Alcoa aluminum potline freeze-up explosive demolition

Dinner conversation ~15 years after the Alabama call with Alcoa senior VP "Peter." Steel mills cut breakouts with oxyacetylene; aluminum can't be flame-cut, so Alcoa called a Pittsburgh specialist who drilled holes, set explosive charges, and blew the frozen aluminum apart — sometimes destroying the potline in the process.

About 15 years later I was having dinner with a graduate of the department who was a senior executive vice president of Alcoa. I said, "Peter, you guys at Alcoa must have aluminum pot lines freeze up every now and then where they make the molten aluminum, with about a 2-foot thick thing inside a big ceramic container." He said yeah. I said, "when it happens, how do you get it out of there? In carbon steel it happens in steel mills all the time — people dump 300 tons of steel on the floor of the melt shop, it solidifies, and they send in people with oxyacetylene torches and start cutting up this one or two-foot thick carbon steel. Might take a week to drill holes so they can put bolts in and sling these 5-ton pieces of steel out, essentially remelt them. In a steel mill, you have a breakout and you can cut up a big blob with oxyacetylene. You couldn't cut it with plasma, but oxyacetylene will do it. But aluminum you can't. So how do you do it?"

Same incident; the resolution side via Alcoa's Pittsburgh specialist who drills holes, places charges, and breaks up frozen aluminum masses.

About ten or fifteen years later, I was having dinner with Peter O'Brien, who at the time was senior executive VP of Alcoa. I remembered this and said, Peter, you have these big aluminum smelting pots where you make aluminum, and you must have freeze-ups from time to time — what do you do? He says, well, there's this guy in Pittsburgh — of course Pittsburgh is the home of Alcoa, where the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, which was the beginnings of Alcoa, got its name because they were reducing aluminum. There's this guy in Pittsburgh, and he will come and he will blow it for you. He'll drill some holes, put some charges in, and blow it up. And if he's good, he won't blow up your furnace too. He can break it up with an explosive charge — if he's lucky, but it doesn't always work. This is sort of like blowing out the oil wells, when you have a wildcat well and Red Adair would come in with his crane full of explosives and try to blow it out like a candle. This is the guy who blows up the solid aluminum masses. It's good work if you can get it, but the world probably doesn't need too many of those people.

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