a wall of dust followed by a wall of rain
Posted by Zonie on August 26, 2025 at 07:26:58
When I got to work this afternoon the sun was shining, but a check of the weather radar showed a mass of storms in southern Arizona moving northward that looked like the outer rain band of a hurricane, though I knew it could not be one.
Later in the afternoon when the southern sky turned deep black, the other Kevin said he would take some time to preemptively get parts under cover or under tarps. Soon after this a wall of dust arrived and soon after that a horizontal wall of rain arrived, driving water into areas that were supposedly under cover. The other Kevin got on the forklift to rescue some items and returned drenched.
I said, "In my experience it feels better opening furnace 15 when drenched. Anyway, it's my turn to get drenched. I need to take the six o'clock reading of the endothermic gas generator, and then I'll help you quench the carburized load."
I returned and reported that the generator room was ankle deep and that the downspout had generated a stream by his car.
Steve of the glass bead shed had taken refuge from the storm in the furnace room, and when he saw that the two Kevins were about to quench the load from furnace 15, he came to watch the show. The lid was opened, and flames shot out, and as the furnace was at 1550°F, it definitely felt better drenched than it would have had we been dry. I hooked the load, moved it over the tank, and plunged it into the oil.
Steve wanted to know why there was so much flame from the furnace. I said, "This is a carburized load, so we were pumping extra natural gas into the furnace. It burned in the presence of air when the lid was opened, but in the oxygen-poor atmosphere of the closed furnace, it dissociated into hydrogen and carbon, and the carbon atoms entered the iron structure of the steel parts and enabled us to harden the outside of the parts. Carburization was invented about 1000 years ago by Japanese swordsmiths. They would take the red-hot katanas and swirl them in rice straw to add carbon. This allowed the outside of the sword to be hard and the inside to be flexible. We do the same thing with natural gas today."
We actually didn't get a whole lot of rain, just 0.27". It just seemed like a lot because it all came down at once and was blown horizontally. The wind gusted up to 70 MPH, and the temperature fell from 100°F to 75°F.