No Holidays for the Best Sandblaster

May 5-11 is Public Service Recognition Week. Public service employees sometimes have had the dubious honor of being recognized for all the wrong reasons. In the recent past we heard about lavish parties paid with tax dollars and a scandal involving prostitutes and people who provide security for the President. These exceptions always make good media fodder, but in a long economic slump, even dedicated government workers are labled "overpaid and under-worked," while some of the best examples of public service rarely get noticed. 

I retired from the federal workforce five years ago but In the early days of my career, I sandblasted ships. Employing equipment that sprayed abrasive material at high pressure, my job was to descale ship surfaces such as underwater hulls, holding tanks, ballast tanks, voids, and other surfaces that required cleaning or preparation for painting and preservation. It was always a dirty job and given the scale of projects in a naval shipyard, often dangerous. Unlike most tradesmen who worked in relatively clean environments, the sandblasters were among the untouchables of the shipyard, almost always covered in dust and detritus that came off of a ship’s hull or tank. I earned just under $6.00/hour, a fair wage back then, but despite the security of a steady job I approached sandblasting with ambivalence.   

Eustaquio Battung was a shipyard old-timer. A WWII veteran, he was already in his fifties when I started in the trade. In my eye, “Battung” was likely the best sandblaster in the world. I was convinced that he could go to any shipyard and out-blast and out-work any other sandblaster. His small, wiry frame made him especially adept at maneuvering inside ship’s tanks where severely angled and hidden surfaces made blasting without damaging the surface or injuring oneself particularly difficult. This was especially true inside the ballast tanks of submarines where one had to secure a precarious footing on 2x4s mounted against the frames of the inner and outer hulls.

We sandblasted wearing a canvas suit fitted with an air-fed respirator mask that afforded only limited visibility. A pressurized mixture of abrasive grit and air shot out of the blast nozzle at 100 pounds per-square-inch. At these settings, even a slight graze on a body part meant injury and excruciating pain, and a fall from the upper regions of a ballast tank could spell severe injury or worse. Except for a light mounted near the nozzle, we worked in a cloud of dust and virtual darkness.

Once we completed blasting and removed the abrasive material, we cleaned the surface of any remaining grit and dust prior to inspection and painting. Battung’s tanks were always free of missed spots--what we called “holidays.” Sandblasting in the shipyard was a 24-hour operation, and we often used shift change to chide the other shifts over the quality of their work and competed to see who could accomplish the most work with the least holidays. I always thought this was a clever motivational tool. For Battung, it was a matter of pride and self-respect.

Battung sandblasted all types of naval vessels over a span of a 40-year career. He showed up every day to take care of business--to do his best. Battung died in 1999 at the age of 81. I never asked him how many ships he worked on over the years, and I doubt he ever kept count, but he was always happy to show a rookie the best way to sandblast a submarine tank. If I could award Eustaquio Battung a posthumous honor for his duty and service, I would thank him for teaching me how to work steady and work smart, a philosophy I took to all other jobs. I would also thank him for his dedication to excellence and for refusing to leave “holidays” or shame in his wake.