Lightning Never Strikes Twice, Bullshit

Well excitement never comes in small amounts it only comes in bucketfuls and not when you really want it to, a bit like a car crash, once its over you think about all the excitement it gave you but yesterday when the lightning storm came over the plant and drown me while I was doing my butterfly rounds I never suspected there was going to be so much excitement. I went to the offices in the plant and was sat with the controls engineer talking about places to go on holiday in Peru when there was this almighty explosion and the building rattled and the radio started crackling with lots of chatter from the operators and the engineer told me one of the units had tripped because of a lightning strike on the plant.

I wasn’t too concerned as you know things happen and it takes a while for the unit to stop spinning and so we finished our teas and took a steady walk into the control room. upon entering I looked a the screens which control my machine and I was shocked and horrified with the alarm screen flashing huge blocks of alarms on and off, this is not what you want and not something that can easily be solved. I was trying to understand what was happening and we had temperatures jumping and falling 800° C, again this isn’t possible and not healthy. It was obvious now that the lightning had struck part of the turbine package and had damaged the control system. This was now looking really serious and I wanted not to be here. I spent a while trying to sort out what was damaged but the big problem is that everyone with any importance was looking over your shoulder and was wanting an explanation. Luckily the engineering manager is pretty reasonable and he was just wanting to know the extent of the damage and he was actually calling the boss in Lima to pass along the bad news. He didn’t want to make any decisions himself and to be honest neither did I. I felt like a mountain had fallen on my shoulders, all I could see was 50 alarms flashing on and off before my eyes, it was very off putting. We also found out we had virtually no spares of the cards that were damaged and that made things worse so we started robbing cards from one unit to get the other one started, after 6 hours of messing about we got one unit running and the other looked like a car wreck in a telephone exchange. But we started putting back some of the dead cards and we were able to get the control system up and functioning but with many dead signals. To save my ass from getting fired I asked for written authorisation to force any signals I needed to get the unit running, they said they would give me verbal authorisation and this basically Isn’t the same as if the compressor was to explode then everyone would deny any knowledge of the verbal agreement and I would get my ass fired down the road quicker than a Klu Klux Clan member in downtown Washington DC. But I agreed and we forced things and a few other things were not working but we finally got the unit running about 11 hours after the lightning ruined my day. What made it worse was that I had got some sort of virus and was feeling pretty shitty and I had not slept well so all in all it could have been a better day to have such a catastrophe happen, in fact it could have happened better if I wasn’t here but that is wishing it on some other poor guy. I went to bed feeling like crap and wondering if I could have a good sleep and an easier day. No such goddam luck ( is this turning into a monster whinge )
I slept like crap again and the phone blasted me out of bed by the engineering manager at 5.45am asking me if I had completed all the e-mails to the factory in Italy and organised the conference call, I bluntly told him I was still in bed and done nothing as I was still feeling like shit. He probably knew and was giving me an early morning call just to get me rousted and ready for the day. We had a conference call where the customer started pointing the finger at GE equipment and we achieved nothing of any great importance other than to piss off the project manager in Italy who seems a really nice and genuinely interested person who wanted to help us all he could but it degenerated into the your going to pay for all this and I could imagine the project manager laughing silently as GE has the best Lawyers in the game and never lose when it comes to contracts and payment. We’ll see who pays in the end.