Working the Nightshift Old Plantation Days, January 2014 

Looking around Hilo and the Big Island these days I do not see much industrial operations that work 24 hours a day.  Most places work a regular day time shift or they work into the evening on retail.  Sure there’s HELCO producing power 24/7, but there doesn’t seem to be an operation that could compare with the Sugarcane Companies I used to work for that employed hundreds of worker who worked on 24 hour shifts.  In retrospect it seems hard to believe that an agricultural operation needed to operate around the clock.

Yet, they did and needed to.  The cane crops in the field could not be harvested only on day shifts and the boiling houses needed to cook and decant the syrup on a constant basis.  These sugarcane mills were hungry operations that needed consistent supply to clean, mill, grind, boil, and spin off sugar.

Early in my career I spent quite a bit of time on Shift Work in the Harvesting operations.  There were three shifts: The Day shift from 6:00a.m. to 2:00p.m.; the Swing Shift from 2:00p.m. to 10:00p.m; and the Night Shift from 10:00p.m. to 6:00a.m.  Each week the crews would rotate from one shift to the next, the shift most difficult was always the Night Shift or sometimes called the midnight shift.

There were many things that occurred on the night shift that will always stick in my memory about working the wee hours of the morning, two of them I will share with you today...

Each shift was 8 hours long and lunch breaks were called “on the fly”, that is that you did not take a half hour off or so for a meal break, but you ate while still operating.  That being said, there was a regular occurrence about 2:00a.m. in the morning, the trucks would stop driving and the crane operators would stop their machines.  The bright flood lights would go out and only the dim light of the operators cab was lit as the man would eat his Spartan meal.  Then a few minutes later the cab light would go dark as he sat back and cat napped until the next truck would start rolling again.  All was dark, no movement, and no sounds.  On this particular cloudy night there was not even a single star to be seen. About ten minutes later the lead crane operator turned on his boom lights and then the rest of the crew did the same…OWLS!!  There were dozens of Owls sitting on the cranes, the cab of my truck, on top of the push rakes.  As soon as we started our engines they all took off into the dark.  They were hunting rats and mice while we were taking our break.

The next memory is of supervising in the scale house where the trucks were weighed with their load of cane.  As one of the trucks came onto the scale I inputted the truck number, the tare weight and pushed the core sample button.  As soon as that was done I was about to signal the driver on, as I looked up at the driver what I saw was the guy in a full Gorilla suit, head, hands, and all.  He raised his black woolly hand to his eyebrow and saluted as I pushed the all clear signal!  I had to shake my head a couple of times, then I laughed and yelled out loud…”Only on the night shift would this happen”!

Maybe I’ll share more about the Glowing Eyes in the Banyan tree or the Exploding Window near Korean Camp in a future issue, there are plenty more stories from Old Plantation Days.