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Winds of Change
Finally got a hold of my work laptop and my user account and things start moving!
The week before last was spent completing my industry safety training. This was composed of Basic Off-shore Survival and Emergency Training (BOSIET) and Minimum Industry Safety Training (MIST). BOSIET focuses on what to do if your rig/helicopter burns down and gave a very good insight into the industry as a whole. One of the delegates on the course turned out to be a member of the BP Assurance team who goes out to old and new installations to commission or re-commission the production lines and control systems. Interesting job and I certainly had at least one interesting chat with him about the Deepwater Horizon disaster that I am not allowed to tell you about, but it sounds very much like Project Engineers will be prosecuted for deleting emails after the fact and on the advice of BP lawyers. Welcome to the digital age, I wonder what court cases would have arisen following the Piper Alpha disaster, had email been around then. Computers certainly help in many areas of engineering and, quite rightly y they stand by to condemn also. He is quite busy at the moment as BP continues to automate their installations which should result in a step increase in off shore safety.
The course was an excellent appreciation of the reality of my role as an SPA. These oil rigs are exceptionally dynamic places in that they are a chemical factory, building site, metal works, hotel and heliport all stacked vertically over 150m of cold North Sea. Even the simplest of changes to an installation can have serious repercussions if not planned correctly and I have spent the last week correlating these two courses to the BP best practices. There was, however, a lot of dross in the week and I sincerely hope I don’t have to listen to anyone drone on about HASWA 1974 for at least 12 months. On the plus side, I did rather enjoy the heli-dunker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1d1bF5ec4Q&feature=youtu.be
This last week has seen me connected to the BP server and suddenly the world opens up. The BP distance learning portal is excellent and contains a plethora of courses that have begun my understanding of how Projects and Mods works, along with ample helpings of Chris’ experiences.
BRUCE P60 Bridge Inspection Platform
Kerry Scott (Programme Lead for Bruce) has been on leave this last week which has given me time to start getting to grips with this project. With confirmation that it is mine and access to email and documents, the process has begun moving. I’ve been assigned two job responsible engineers, one for Cassions and one for the project itself. This project has changed hands numerous times and has been scoped on at least two occasions but at present there is funding for about 700 hrs of work which may be enough to take it well into the Define stage. This would see the project designed in detail with constructibility reviews and all of the required hazard analysis. What I need from Kerry this week is definition of where she sees the project and what the next gate is. There is some uncertainty as to whether, in the BP scheme of Appraise, Select, Define, Execute, Operate, the project is actually through the select gate or not.
In terms of funding it certainly sounds like we are poised on the edge of Define, but this could all change this week as Kerry holds the purse strings and she has said previously that she does not consider this project to be that advanced. This project has floated in the ether for the last ten years and so I don’t know whether to be optimistic that this is the time for it to move forwards or whether it will get kicked back into the long grass. Either way, it is on the brink of Define and therefore I will be able to get some good design and general management experience. The company is also getting to grips with its new electronic Management of Change software (eMOC) and a renewed focus on risk management and so it is set to be a good learning opportunity at the very least.
and in other news…
Hugo had a brief stint in hospital last weekend as he came down with Bronchiolitis, but to look at him now, you wouldn’t believe it! On the plus side, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary is probably the best hospital I have visited and the staff were brilliant. Cycling to work is going well and I have found a nice off road route which should save me from being squashed on the 2 miles of rat run that I usually have to negotiate.
I leave you with a dubious piece of advice from Aberdeen County Council…
Measure twice, pour once!
This week as seen fairly poor progress primarily due to rain but exacerbated by a growing supervisor turf war between my supervisor John McNally and the civil team supervisor working in the area. We couldn’t do much about the rain although we should have protecetd our excavation alot better than we did and I now understand the sort of volumes of water you can experience in this country in a very short period of time. We managed to blind abutment B in prepartion for the pile trimming to happen but the following day when checking the levels for abutment A we realised that the levels for the other abutment were wrong. My part in this was not insignificant as one of my drawings I produced to make the excavation easier to understand for the leading hand who was checking the levels for the excavator was wrong. The other two were correct and of course the designers drawings were there to cross check any ambiguity but it seems they fixated on one particular sketch. Neither I nor the supervisor checked the levels prior to pouring and so we had to rip out the blinding the next day and re-pour later in the week. Fortunately it was only a blinding layer (20MPa) of 6m^3 instead of a major structural component which would have been an expensive mistake rather than a lesson learned I think.
