(I like'em with mustard) In the begining

I haven't been on for a while since they took my grand daughter and put a big hole in my world but there it is. Dad seemed to think she aught to be living with him, I hate oneway's :)

So since I had no justification for sitting on my laurels here at the house I got a job. :( With the thought of working at a place like Home Depot or something like that off I went. Nobody would hire me always with the same old story, sorry but your over qualified. I think they just didn't like me.

Well I did the online job hunting thing and posted my resume on line and after a few months and a few calls I get one that wanted me to work for them. This is a profession that I am much to old for but the management there prefer older folks and since the less strenuous companies weren't interested what choice did I have.

It's been 15 years since last I held one of these position's and much has changed in the way they conduct themselves, so bearing that in mind I thought I would launch a series of tales about my reinsertion into a world I thought I had left far behind me. Due to the nature of internet checking by companies I will keep the name of the company and what they manufacture unknown, but will relate the football fumbling that takes place on an almost daily basis there.

Sounds interesting!!!!

I'll be watching this.

Me too.

Caught my attention.

Well this is kinda in the middle here and relates to last night's shift.

The two guy's who are normally on the night shift with me, one is on vacation and the other had the night off and since I have not yet bowed before the alter of the pagan gods I am not allowed to run the plant on my own so one of the day shift techs came on nights with me and is unfamiliar with procedures.

The evening shift tech informs us that #1 -48 degree liquid ammonia pump is ready to be run and that we should wait until 4 am to start it up which is the same time that we start bringing our blast freezers to life for the day's production. This is unacceptable to me as it has just been repaired and has yet to be tested. Daddy's no fool. :)

9:45 PM
With the assist of my shift partner who is in the control room (new age stuff I can't just turn the pump on or off there it has to be done at a computer screen) not being involved in the repairs I am walking into this blind and no idea as to what has or has not been done to the pump, or for that matter what has been left undone.

I look the pump over and make sure that all valves and related technicalities are done so that I can safely start the pump. I call on the radio to start it up. It growls and grips but it finally picks up liquid to start pumping it {while standing at a safe distance :) } so I walk back up to the pump and the seal oil (the seal keeps the liquid ammonia inside the pump instead of outside with me) :O push rod is fully extended past the point of where it is supposed to hit the safety shut off switch, so here are two things 1. The pump seal has no lubricating oil and 2. the switch that shuts the pump off so that if the seal has no lubricant which will cause it to break and deliver a generous and possibly lethal dose of ammonia at me isn't shutting off the pump.

I quickly call my shift partner to shut off the pump and he casually asks why I don't just stop it with the emergency lubricant loss switch. Gee why didn't I think of that, oh wait maybe it's because the switch isn't working! So I reply "just turn off the pump if you would please" the whole while I am thinking to myself that I would just kill him later and bury his body in the drainage ditch, maybe no one will notice. :)

So an hour later after we have set the plant up for the sanitation crew so they can preform their cleaning of the plant for the next day's operations we make repairs to the pump so that it could be operated safely.

The rest of the night was uneventful until........

4AM
Sanitation has finished and released the freezers to us and now we wait for the floor tech who tells us that he is ready for us to start the freezers which he calls to start #1 and makes sure that all is well, then #2, #3, and so on until we have started all 10 freezers.

I let my shift mate do the start ups while I watched (it gave him a thrill) we get to #7 and as he is moving to the next screen for #8 something about #7 caught my eye and I asked him to go back. #7 isn't starting correctly so I told him to finish the start up's of the last 2 freezers and then I would look more closely at #7. The problem with #7 was that only half of it was starting but the other half kept going into defrost (there 2 sets of freezing units for each freezer) which is what we make them do at the end of a production day to remove the ice that has built up so that sanitation can clean them.

I sent my shift mate off to finish setting up the rest of the power plant while I tried to figure out what the problem was. I had read in the log book that some work had been done to this unit the day before so I knew that they had done something to it but what? By 4:30 am the foreman came in and still no luck with getting the thing to behave. The man was not happy and it's getting close to show time. Now I knew how to make the refrigeration work manually but without the fans to move the air around that would be pointless and that of course could only be done by the computer. Well the young man who had been involved in the work that had been preformed the day before came strolling in at 5am and looked at the problem and stated "oh yes I used the secondary defrost system to test the unit and forgot to put it back to normal". Well the secondary method of defrost had not been shown to me by a competent tech ie one of my regular night shift partners, more about him later.

What's the moral here?

First when you work on something YOU need to check your work and make sure all is as it should be before you turn it over to someone else.

Second if you change something YOU need to make sure it is returned back to the way it was so the next guy after you doesn't have to start guessing what it is you have done.

Third if your the man in charge shouldn't you at least have some fundamental knowledge of the equipment that you are in charge of?

Fourth if you can't see whats going on and someone on site asks you to do something shouldn't you do it and then ask questions later?

Maybe it's just me.
Bed time for bonzo I'm tired, so goodnight one and all!

Wow, sounds like some of this could have been dangerous enough to kill someone. Am I correct in this assessment?

Not just you, I agree with all points.

