Engineer answers DuPont's call to serve

Web posted Monday, November 13, 2000

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By Virginia Norton
Staff Writer

Life was sweet to John Granaghan in the late 1970s.

The petro-chemical plant he managed for E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. at Cape Fear, N.C., was running beyond capacity. Employee safety was also good.

John Granaghan was one of DuPont's leading men at Savannah River Plant from 1979 to 1989. A mechanical engineer, he left the plant one year before Westinghouse took over its management. This year he has taken on a new role as the chairman of the 50th anniversary celebration of Savannah River Site. JONATHAN ERNST/STAFF

After moving around to more than a dozen assignments with the company during a 25-year career, he and his wife Nancy had built a nice home near the cape, a place heavy with beaches, golf courses and collards that seemed to reach for the sky.

Sitting down one October afternoon, he began to think he would like to keep his job at Cape Fear until he retired, he said.

His resolution evaporated with a phone call.

The caller requested Mr. Granaghan meet him two days later at Savannah River Plant.

They ``wanted me to take the manager's job. When DuPont tells you they want you to do this `But you have an option,' you really don't if you want to eat. You pack your bags and get on the road,'' he said.

Mr. Granaghan, a mechanical engineer who always has a good yarn to tell, moved from shift engineer to controlling engineer to the corporate office and back out to various plants. His career coincided with a time of major expansion for DuPont.

He supervised employee relations at some sites. At others he managed different stages of production.

But he had never managed any plant as big as SRP before his appointment there as manager of DuPont's operations - few people had.

Savannah River Plant, with its maze of pipes, had been the biggest construction project ever attempted up until that time. Operating costs were more than $1 million a day in 1978, the plant's 25th year of operation and the year prior to Mr. Granaghan's arrival. The yearly payroll was around $120 million.

``Somebody told me at that point that was the greatest collection of scientists and engineers who existed under one roof,'' said Mr. Granaghan, 71, who managed the plant from 1979 to 1989. He is chairman of the 50th anniversary celebration of Savannah River Site.

Through meetings, talks and evaluations with the scientists and engineers, he got a virtual Ph.D. himself, he said. ``I have not experienced it, but I have read and talked about it.''

One of the highlights of his career was a 30-minute conversation with Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb.

``I had read his biography. He had had a foot cut off by a street car in Munich back in his younger days,'' Mr. Granaghan said.

But Dr. Teller brushed aside personal questions and instead went up to a blackboard and drew the reactor of the future and what it was going to do, Mr. Granaghan said.

Rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dr. Teller was an intriguing part of his job, but ``all the while you had to keep your eye on safety, because nothing will get a plant manager in trouble faster than poor safety,'' he said.

The year before Mr. Granaghan moved to the Augusta area, concerns about the aging reactors at the plant began to surface. A congressional committee report worried that the plant's ``galloping obsolescence'' could threaten the nation's weapons program.

SRP also had produced more than 50 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste. Some had been removed from the site; the rest was in storage.

The plant's mission was to produce plutonium and tritium for defense purposes but also to make radioactive material for medical and other uses, study alternative fuel sources and conduct environmental research.

DuPont ran the plant for nearly 30 years and only charged the government $1 at the end of its contract in 1990. Westinghouse, its successor, assumed responsibility in April of that year.

During the transition period, the plant's reactors were shut down for evaluation and maintenance.

Illness forced Mr. Granaghan to step out of the manager's role before DuPont ended its watch at Savannah River Plant.

By the time Mr. Granaghan ended his professional career in 1989, DuPont had come under severe criticism for its management practices at the site. Further study, however, showed the criticism was unjustified, although operating procedures and equipment were upgraded under Westinghouse.

``We passed the baton to them (Westinghouse), and they have been doing an outstanding job overall,'' Mr. Granaghan said.

Reach Virginia Norton at (706) 823-3336.

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