Monthly Archives: May 2017

Wheels of Industry

Fake – fake – fake!

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So it’s Tuesday morning and I’m looking at a short week in the office, chasing down some quotations for proposed 2018 projects and the phone rings.  I can see the call ID.  My Tech at the station northwest of Houston.

ME:  This is me.  What’s up?

Him:  Uh, we rolled the lockout on the T-1 transformer.  Can I reset it?

ME:  (struggling for information) It’ off line.  Tripped?

Him:  Yeah.  Lockout rolled.

Allow me to drag you into a corner of protection for electrical power systems.  We’re looking to protect people, equipment and the upstream electrical system.

The most common parameter to monitor to do these tasks is current.  We can say “This is the maximum amount of normal current” and trip equipment off line on that parameter.  Oddly, we call this ‘overcurrent protection’ because power engineers are nothing if not poetic.

We can look at differential current – what goes in must equal what goes out.  Still being subtle, we call this ‘differential protection’.  If those two amounts – in versus out – don’t cancel out, we trip.

My transformer has both.

Now, overcurrent protection CAN be due to the load on downstream equipment, in other words, less serious.  Differential, though,t hat means there is likely a big puddle of electrons inside my transformer, and that, folks, is serious stuff.

In the first case, we look at what caused the overload, and we close the breakers to re-energize the transformer.

In the second, we operate a device called a ‘lockout relay – ANSI device #86’.  It turns a little handle, shows a little orange indicator, and while it’s rolled, it blocks operation of both the incoming and outgoing circuit breakers until it is manually reset.  The word I teach is “If the lockout’s rolled, I get called, and under NO circumstance do you re-eneergize until we’ve tested that transformer. So…

ME:  NO!  Do not reset ANYTHING.  I’m on the way.  While I’m on the way, call our friendly high voltage contractors and tell ’em we want the transformer and the rely tested.

Him:  Roger roger, boss.

And that’s what happened.  I went to the house, packed for an overnighter, then headed off to his station.

The contractors were just getting their feet on the ground when I got there.  First order was to pull an oil sample for a rush analysis at a lab.  Various abnormal conditions in the hydrocarbon oil (about the same as diesel – some people burn it in vehicles) can cause the long-chain hydrocarbon molecules to ‘crack’ – break apart into shorter hydrocarbon molecules, some of which are gases.  If the oil shows significant amounts of gases such as hydrogen, methane, ethane and acetylene then something bad has happened and the funeral arrangements are made for the transformer.

If that sounds familiar, I just went through this exercise eighty miles east in February.  The oil sample – a syringe to keep air out of the oil because it would skew the results – was pulled and hustled off to a lab on the other side of Houston.

In the meantime, we tested the relay – the device that had decided that there was a fault condition, and we tested the transformer using a series of tests.

You guessed it.  Transformer’s fine.  That saves us $300 K.  The relay’s losing its little silicon mind.

I left the station at 1700, spent the night in a hotel, came back this morning.

We put the transformer back on line this morning and I’m getting quotations to replace the relay.  Nope, ain’t going back in with the same model which would be about $8000 and fifteen minutes’ time.  We’re stepping up to the latest technology, probably from a company that seems to be having better luck with their products than the people who bring good things to life.

History

Today in History – May 31

1678 – The Godiva procession through Coventry begins. Now there’s a tax protest.

1884 – Dr. John Harvey Kellogg patents “flaked cereal”

1889 – Johnstown Flood: Over 2,200 people die after a dam break sends a 60-foot (18-meter) wall of water over the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. FEMA slow to respond. Bush widely blamed.

1911 – R.M.S. Titanic’s hull is launched. This will end well.

1916 – World War I: Battle of Jutland – The British Grand Fleet under the command of Sir John Jellicoe &Sir David Beatty engage the Kaiserliche Marine under the command of Reinhard Scheer & Franz von Hipper in the largest naval battle of the war, which proves indecisive.

1927 – The last Ford Model T rolls off the assembly line after a production run of 15,007,003 vehicles. The VW Beetle (Type 111) finally beat that production number, topping out at 21,529,464. 15,444,858 of them were built in Germany.

History

Today in History – May 30

1539 – In Florida, Hernando de Soto lands at Tampa Bay with 600 soldiers with the goal of finding gold, gets run over by an 83-year-old retiree from Brooklyn who’s driving a full sized Lincoln with a seatbelt hanging out the door.

1783 – Benjamin Tower of Philadelphia publishes first daily newspaper in US.

1848 – Mexico ratifies treaty giving the Unites States most of New Mexico, all of California, parts of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado in return for $15 million. We paid for it.

