Safety Gone Crazy

I am suffering from a bout of safety gone crazy from my employer here in Peru. Today we were meant to start the shutdown maintenance but first we had a good 2 hours talking to about what was going to happen and this was from 7-9am, then I thought we could get on it, as it is my turbine and I wanted to do many things, so we went to the motor control centre to knock off all the power to everything and as I was about to power down the first item, a large OOOOOOOHHHHHHHH!!!!! Cam from behind me and the mechanical guy was waving his head about like a demented bobble head doll. So I pulled back and asked him what the problem was, he said I couldn’t touch anything as it was all going to be locked out by the shift supervisor. Well I can handle that but he said we will be lucky to get it all done by 11.00am, this was 2 hours from now and I was thinking how the hell can this take 2 hours when I could do it in less than 2 minutes. There was an never ending stream of guys with note books taking lots of data down and coming back with little stickers and standing in line with locks and then the supervisor would end up with a queue of guys behind him as he put on a clamp and locked it up all these other guys would add their locks and the cranking motor had a clasp with 21 locks on it, can you imagine that, 21 locks all dangling on this clasp. I couldn’t believe my eyes, he then told me this is getting out of control, the safety procedures are going crazy he confided, this happened one after another mountains of locks and tags looking like insane Christmas decorations on the handles. It finally took 1 ½ hours to get all this done and I was blowing steam at this point and I wasn’t allowed to climb the ladder to peak on top of the turbine, my own turbine, prevented by some written crap by some highly paid lawyer no doubt, and all this paperwork has to be re-approved at the beginning of every shift. It is a wonder that we will get anything done at all. Luckily they have about 20 mechanics to do all the nut and bolt stuff and I just watch. I do sometimes thank Buddha that I have got to this point in my career as I hate skinning my knuckles on the sharp bits of metal that is part of the turbine package. We went into the air intake housing and the smell of have decaying insects was intense and I wasn’t expecting it to be that bad. That means they will have to throw away all those very expensive filters, I did tell them to turn all the lights off in the plant but would they listen.
So my italian specialists are arriving on a specially chartered flight tomorrow and they will start pointing the fingers at things and hopefully they will have good English or Spanish to get over what they want. This is the first time I will see inside a turbine. All these years and never seen the mean bladey spinny thingy that makes it go round and round, i just press the switch and keep it running.