Then there was the time I was on a tour in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky and a storm on the surface knocked the power out. We had lights one minute and no lights the next. Back on the farm, we would have said it was darker than the inside of a cow. There were two guides with our group and they had us immediately sit down where we were. One guide stayed with us and the other went down the trail to where they knew there was a "safety box." She came back in about twenty minutes with two Coleman lanterns, both of which needed new mantels (which the guides carried in their pockets along with safety matches). I have been in paper mills where the lights suddenly went out. It is not as dark as the inside of a cow but definitely more dangerous than being in Mammoth Cave with knowledgeable guides.

I must have told this story before, but it is worth telling again. We were rebuilding a paper machine on an accelerated schedule. It was a massive rebuild. I was the Owner's representative on night shift. We had about 75 jackhammers and 2 hoe rams operating on each shift, all inside the paper machine building. The noise was unimaginable...

The week of Thanksgiving, 1954, my grandmother was overcome by natural gas and died. The cause was an ancient water heater that did not have a safety valve. When the pilot flame went out, the gas did not shut off. She and my grandfather were vacationing in Florida, and it was a rental house. The flame went out in the middle of the night. They saved my grandfather, but my grandmother had had other medical issues, and they could not revive her. Whether the gas at that time had a smell added to it, or not, I do not know. It is all odorized today. In pulp and paper mills, we have many gases. Most naturally stink on their own. However, the safe employee must assume they don't all have a smell and that the odorous smell of a stinky one can mask the smell of a far more dangerous one.

Sunday, 24 May 2026, I watched the sporting event of the year that I thoroughly enjoy--the Indianapolis 500. The greatest auto race in the world has succeeded in seriously improving its performance and dramatically improving its safety record. Why can't we do the same? In Paperitalo's publication, PaperMoney, we have a department, "Risks: Fires, Fatalities and Catastrophes." We started this chronicle of such events in 2017. There has been no discernible improvement in the nine years since then.

Here in Atlanta, Georgia, a bunch (pride, brood, covey, ?) of Waymo cars, when without a passenger, have taken to going to a roundabout in a residential neighborhood and continuously circling, leading to congestion for the residents. They are unable to get out of their driveways. Perhaps the software needs an upgrade. Nevertheless, driverless trucks (fork trucks, service trucks, tool boxes, ?) are coming, probably faster than we want to believe.