Patrick Holloran stood under the mango tree, fascinated by the painted turtle that had just crawled out from under the heavy tropical foliage near the giant bamboo trees. It was a large amphibian with a glistening black shell and yellow markings on the sides of its head.
As Holloran studied the colorful reptile, a smaller snapping turtle suddenly galloped out from the same spot and, with mouth wide open, lunged at the painted turtle's stern end. While Holloran watched in horror, the snapping turtle quickly chewed its way through the vital organs under the painted turtle's shell, emerged through the bow, and hurried away without stopping. Holloran stared in disbelief at the lifeless shell. What a few minutes before had been a live turtle was now just an empty shell with two open ends, like an old piece of glazed tubing.
Holloran suddenly sat up in bed. Hot beads of sweat were rolling down his contorted face. He snapped on his reading lamp and rubbed his eyes.
"Saint Patrick, save me," he exclaimed. "That same dream. But WHY?" His hands were shaking as he lit a cigarette. But he almost instantly crushed it into the ashtray on his night table.
"I've got it," he said out loud. "That power failure yesterday. That's what it is. I had the same crazy dream after each of those other two power failures."
Holloran was the American chief engineer of the Butano de Mexico chemical plant in Tampico, Mexico. The plant was only six months old, but some of its electrical machinery had come from a defunct chemical plant in nearby Yucatan.
The plant's electric generating equipment consisted of one 5-MW, 4,160-V generator, driven by a topping turbine, which ran at 900 psi and exhausted at 150 psi. A second similarly configured unit was rated at 6 MW, and a third produced 1,500 kW. All in all, it was a fairly nice installation.
Holloran had been transferred from the firm's Veracruz division shortly before the Tampico plant was commissioned. But from day one, he and Bolivar Cornoz—the native chief electrician—had locked horns. Then, only a month later, the entire chemical plant went dead due to a power failure. Holloran and Cornoz had words, each blaming the other.
Eliot Nevins, the plant's general manager, stopped the argument, making it crystal clear that any power failure made him look bad in the home office in Mexico City. Nevins wanted a detailed report on the cause of the outage. But Holloran didn't have any logical explanation. That night, he had his first turtle dream.
Six weeks later, there was a second power failure. As before, with no warning, the large plant suddenly went dead. All was darkness, and it was sickeningly hot and quiet inside. Lacking a tie-line to the local utility, the hot process plant had to be started up from scratch. Placing the many electric-driven pumps and steam process equipment back in service took several hours of sweaty, backbreaking work. Everyone was on edge.
This time Holloran's and Cornoz's words and accusations were even more heated. Eliot Nevins was kept busy on the phone trying to explain what had happened to the central engineering office in Mexico City. But just as with the first failure, no reason could be found for the outage. All relays, interlocks, fuses—in fact, everything—had been thoroughly checked and found to be in working condition.
Before putting the plant back on steam, Holloran had his assistant check the high-speed stop and overspeed trip circuits of all three topping turbines. They all worked perfectly. So the electric-generating units were returned to service. Because Holloran could neither explain the cause of the outage to Nevins nor assure him that power wouldn't fail again, all department heads were nervous. The fear of another shutdown hung above their heads like a guillotine blade, ready to drop unexpectedly. Among the plant's engineers, Holloran's stock dropped to an all-time low.
Again, the chief engineer said he thought the cause was electrical. Again, Cornoz insisted it was mechanical. There followed another argument that was so nasty it looked like the men would come to blows. That night, Holloran again had that gory dream of the two turtles near the bamboo trees.
The chief was convinced that Cornoz was stacking the cards to get him transferred or fired. But although he couldn't prove anything, after each power failure Holloran kept one eye on the chief electrician while using the other to study the system, component by component.
It was common knowledge at the plant that Cornoz had expected his brother-in-law, Raphael Jiminez, to get the chief engineer's job. Jimenez was the chief engineer of one of the chemical company's smaller plants in Zacatecas. By now, Holloran was convinced that Cornoz would stop at nothing to get him bounced for good.
Then came the third power failure, and the third nightmarish dream. Making the connection, Holloran nervously lit another cigarette as he sat on the edge of his bed. "That's it, all right," he said out loud again, using a corner of the bed sheet to wipe the sweat from his face.
"It's a warning, that's what it is. In the dream, I'm the painted turtle and Cornoz is the snapping turtle that destroys me. Now there's no doubt about what's going on. If I could only catch him in the act. I wish I knew what the dirty SOB is doing to cause those failures."
The chief took a few more puffs. "I gotta keep on the tail of that sneak," he murmured. "You know, come to think of it, yesterday when the plant went dead he was in my office. So that's how he's playing the game. One of his stooges is doing his dirty work. But I'll get him, I'll get him. . . ."
Then Holloran had another thought. "Today's Friday. Big boss Alvarez is flying down from Mexico City this morning to investigate personally. I need some coffee, right now."
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