Power Plant Comments

From David McKinney Jr via Facebook (2)

(The power plants used) Cooper-Bessemer Co. (Grove City, Pennsylvania), 4-cycle, turbo-charged, dual-fuel V-16 (Model LSV-16) diesel motors. The engine turned a 3-ton fly wheel connected to a generator. The PAR and MSR power plants had very similar equipment.
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The air intake system had a unique filter/cleaning system, that leveraged water to remove dirt or particles from any detonation of inbound missles and to purify the incoming air for the engines. I recall that when the air filtering system was fully operational during testing it was as loud as the V-16 engine running itself.
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Cooper-Bessemer Co. was required to design and construct pollution suppression devices for their diesel generator exhaust due to an environmental impact study, which indicated that the facility would violate N.D. and Federal Clean Air standards.

The first diesel generator unit left the Pennsylvania factory June 25, 1971. The complete unit weighed 35 tons. It was shipped via rail and had to be moved by truck from Hansel over state roads. It required an overload permit which the state finally issued on July 7th.

Program Documentation Cooper-Bessemer LSV-16 Diesel Generator Set:
This documentation is a description of the computer program, which provided the OCE (Office of the Chief of Engineers (Army)) with a mathematical model of the Cooper-Bessemer LSV-16 diesel engine with associated electrical generating equipment and synchronous fuel control to exercise and to predict the performance of the diesel engine power system to electrical load changes and air shock waves due to changes in the environment. Mathematics wizards will love it!

From Jerry Smith via Facebook (2)

One time something happened that caused the radar to do an immediate shut down called crowbar. We were running on generators. This caused a large drop in the load on the generators. The voltage spiked and there was a surge felt on Ottertail's grid. Ottertail complained and BTL made a design change which kept this from happening again.
(Webmaster note: Ottertail is the local electric utility; BTL is Bell Telephone Labs.)