Blinding complete followed by rain stopping play for a day!
8 out of the 10 piles have now been trimmed to the correct RL so at least the steel fixers can start work on abutment A on mon morning and weather permitting we can get that pile cap ready to pour by the end of next week (only a 3 day week next week due to ANZAC day)
Abutment A pile trimming complete.
The supervisor war on site has become a little childish and I am staggered about the lack of communication between departments. In this small area there have been 5 different teams trying to work around each other. At first I realised that the civil team need to take possesiion and do the bulk earth removal and I was fully aware of them and them of us after having a few meetings together and de-conflicting space and time issues. Since then the Combined Services Route (CSR) team have dug trenches right through our retaining wall areas (we have had to change the design of one of the retaining wall base slabs by cutting a corner off to miss the CSR) the rail team are constructing the overhead stanchions either side of the retaining walls and the other day a signals team arrived who started marking out and spray painting on the ground in the middle of both abutments. I am fairly sure they would have spray painted over my boots if I had stayed static for too long, this just highlights the attitude of work throughout the project for me. Everyone seems rather blinkered to their work only with little regard for others. I assumed we owned the site after all we are building the bridge and so any other trade/team would have to report to us or at least communicate with us, this however seems optional. When I have raised questions, concerns and recommendations it is met with a shrug of the shoulders and agreement that the situation is bizarre but no suggestion of why or how it can be changed. The issue still lies with the civil team who are all over the site and who have very little work left to do on this project apart from at Dickson Rd. Their supervisor has clashed with ours all week reagarding control of water on site. As we have produced the lowest point on site water will inevitably find us but due to earth stock piles further up the alignment we had directed and contained the surface water run off to abutment B only and had protected that with the use of bunding. By blocking access between the two abutments for safety reasons to stop 30T Moxy vehicles transiting through we seem to have aggrevated the civil team supervisor who decided to install a drainage pipe through a stock pile further up the site which has subsequently flooded both abutments. John McNally who is our supervisor and a fairly laid back chap responded by constructing a bund (the great wall of McNally) across the entire width of the alignment and blocking said drainage pipe. The arguments continue with both our superintendent and the general superintendent getting involved whose solution from what I can gather seems to be ‘bund more’ and ‘just deal with it’. I am not entirely sure anymore who has real control over who, engineers seem to have very little. Having thought at the start of this attachment that the structure and CoC was very similar to the Army it now seems more of a façade with little bite. The construction manager seems to have all the real power as he can fire and hire people which is what people ultimately care about.
Clearing my tubes!
The inclonometer tubes after the civil team clipped the top of both of them a few weeks back had collecetd about 3m of water and a few clumps of clay which we managed to clear with a water hose and air compressor, heath robinson stylee effort. This managed to clear abutment A tube which I need to repeat on abutment B next week. Having had the inclonomter PDA sent back to me from Melbourne following repair I have finally taken the second reading and have a full set of initial results. Apparently the client requires a variation of no more than 3mm between readings which I think we are very close to if not slighlty over so I am not sure what the repurcussions will be. There is a history of coal mining in the area which seems to be the reason for inclonometer readings being required for any pile works on the project and I am supposed to produce a report once the abutment walls are complete and the final readings have been taken. I am not sure what form the report takes and if the readings are greater than 3mm at any point what remedial action needs to be taken. As I think we already have a reading very close to the allowed tolerance I assume the client needs to be aware of this now but what I have been briefed is that the client gets all the results contained within one report after the final reading has been taken. I need to look into this in a lot more detail over the next few weeks as the more I have got involved in the inclonometer the more questions it has raised – topic for TMR1 I think!
Hopefully this British style weather will go back to where it came from very soon and we can make some progress.
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