who they were and why they were here.  They said they didn’t know, but Manpower had told them to go work on the piers.  I had unskilled labor now to fly the thousands of pounds of feeder and getting it up to the main floor.

It was damned cold out, with the bay doors open to the wind blasting in from the Hudson River.  We took turns going into the power room where the transformers threw off their extra heat and made it nice and toasty.

The next day came time to go inside and run the feeders down the floor to the dimmers.