1868 – Decoration Day (the predecessor of the modern “Memorial Day”) is observed in the United States for the first time (By “Commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic” John A. Logan’s proclamation on May 5)when two women in Columbus Mississippi placed flowers on both Confederate & Union graves.

1896 – First recorded car accident occurs as Henry Wells hit a bicyclist in New York City. Three lawyers are injured in a scuffle over who gives the victim a business card first.

1937 – Memorial Day massacre: Chicago police shoot and kill 10 labor demonstrators. Now they’re just as likely to BE the labor demonstrators.

1958 – Memorial Day: the remains of two unidentified American servicemen, killed in action during World War II and the Korean War respectively, are buried at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.

1968 – Charles De Gaulle reappears publicly after his flight to Baden-Baden, Germany, and dissolves the French National Assembly by a radio appeal. Immediately after, less than one million of his supporters march on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. This is the turning point of May 1968 in France. Even De Gaulle knows that the easiest way to get something going in France is to start out from Germany.

1971 – 36 hospitalized during Grateful Dead concert after drinking LSD-laced apple juice. Drugs? At a Grateful Dead concert? Shocked, I tell you. Shocked!

1972 – In Tel Aviv members of the Japanese Red Army carry out the Lod Airport Massacre, killing 24 people and injuring 78 others.

Current events - national, History

Memorial Day 2017

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If this looks familiar, it should. Parts are from last year.

It is worth noting that Obama visited Hiroshima, Japan and made noises that only slightly avoided an apology for the atomic bomb which, along with one six days later at Nagasaki, gave Japan the excuse needed to surrender.

Dad was in the WW II US NAVY. By that stage of the war he was in the Pacific, the coxswain of a landing craft. You remember the landing craft in the openings of war movies – they’re targets. That would have been Dad. When peace broke out, Dad was two months from participating in Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu. US Sixth Army could be expected to suffer between 514,072 casualties including 134,556 dead and missing. The army’s figured admit that they do not take into account the Navy’s losses.

What am I saying here? Simple. Had we not nuked Japan, had the war proceeded to the invasion, I and millions of other Americans would have never been born. The same goes, of course, for millions of Japanese and others. Thank God for the Bomb.

Instead, Dad ended his Pacific experience by being a water taxi, his landing craft providing liaison to the Allied fleet anchored in Tokyo Bay.

And I’m here.

Used to be easy to find a soldier.  In 1968, when I joined the Army, the Viet Nam War was in full swing. the draft was in effect.  Everybody had a brother or a son or an uncle in the military in some capacity.  On the streets the military haircut was easy to spot among the herds of hippies and fields of fops sporting long hair.

Even more, everybody had dads, uncles, grandparents who’d served in WW II and Korea. I had a great-uncle who was a veteran of WW I. My maternal grandmother was a welder at a shipyard. It was rare to see a politician at the national level who didn’t have some military experience.

I don’t know how to put it.  I remember the winter of 1969, the final weeks of a course at Fort Knox’s Armor School that turned young soldiers into tank commanders.  The days were filled with classes, marching to and fro, learning mapreading and small unit tactics and gunnery and communications and dozens of other things.  The evenings, for many, were filled with study in order to pass the course.  I needed no study, graduated #2 in a class of sixty.  My evenings were filled with reading and listening to a million conversations.

Friends. These were friends, all young males between eighteen and maybe twenty-three.

We had a couple of guitar players, one whom I remember well, because he brought his twelve-string with him and in the evenings he’d sit on his bunk and pick out bluegrass tunes.  When I heard him playing, I went down there to listen to the pleasant diversion of his talent.

Somewhere in Vietnam that bit of music died in a flash of fire and metal, as did several of my other classmates.  I and three others, by some strange twist of fate, ended up on Korea instead of Vietnam.

My Memorial Day includes a time with the ghosts of the ones I knew personally.

Wasn’t always in combat, either.  This was also the center of the Cold War, and training is dangerous in its own right, from the kid who was perforated in an accident at a rifle range in basic training to the crew who died when their sixty-ton tracked recovery vehicle rolled sideways down a hillside at a training area in Germany.  Dead is dead. Service is service.  One of those guys in that recovery vehicle was wearing a shoulder patch from a combat tour in Vietnam.  Survived ‘Nam.  Died in Hohenfels.  In the service.

My First Sergeant in Korea was a veteran of the Korean War.  One day he told me to go get the jeep.  We took off across the countryside.  He knows places.  Had faces to go with them.  His Memorial Day.

