ASME INSIDER CHRIS CANTRELL

Prior to joining ASME, I was the chief boiler inspector for the state of Nebraska. When I would go do boiler inspections, I would walk into an office building or a school and say, “Hey, I’m here to do the boiler inspection.” And the receptionist, or the janitor, or whoever I was talking to as my first contact—they would be like, “Wow, we have boilers here?” And I’d be like, “Yeah. And because I’m doing my job, you don’t know that there’s a boiler here.”

I’m Chris Cantrell. I’m the senior managing director of Standards and Engineering Services. My father owned an oil field roustabout business. And so, most of the people that I knew were involved in engineering-related professions—to either build, restore, clean up—items being used for oil field production out in the Permian Basin of West Texas. And I have always considered myself more of a “light blue-collar.” I have the ability to get in and get greasy and dirty and roll up my sleeves and do the work because I have that experience.

I’ve looked at boilers that are ASME certified that were built in 1919 and were still operating. And I was inspecting them, 100 years later or 95 years later, the same as many, many inspectors had looked at them before, you know, 95 years of safe operation. And so that’s a success story.

But I also have developed the experience and gained the knowledge to operate in a very executive and managerial world and relate that roll-up-the-sleeves attitude to how I can apply business principles to that.

Almost everything that we do, in ASME, especially in the standards world and in our certification world that I have the privilege of being a part of, has an effect on people’s lives, whether it’s your air conditioning system that has welded pressure parts, or whether it’s a heating boiler up here in the northeast, or a nuclear power plant that’s providing electricity for industries and schools in your area. Most people just don’t realize the true impact that ASME codes and standards, and really all of our engineering knowledge, has on their everyday lives.

Just imagine going into a grocery store to buy meats or cheeses that are refrigerated. A lot of those refrigeration systems have ASME components or components that are at least designed to an ASME standard.

The people that work for ASME, they have the same goal as the volunteers to bring together the best and the brightest, to put together codes, standards, test procedures, guides that will help engineers and engineering-type professions apply these things again, really to save the world. I try to tell my staff at least once a month, “It ain’t easy saving the world,” but that’s what we do, every day.