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Above: Flashboards across the top of the Bowersock dam raise the water level, increasing the amount of power the plant is able to produce. Photo by Christina Neff/KANSAN
The river stops here By Dan Curry
These three red generators produce electricity at the power plant. Rotating magnets, spun by river-powered turbines beneath the generators, interact with the electrical fields of charged copper coils inside the red hubs. Photo by Christina Neff/KANSAN
Power Company
Bowersock dam workers risk injury taming the Kaw
All things atrophy. Men grow old. Riverbanks erode. Roots give out, trees fall into the water.
At present, the Bowersock dam endures, forcing back the Kansas River where Massachusetts Street crosses into North Lawrence, channeling water through gates, through turbines turning the seven generators inside the power plant, producing 2.5 megawatts of electricity — enough power to keep bulbs burning into up to 5,000 homes.
The 600-foot dam resists the river and the century-old plant lives because four men, all oak and iron, punch in each day, engaging in work that could break them in two. It's a matter of time. Every dam is waiting to crack.
"It's a great job," says Jason Loss, a Bowersock Mills & Power Company employee and a Lawrence senior study civil engineering.
Loss, and the other three workers, Steve Tucker, a 1996 KU graduate, Dave Readio, an electrical engineer, and Nick Stewart, a Lawrence resident, cover chores at the plant that range from moderately dangerous to downright daredevil.
"Flashboards are probably the most dangerous thing we do on a regular basis," Loss says us he sits in a concrete window and rigs himself up to rope and rappelling gear. He prepares to climb down the wall to reach a plugged drainage chute.
To deploy the flashboards, three men in life jackets edge across the dam while a fourth rides above them in a cart suspended on cables above the river. A winch in the cart is used to raise the flashboard while three men squat in the surging river full of discharge from Topeka's sewage treatment plant.
From the window you can see the dam stretch to the north bank. Eight-foot wide panels, the flashboards, are hinged to the top of the dam and stand like a wall of cards across the dam. The men periodically raise them to lend extra height to the dam, increasing the amount of electricity the plant can produce.
They prop the flashboard up with wooden planks, swinging heavy hammers and nailing the boards into place with two-inch stainless steel nails. Eventually, when the river level rises, one
by-one the supporting beams will snap like toothpicks, and the flashboards slam down.
Readie, the manager, built like a barrel of muscle, who has hands like bear paws and fingers thicker than sausages, describes how trees travel torpedo-like over the open-faced dam. Out on the dam, the men must be alert, or face the brunt of a river-borne battering ram.
"If you start thinking about it, you'd probably never go out there to begin with," Readio says.
Loss has known trouble with flashboards.
Twice he has been pinned beneath them, one being a newer, steel variety at the south end of the dam. A metal hook hit him, sending him sprawling and the door crushing down.
"I remember seeing the river washing all around me," he says.
he couldn't call for help because he couldn't reach the rolls on his big
His co-workers saw him at last, and Loss survived.
Now Loss eyes the river below before he scoops toward the edge of the window. He leaps out. As he rappels down the mossy wall, he holds a long pipe like a fishing spear.
His feet dip into the river. He leans almost upside down and searches for an angle to get at the clogged chute. Finding it, he thrusts the pipe up into the drain. Black debris spills out.
On the other side of the brick wall, within an interior chamber of the power plant, Tucker tries to rethread a bolt in a turbine about the size of a Volkswagen beetle.
A yellow bulb casts the only light, exposing the rusted chains that snake down from the ceiling. The squeal of the other generators pervades the chamber.
"I'm going deaf in one ear because of it," Tucker says.
The men have lowered 18-foot steel doors to keep the river out, but the seal is imperfect. Water sprays in through cracks and spills around Tucker's boots, pooling over the drain hole that Loss is outside trying to unplug.
Every underwater ligature in the chamber is caked with a barnacle-like crust left by hellgrammites, the pincher-armed larvae of the dobson
fly. The insect thrives in river water and feeds on anything, including the flesh of a Bowersock dam man.
"The first time I worked down here I was spooked," Tucker says. "But you get used to it."
Tucker explains that they are revamping this generator after one of its turbine blades cracked.
Four of the seven generators are nearing the end of their operating life, Tucker says. Much of the mechanical system dates back 50 or more years.
"We're always waiting for something to break down." Tucker says.
Tucker is often the first to know. He doubles as the night watchman at the plant, which means he gets to live in the spacious loft above the warehouse and use the plant's electricity. But when there's trouble with a generator, an alarm goes off in his apartment, and he will have to rise from bed and try to fix the problem.
In the chamber where Tucker works, a steel shaft runs from the turbine through the ceiling, where it enters generator number four.
Readio, grease on his face and hands, hunches within the hub of this generator. Delicately, he presses insulating tape across the new copper coils. Up here, the squeal is deafening, and the temperature reaches 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
In a good year, the power plant can produce 1,700,000 kilowatts per hour a month, which the plant routes into the Kansas Power & Light power grid, Readio says. Because the dam's equipment has long since been paid off and the river is free, the only costs to the company are salaries and replacement parts.
KP&L pays the plant 2.45 cents an hour, which means the plant grosses about a half million dollars for the year.
The last few years have been banner years for the plant. Readio boasts.
One can tell Readio likes life on the river. Pictures on the warehouse walls show him smiling, posing with other Bowersock employees.
Workers have been keeping the system going since 1872. The plant has survived seven floods and ice flows, electricity has flowed since 1886 and nothing suggests that it will stop any time soon.
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