Daily Archives: 9/9/2008

Wheels of Industry

Work stuff

That’s what I came up here for, so at 0630 I was out the door following my partner in crime, a controls specialist, on the way to the station. We got there before 0700 and sat through the morning meeting with the crew, then got on into troubleshooting the problem.

Here’s the deal. As I’ve said before, pipelines do not typically go through metropolitan areas, and you can’t get much less metropolitan than this one in Mississippi. Due to their remote locations, the utility power systems for these facilities are pretty puny by industrial standards. Further, due to the nature of our operation, we require that stuff doesn’t stop working when the utility company loses power, so we have a combination of a backup generator that can run the whole plant and we have UPS.  That’s Uninterruptible Power System, not the big brown truck.

The UPS carries a few critical things like the process control computers that run the station and the communications equipment that lets our station communicate with the control center hundreds of miles away.  It’s built so that there is NO interruption in power.  When the utility company quits on us, the UPS just keeps on powering the critical stuff while the big natural gas fueled generator cranks up and warms up.  Once it’s up and running, it picks up the whole station load and things just rock right along.

Except lately we’d been losing what appeared to a be a random list of critical equipment.  This is bothersome because when it happens, the control center has to get one of the local guys out to reset things, and that’s not good.

This morning we reviewed the equipment asigned to each of our four UPS at this station and found that what seemed to be random in fact wasn’t.  Everything that we lost was on the same UPS.  What had thrown the station guys before was that it didn’t happen EVERY time, jsut every now and then, then pretty regularly, and finally, often enough to upset the control center and get an email to the guy who runs the station.

We replaced the reluctant unit with one that was working properly when removed from service.  Then we tested it through a couple of faked outages.  It performed properly.  And I talked with the boss here and told him that this was the last freebie, that his stuff was out of date by 20 years and when the next one dies, we get to jump through our collective butts to get a replacement that costs seven or eight thousand bucks, during which time he can only hope for clear skies over Mississippi.

I love this job…

History

Today in History – September 9

1776 – The Continental Congress officially names their new union of sovereign states the United States.

1850 – California becomes 31st state. Back then it was “The Golden State”. Now it’s the “Granola State”, the land of fruits and nuts.

1914 – World War I: The creation of the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade, the first fully mechanized unit in the British Army.

1926 – National Broadcasting Co created by Radio Corporation of America. Today “NBC” stands for “National Barack Channel”

1942 – 1st bombing on continental US soil, Mount Emily Oregon (WW II) as a Japanese floatplane drops incendiary bombs trying to start fires.

1947 – First actual case of a computer bug being found: a moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University. It was removed with tweezers and taped into the logbook.

1965 – The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development is established, a scam put forth by LBJ and his socialist cronies to suck huge amounts of money from working people and give it to the perpetual underclass.

1965 – Hurricane Betsy makes its second landfall near New Orleans, Louisiana, leaving 76 dead and $1.42 billion ($10-12 billion in 2005 dollars) in damages, becoming the first hurricane to top $1 billion in unadjusted damages. FEMA slow to respond. Bush widely blamed.