Those Who Serve

Whenever I find myself in a cemetery the first headstones that I am drawn to are the Veterans.  They seem to pull my focus to them.  Perhaps it is because I come from a long line of Veterans or because I am a disabled Veteran myself.  All I know is that if I have limited time to document a cemetery it is  Veterans first.

I visited the cemetery in Chloride recently.  It was started in the 1800's and is still being used today, even though Chloride is considered a Ghost Town.  The Cemetery was windblown with wild squash and gourds growing on some of the graves.  The ground was soft and my foot went through to a casket once.  It sits in a vast ocean of desert with tumbleweeds traveling through.  There were paw prints in the soft earth and scat was evident also.  American flags were evident and so were several open grave-sites.

As the wind blew I grabbed some photos and wondered about the Veterans buried here in the cemetery of a Ghost Town.

                                                          Son and Father side by side.

Mountain View Cemetery, Williams AZ

My 16 year old daughter and I have a terrible addiction to cemeteries.  So, as we are driving up to the Grand Canyon in our RV we go through Williams, AZ.  We could hardly wait to park and set up the RV so that we could go back to the cemetery.  We were as they say, "like kids in a candy shop".

Greek Orthodox

 Irma is well loved and remembered.

How far from home you were.

Saint Francis Watches

It is nestled at the foot of the mountains and has large pine trees.  The plots are large and raised and they are decorated.  No stodge rules about no decorations.  These plots have character!  You can tell who visits and keeps up the paint job and leaves tokens.  Tokens are toys, ceramic angels, balloons, photos, flowers, rocks, etc.  The cemetery was alive.  Benches were in evidence in several places.

Older Part

We had no plan that day to photograph headstones, but how could we resist.  Names called to us, plots of interest pulled us in another direction.  We want to go back and properly document this cemetery.

Bullhead City Memorial

I have only recently moved to Bullhead City, AZ.  It is really not a big city.  It sits across the Colorado River from Nevada.

One of the biggest landmarks was the Mohave Power Plant.  Shortly after we moved here they dropped the stack of the Power Plant.  It was a big event.  Today while out taking headstone photos, I noticed a memorial.  It is a Memorial about an explosion that happened in 1985 at the Mohave Power Plant.

History is all around us if only we take a minute to look around.

1985 pipe failure disaster

On June 9, 1985, a 30-inch (760 mm) hot reheat line, under 600 pounds per square inch of pressure, burst open. The reheat line cycles steam back through the boiler stack after it has expanded through the high pressure (HP) turbine and before it reaches the low pressure (LP) turbine. A 1,000-degree steam cloud blew down a door leading to the control room of the station, fatally scalding six workers: Michael Bowman, John Dolan, Ernest Hernandez, Terry Leroy, Danny Norman and Howard Turner. Ten others were injured. The station was out of service for six months while all the steam piping was replaced.^[4]
A report on the accident was completed in May, 1991, but was not released until Christmas Day because of Edison's objections that it would compromise civil suits.^[5]
Although several factors contributed to the pipe's failure, the report said Edison's actions—or lack of actions—were "primary and critical factors in causing the accident":

• Edison knowingly operated the system at temperatures above design specification for long periods of time, and operators were unable to control the temperatures within the system as a result of a "design flaw."

• Even so, the pipe, part of a steam reheat system, was not routinely maintained or inspected, though the pipe shifted and distorted because of exposure to abnormal stresses, the report said.

• Edison's management made high production a priority over safety. In 1979, Edison disciplined a supervisor for ordering an unauthorized inspection of unrelated pipe welds. "The fear SCE management has instilled in its employees is counterproductive to safety and increases the chances that additional incidents as serious as this one may occur in the future," the report said.

The report found no evidence that the accident was caused by a specific action on the day of the pipe failure.

The report recommended sweeping changes to Edison's policies, including annual reports to the PUC on the utility's safety training, inspection and maintenance programs. In addition, the report argues that, because the accident was avoidable, the costs should be borne by Edison's shareholders, not its rate-paying customers.

The Above in italics is from the Wikipedia page.

Ten Year Anniversary of Disaster

And They Hung Their Feet in the Plot

I have grown up hearing the story about my Grandfather, John who took care of the cemetery in Murphysboro, Ill.   Apparently when my Mom was pregnant with me she and my Grandmother would go to the cemetery and sit with their feet hanging over the side of the freshly dug grave and eat lunch with my Grandfather.  That is the beginning of my love of cemeteries.  Pre-birth I was introduced to the magic of the cemetery.
There are more stories of disinterring a Civil War solider and only finding gray dirt that was his body, the hilt of his sword and some buttons off his uniform.
So now I find myself in cemeteries, taking photos, reading headstones and making up stories about the headstones.  I always look for surnames that match ones in my family.
I take Cemetery  Tours and read everything I can on graves, headstones and cemeteries.  I do feel like I came late to the party.  There are so many things to learn about cemeteries.  What do the symbols mean?  What is a footstone, a cenotaph?  I do know the answers for some of the above.  The rest I am willing to learn.

So today when I was taking photos of graves what should wander through the cemetery?  A Graveyard Rabbit.  Okay it was a Jack Rabbit, but I will take it as a sign that I should be blogging about graveyards.