Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

New Office – 10 South Howard Street, Baltimore

I have now wrapped up and handed over most of the work which I was involved with at USAMRIID and SSP sites over in Frederick, and am now daily commuting up the road to Baltimore to the District HQ, based out of the Mechanical Section.

Apart from the fact that the HVAC is broken (ironic, I thought) which makes the office about 30C everything else seems to be falling into place. I am about to go to their weekly meeting which details the existing and expected projects,  hopefully will be able to position myself on a interesting yet modular project.

SSP

Back in Frederick, the SSP project is still treading water, though a new Bio-Challenge test has been conducted, which we are currently waiting…… It is expected that a test pass will alleviate many of the commissioning issues, though it is becoming increasingly evident that the “customer” does not want to be responsible for the plant, and so is “stalling” as much as they can, this is clearly making the commissioning, closeout and handover of the plant difficult. As a point in case, last week I had to reassure some of the USAMRIID customers that it was perfectly normal for clouds of steam to be coming out of the steam vent on the steam plant, and did not indicate that the steam condensate traps were broken, and so we did not need to launch an investigation and fix it.

USAMRIID

Construction is still continuing at pace. Several issues have come up, but are being resolved as quickly as possible. (1. Slightly flammable pipe insulation in plenum areas, 2. duct cleaning – cutting holes in ducts that are already tested, in order to clean them…, 3. continuing issue of accuracy of duct testing paperwork, thus throwing doubt about the results,  4. In ability to pull some of the coils out of AHU’s etc)

The main concern as far as I can see is that there STILL really does not seem to be a schedule. Despite this being the case for the entire time that I have been there, and various of us voicing our concerns about this situation, the Resident Engineer does not want to delay the project by calling for a stop work order, (realistically the only stick that would have effect) due to lack of adherence to the specification, so the situation rumbles on. Clearly this will become a more pressing issue when commissioning comes, also, from our inspection of what schedule there is, no time has been allowed for reviewing the submitted system tests etc,  feasibly this may cause real embarrassment in about a years’ time, luckily (for him) the resident Engineer has said he will probably retire in 10 months time…

I am intending to continue to pop back to the USAMRIID on a frequent basis, to keep an ear to the ground to hear the outcome of these issues, and contribute to the lessons learnt.

Home Front

Sarah is doing well in her job, and getting used to the fact that she is firing about a person a day, but this is apparently expected when largely working with Ex-Cons.

My Beer is going well, I now have particularly smooth pumpkin ale, (the Americans have figured out a way to make almost anything from pumpkin – ale, pie, soup, stew )

We have now got a Christmas tree wedged into our little place, it is about 9 ft tall and 5 ft diameter, which actually may be a little too big, it does make it feel very forested in our front room, in a nice way. Needless to say, it looked smaller in the field.