The satisfaction of a job well done

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part series on Marsha Bell.

Managed by the Department of Energy, the 586-square-mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation is a place of firsts. It housed the world’s first plutonium facility that produced fuel for the worlds first nuclear bomb. It is also one of the most contaminated places on Earth, according to Physicians for Social Responsibility.

A young Marsha Bell arrived at Hanford in November 1978, nine years after graduating with high honors from the University of Colorado with a mechanical engineering degree. Her chosen profession was a predominantly male-dominated one that was often hostile to women.

Due to the nature of contracting at the federal government reservation, Bell would change jobs — each progressively responsible in nature — about every two years. The petite woman of huge drive and potential began making her mark from day one.

Bell was first assigned to a design team working on a “very highly radioactive” nuclear material shipping container project. The team was dysfunctional — and behind schedule.

The project was due the end of September 1979 — payday for Rockwell — but only if the project was completed. In August, still well behind schedule, Rockwell approached Bell. “We need you to be team leader, and we need 19 shipping containers approved by Sept. 15.”

With one month to complete the project, it was do or die, “and I did it,” Bell recalled with a smile. There was some blood-letting.

The bottom line can a powerful tool, and Bell wasn’t afraid swing it. One of the first things she did was eliminate the cultural and gender-biased malcontents from the design team who refused to take direction from her.

With success came exposure, and a new sense of purpose.  

“It was my first introduction to management, and I loved it,” Bell said, recalling the feeling of being free to release her abilities. She would go on to earn an MBA.

“It was a tremendous growth time for me,” Bell said. “I had some managers — men — who supported me.”

The challenge of being a woman in a predominantly man’s profession didn’t just evaporate with success, however.

Bell gained respect and credibility, but the pendulum swing of the second wave of feminism and equal opportunity was reaching its apex. Hanford, subject to federal equal opportunity incentives, incorporated equal opportunity quotas into it’s contracts. The result? Some female engineers were hired who weren’t “up to their potential,” Bell said. They were hired to fill the contract quota, not necessarily for their ability.

Bell moved on to increasingly challenging tasks. Men who refused to work with her disappeared. She continued her string of successes, thriving in a complex, technical and challenging bureaucratic federal system within the ponderous checks-and-balances work environment that was Hanford. The reservation was a huge city with all the requisite infrastructure. Bell would eventually manage it all.

By 1984, Bell was responsible for managing multimillion dollar contracts, and all of Hanford’s on-site engineering — roadways, electrical systems, “the entire Hanford area,” she said. Everything but chemical processing and waste management.

Then, in 1987, while still working for Rockwell, the company’s 10-year federal contract with the Department of Energy was about to end. The federal government at the time had decided to move to a new, “pre-consolidation” contract that merged what had been individual contracts with multiple companies into one massive, consolidated contract. Rockwell brought Bell in to lead the bid effort.

“My job was to make Rockwell look good,” Bell said.

Rockwell lost their bid. The winner? Westinghouse.

By then, things at Westinghouse had changed. When the company vice president approached Bell offering her the job of operations plant manager at the troubled and remote Plutonium Finishing Plant, or PFP, located on the remote reaches of the Hanford area. Bell was unsure.

“I had always been a little leery of operations,” Bell said. “The mentality was that the plant manager was the fall guy.” And she had seen lots of them fall. But here was the Westinghouse VP, knocking on her door.

“They hadn’t even had a manager for months,” Bell recalled of the offer. “Everyone before him had failed; they’re having all kinds of problems. Do I want the job?”

She accepted the challenge. In late 1987, Bell became responsible for helping bring the PFP, shut down for some time, back online. The plant converted liquid plutonium into hard fuel pellets, a potentially volatile process, where one mistake might result in a “criticality” — where the material they were processing could ignite or explode.

From 1988 to late 1989, Westinghouse worked toward PFP start-up and production, refurbishing and updating equipment with the latest technology, training operators, running drills. Procedures were written for every conceivable contingency, and in minute detail, all of which required approval by a safety board. Every detail of plant operations had a pre-approved process.

“There was a lot of stress,” Bell recalled.

Unknown to Bell, a betting pool was established on how long she would last on the job. She was working, managing these people — all men — on a daily basis and in a highly volatile work environment. Security was tight: phones at each door where a code word had to be recited for entry, guard dogs and armed guards with live ammunition, and night drills. Bell would arrive at the plant in the morning to find spent brass ammo casings littering the ground. Every gram of plutonium had be accounted for.

“And all these people have a bet on me,” she said. Someone offered her a bottle of Maalox. “You’re going to need this,” they said.

And so it went. But the pool never paid out. Not only would Bell succeed, she would eventually become the PFP deputy plant manager, essentially responsible for running the entire PFP while the plant manager interfaced with outside organizations. The plant went online successfully in 1989.

“That was the last time that facility operated,” Bell said.

And when Bell left there were women working in many key plant positions.

By now she was on a short list for a variety of increasingly responsible and high-profile positions at Hanford. Now more a manager than engineer, in 1991 she became deputy program manager for Hanford’s infamous leaking and “burping” nuclear waste tanks. She wrestled a sampling and testing process that previously had taken over three years, reducing the turnaround time to 181 days, herding doctoral chemists, “who were very independent and didn’t take direction well” along the way. “It was a huge culture change,” she said.

Her value as a manger continued its upward trend.

Bell’s personal life experienced changes that year as well, when she and Mel Bailey married. It was her second marriage. But Bell bucked the traditional status quo, even in her personal life: she kept her maiden name, instead of taking her new husband’s name. It was a career choice as much as it was a value-based decision. Business is conducted on relationships.

“I had worked for 20 years as Marsha Bell,” she said. “Changing my name would have been a setback.”

The decision was also based on past experience. Married in her early 20s, she took her first husband’s name — and lost her sense of identity. “I didn’t know who I was.”

Westinghouse named Bell director of re-engineering – the systematic reorganization of internal processes — in 1995. She was a big dog now, responsible for analyzing “every activity on the site.” Of the 16 technical directors at Hanford, she was the only woman.

The winner a decade earlier, Westinghouse lost its Hanford contract bid in 1997 to global engineering firm Flour-Daniel, who became the lead engineering company at the sprawling site. Part of the contract terms included continuing with re-engineering due to its success, “and basically that I be kept in that position.” So Bell jumped the Westinghouse ship for Flour, and in doing so “saved hundreds of millions of dollars” through the reengineering effort.

Bell’s final job at Hanford was to lead the site through the threat of the infamous Millennium bug, also known as Y2K. “Nobody knew what to do,” Bell recalled.

But to Bell, who had made a career out of tackling the toughest of jobs under the most challenging circumstances, the Y2K project as anti-climactic. “I could have done this job in my sleep,” she said. “This was like a part-time job. It was time for me to move on.”

The milestone for the Y2K fix was April 1, 1999. Bell met her final goal that day — and promptly retired.

Today she and Mel operate a bed and breakfast on Schweitzer Mountain, and own and operate the water system that services the area.

Bell was active in the Society of Women Engineers, and mentored women engineers during her career. One had a mantra: what would Marsha do? “What an honor,” Bell said.

But that mantra also underscores her own success: Bell never had a mentor — she was the pioneer, the trail blazer.

“When I was going up through the ranks I never thought what would someone else do,” she said. She never called her managers for help deciding what needed to be done. “I did it on my own.”

For Bell, it was sheer grit and determination. It was “the tenacity that I’m going to prove that I could do it. I figured it out. I made it work.”

But in the end it’s the satisfaction of knowing she did the job to the best of her ability, and was successful at it, despite the barriers, that sustains Bell today.

“I loved what I did.”