Toston Dam from the Inside

On Thursday last, I conducted an electrical safety survey at the Toston Dam power plant.  Toston Dam is a run-of-the-river dam, and the uppermost barrier on the Missouri River.  In a few weeks, I will be conducting training out there.

I have something of a history with the Toston facility.  The present-day hydro plant superintendent, I, and many others, spent part of 1988 and part of 1989 installing a 10 megawatt power generator in the reconstructed dam.  The generator sits in a concrete pit deep inside the dam.  Water flows around the pit through intake tubes to drive a turbine runner attached to the generator (through a gearbox) on the downstream side.

Early in 1989, while I was working on the Toston project, my grandfather passed away.

I loved that man more than any other.

My grandmother had passed only a few months earlier.  After Grandfather’s passing, my family sorted through all of our grandparent’s earthly belongings and dispersed them as does any family.  I kept a couple of my grandfather’s hats but donated all of his clothes to the Salvation Army.  Among his clothing was a lurid one-of a-kind Hawaiian shirt.  Grandfather looked mildly ridiculous when he wore the shirt, but he loved wearing it.  I can still imagine him standing there with a crooked grin—awash in the too-bright colors of that shirt.

The Toston project was a messy one.  Water.  Cutting oil.  Mud.  Toward the end of the project, the company that employed us, purchased bales of rags from the Salvation Army in Helena so we could wipe down equipment and keep the floors dry.  One afternoon, I broke into a new bale of rags so I could clean-up some oil in the generator pit and out popped a familiar Hawaiian shirt.

For the longest time the whole world stopped and I just stared at the fucking shirt as tears streamed from my eyes.

--Mitchell Hegman