took heating oil to nearby school buildings or gasoline to nearby service stations. If the trucks couldn’t come and go, Koch couldn’t sell its products. The OCAW aimed to starve the company out, forcing it back to the negotiating table in a weakened position.
The tanker truck drivers—and even the cops who patrolled the road outside the refinery—belonged to the Teamsters union, which meant that crossing the picket line was akin to violating their own sacred oath of solidarity. The picket line worked. On a typical day at the refinery, about two hundred tanker trucks passed through the gates to pick up fuel and ship it out. That number dropped to near zero after Quinn helped get the OCAW picketers organized and standing in shifts.
The union had cut off the oxygen supply of cash to Koch’s refinery. They knew that the owner, Charles Koch, was losing enormous amounts of money for every minute the OCAW was on strike. It seemed certain that Charles Koch would have no choice but to fold. He might hold out for a week or two to save face, but there was no way Koch could hold out for long.
These union men clearly had no idea who they were dealing with.
* * *
Bernard Paulson was prepared. He had set up a cot in his office, a cot where he would sleep for most of the next nine months, rarely leaving the refinery, rarely leaving his post. He had also stockpiled food. The refinery had a large cafeteria near the office building, and when the union workers walked off the job, Paulson gave an order that the cafeteria was to be open twenty-four hours a day. A skeleton crew of nonunion workers would be living inside the refinery gates, and Paulson made sure that the cafeteria was open to them whenever they needed to eat. And they would need to eat at odd times during the strike because there weren’t going to be any more eight-hour shifts. Running the refinery would now be an around-the-clock job. There wouldn’t be regular mealtimes.
Paulson did more than just stockpile food. He had also quietly built the workforce he needed. Many members of this new workforce were the nonunion supervisors who worked at the refinery. They would each now do the job of two or three men, working sixteen-hour shifts. But even that wouldn’t be enough. So Paulson started making phone calls back to Texas, back to the oil-patch state where Paulson had friends and employees who thought the world of him. He called these old friends and asked them to come up to Minnesota to work. Shortly after the picket line was erected outside the refinery gates, Paulson arranged for helicopters to fly these workers into the refinery. The helicopters swooped in low over the refinery fences and landed on the refinery grounds to drop off his new workers from Texas and Oklahoma and other states where unions were not only rare but widely hated. Inside the main office building, Paulson converted a large room in the basement into a barracks for the new workers.
On the picket line, the OCAW men watched as the helicopters passed over them, hovered, and landed inside, delivering the workers who would replace them. The picket line was becoming symbolic.
But even with Paulson’s new workforce, it wasn’t easy to keep the refinery going. Paulson needed to run giant machines called reformers, for example, which made a vital chemical for Koch’s fuel products. The reformers could not be started with the simple press of a button, however. They needed tank loads of hydrogen to spark their ignition. After running out of hydrogen, Paulson knew he couldn’t convince any local truckers to break the picket line and deliver more to him. So he called some old friends of his at Amoco, and they told him about a solution: he could use natural gas—which came into the refinery via pipeline—to ignite the reformers. It was a tricky, complicated process, but Paulson and his team figured out how to make it work. Soon he had all the reformers firing, and the fractionating towers were running at full steam.
On the first night of the strike, however, one of the boiler units—the large furnaces that superheated oil before it was sent to the fractioning towers—wasn’t working right. The mechanical problems inside the boiler went unnoticed for many hours because the unit was understaffed. Usually the boiler was monitored by three employees, but Paulson had to run the unit with fewer. The boiler