I guess that’s the thrust of this little screed:  America has a Memorial Day.  Many of us, though, have faces to go with it.

memorial

History

Today in History – May 29

1780 – At the Battle of Waxhaws, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton massacres Colonel Abraham Buford’s continentals allegedly after the continentals surrender. 113 Americans are killed. Nothing like a good massacre to show how you really feel.

1849 – Lincoln says “You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of people some of time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of time”. The dimmocrat party says “all you gotta do is fool enough to get yourself elected, then screw ’em all…”

1864 – Emperor Maximilian of Mexico arrives in Mexico for the first time. He has the full backing of the French government which naturally means he’s an incompetent despot, later executed by his own rebellious people.

1886 – Chemist John Pemberton places his first advertisement for Coca-Cola, the ad appearing in the Atlanta Journal.

1913 – Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score The Rite of Spring receives its premiere performance in Paris, France, provoking a riot. Go ahead and laugh. What do we expect every time there’s a rap ‘concert’ or a professional sports team championship win?

1940 – The first flight of the Vought F4U Corsair. In the coming war, the Japanese called it “Whistling Death”.

1942 – Bing Crosby, the Ken Darby Singers and the John Scott Trotter Orchestra record Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”, the best-selling Christmas album in history, for Decca Records in Los Angeles. Come Christmas time, it’s either this, or “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”.

1953 – Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay are the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on Tenzing Norgay’s (adopted) 39th birthday. Hillary Clinton, born in 1947, is, by her own words, named after Sir Edmund, who was completely unknown in 1947, which means she should be president.

1964 – The Arab League meets in East Jerusalem to discuss the Palestinian question, leading to the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO is a terrorist organization and its formation gives ‘legitimate’ Arab governments somewhat plausible deniability in violent acts against Israel.

1977 – Janet Guthrie becomes first woman to drive in Indy 500, completes first ten laps while applying mascara.

1987 – Michael Jackson attempts to buy Elephant Man’s remains, offering a slightly used Cub Scout troop and an undisclosed amount of cash.

2001 – In a decision that shakes the Republic to its very foundations, The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the disabled golfer Casey Martin can use a cart to ride in tournaments.

History

Today in History – May 28

1588 – The Spanish Armada, with 130 ships and 30,000 men, sets sail from Lisbon heading for the English Channel. (It will take until May 30 for all ships to leave port). In a big hurry to get a butt-kicking…

1754 – French and Indian War: In the first engagement of the war, Virginia militia under 22-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington defeat a French reconnaissance party in the Battle of Jumonville Glen in what is now Fayette County in southwestern Pennsylvania.

1863 – American Civil War: the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first African American regiment, leaves Boston, Massachusetts, to fight for the Union.

1871 – Fall of the Paris Commune. In a war against the French, the French win!

1905 – Russo-Japanese War: the Battle of Tsushima ends with the destruction of the Russian Baltic Fleet by Admiral Togo Heihachiro and the Imperial Japanese Navy. The Japanese Navy grows fiercely overconfident from this victory, and the overconfidence contributes to their losses in WW II.

1937 – Neville Chamberlain becomes British Prime Minister. The Neville Chamberlain School of Diplomacy is highly regarded by the Left. “Peace in our time”, my a**!

1940 – World War II: Belgium surrenders to Germany to end the Battle of Belgium. In ancient tongues, “Belgium” translates to “Gateway to Paris”.

1942 – World War II: in retaliation for the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich, Nazis in Czechoslovakia kill over 1,800 people.

1964 – The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is formed, because hating Jews needs a new letterhead.

1987 – 19-year-old West German pilot Mathias Rust evades Soviet Union air defenses and lands a private plane (stealth Cessna 172) in Red Square in Moscow. He is immediately detained and is not released until August 3, 1988. Several high (and low, no doubt) ranking officers are ‘disciplined’ in the Soviet military.

1996 – U.S. President Bill Clinton’s former business partners in the Whitewater land deal, James McDougal and Susan McDougal, and Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, are convicted of fraud. Bill and Hillary, however, are as pure as the driven snow (or some other four-letter word beginning with “s”)

1998 – Nuclear testing: Pakistan responds to a series of nuclear tests by India with five of its own codenamed Chagai-I, prompting the United States, Japan, and other nations to impose economic sanctions. Pakistan celebrates Youm-e-Takbir annually. This puts atomic bombs int he hands of a Muslim nation with a history of corrupt and shaky governments, so I feel MUCH better.

2002 – NATO declares Russia a limited partner in the Western alliance. Bet you forgot that, huh?