Big packages can fit thru small things.

I'm declaring it work month. Where I tell you all about what I do for work. The biggest challenge I have now is convincing my co-workers and my boss and I can still do my job. Nothing has changed that much other than I physically look like certain co-workers.

Without getting into the boring details, there are several types of outages. Some of them are planned and scheduled and some are not scheduled but are necessary to fix a problem that would prevent the unit from running the next time it was started up. The gas plants we have at Santan are mostly peaker plants. The older units mostly come on in the summer time. It gets more complicated than that but in essence, there is a group in our corporate office that tells us which unit they want us to start and like good boys and girls, we fire up the unit. Well, not we, operations does.

So during the outages, Engineering's role is to perform inspections and make recommendations that would keep the unit in good operational status. Kind of like checking your brakes in your car, looking at hoses and spark plugs to see if they are in working condition, that type of stuff. And our recommendations get sent into a report that gets transferred into a maintenance activity. I.e. the mechanics physcially changing the oil in your car.

During this inspection I am in the "stack" of one of the older Legacy units. It was a fun climb up a ladder and hopping over some valves. And before entering this manway I did a lot of stretching - everythings a little sore and a little tight around my hip joints. I didn't want to get a cramp or anything. That would be SO embarrassing. The hole is probably smaller than it looks.


And come on, even 6 months pregnant I'm still way smaller than this guy here. You can see the size of some of the equipment I get to crawl in. It either goes from gi-normous to teeny tiny. At the top of this picture are womper --(damper --- I couldn't resist, it's an inside yoke from this mexican guy who was building our outdoor fireplace and he kept saying womper and Mike could not figure out what he was saying until I told him that a "womper" is actually a damper and why we needed one.... I guess you just had to be there). So the wompers are opened to let the flue gas out. Flue gas is the gas that is combusted in the gas turbine. Like the exhaust in your car. Don't worry though it also goes through a CO catalyst before this - so we are green. You like that word right? Who doesn't? Green, green, green. Producing megawatts and being environmentally friendly at the same time.

You might be wondering if my job is dangerous. Yes it CAN be dangerous. The thing I hate the most is being around a peice of running equipment. Or having to do work in the steam building when the unit is running. Accidents happen all the time and equipment blows up. I'm just hoping that I'm never in the wrong place at the wrong time. But on a lighter note, the engineering always amazes me. And I feel lucky to have a job I really enjoy.