It sounds like potentially dangerous mistakes were made. Scary. A friend of mine was injured because another employee had used his office and adjusted his chair to suit her but had not tightened it properly or tried to re-adjust it. My friend is a large man. He came to work, sat down, the chair collapsed. Kind of funny in a way but he had a disk problem from it. Told him it was time for worker's comp and he just laughed. Said he'd rather just use his insurance than try to go through all the hassles. The woman who used his office did apologize. Now, that was just a small thing. But, it is the same kind of problem. Bad communication.

Good morning, evening or whatever it is.

The situation is not one of communication but rather one being that where equipment is concerned if you are the one who works on it then it is your responsibility to complete the work as well as to test the equipment before turning it over to someone else for the simple reason that it is dangerous due to the fact that the next person has no way of knowing what it is that you have done or not done to that piece of equipment.

Last night was fun because I duped the plant engineer, the corporate engineer and the power plant foreman into thinking that they were seeing something that was caused by a condition in the plant that happens naturally but was initiated artificially by me instead. ;)

Now before I get a lecture about this let me explain. You are about to get the first lesson that is taught to every novice to the field of refrigeration gets especially when it's ammonia refrigeration.

Never, never, never, never, never trap liquid refrigerant in a liquid line, especially cold liquid, EVER!!!!!!!!!!!

When we shut down for the night the electric liquid valves are closed to the freezers from the computer. Up until 2 weeks ago this had never been a problem. Starting 2 weeks ago we preformed this procedure and later that night we got a report that there was the smell of ammonia in the plant. Myself and one of the night shift techs I work with found some leaks coming from some valves up on the roof, pretty good sized ones at that. Leaks fixed no problem.

Next night same thing, unusual but again fixed. Third night again but more serious, this time when I closed an isolation valve to safely make the repair the top of the isolation valve popped and started to leak ammonia. Again not good as this indicates something more serious. I move to the valve that isolates that entire section, lions, tigers and bears oh my this valve too is leaking in a place that it should not. I make the decision to shut the plant down entirely and bleed the liquid ammonia out of the liquid line system and back into the tank from winch it came. I radioed my shift partner to call the power plant foreman and let him know that I had shut down his plant and isolated a part of it, it is after all his plant.

While waiting for the foreman to arrive (it's 2:30 am :) my bad) I instruct my shift partner to tighten every bolt on every flange and valve that he came across that was apart of the liquid system. As we are finishing up the foreman arrives and asks if the system has been drained of liquid, (me) yep (foreman) well lets tighten all of the bolts on all the flanges and valves; (me) been there done that and we're ready to put the system back on line. No problems all was well.

Next night the foreman and a couple of extra techs as well watch the system and sure enough we got leaks, but this time in places that really, really should not be leaking, I kept hearing reports of bad gauges (things that measure pressure) even new gauges that must be bad even through they are new straight from the box, now I know that something is truly amiss and I say so. I find a gauge that goes as high up in pressure as I could find.

The air in your car tire is usually around 45 pounds, the gauges that were bad went to nearly 6 times that pressure (300 pounds), the gauge I found went to 12 times that pressure (600 pounds) and it broke due to the pressure. Best guess 650 to 750 pounds, more than one and one half times than the isolation valves were rated to handle. The normal operating pressure of the liquid system 45 to 55 pounds.

By the grace of God alone no explosions no injuries and no deaths.

Now to make a long story short. One of the techs mentioned to me about some work done on the liquid pumps the Sunday before this all started, that being the outlet valves on the discharge side of the pumps had been repaired and they were......... stop check valves. A check valve is a device that allows flow of something to go only in one direction but not in the other. So when we shut off the electric valves and the check valves didn't allow flow back through the pumps and back into the tanks they TRAPPED liquid in the line so it had no where to go. Why is this bad? The liquid ammonia in the line is -40 degrees and the surrounding air temperature's is in the 80's. Refrigerants make things cold and by doing this it wants to expand or in other words it wants to grow in size. Having no room to grow in it builds pressure until it gets the room it wants or it finds weak spots to relieve the pressure (remember all those leaks we were fixing?) or it goes BANG.

Well the foreman and plant engineer don't want to believe the trapped liquid idea so for many nights we play games to prove that something else is the cause of the pressure build up. Finally they had to admit the trapped liquid scenario, well the corporate engineer wanted to see this for himself. System didn't want to cooperate and so you have little old me down at the pump who decided that enough was enough, no more games, no more fooling around all night playing duck, duck, goose, so I tripped the safety switch on the pump shutting it down making the check valve close and lo and behold the pressure went up rapidly. They played around with the system for another 2 hours before passing their sagely decision that it was a combination of trapped liquid, heat from the pumps action, and hot gas from the defrost system.

Remember the refrigeration lesson way back up top?

Never, never, never, never, never trap liquid refrigerant in a liquid line, especially cold liquid, EVER!!!!!!!!!!!

Am I bad or what? :)

If someone Doesn't communicate what they have or have not done to a piece of equipment then it's bad communication. Sorry. In your case, however, that company may be looking at some liability issues, too! Clearly, it doesn't seem like a safe working environment. Do y'all have a union there? I don't know what the procedures for contacting OSHA are, but you probably do. In my opinion, this job isn't worth getting blown up for. You're not bad, by the way, just trying to deal with a bad, dangerous situation. The whole thing sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Is this normal in your profession?