A day I will not soon be Forgetting (work)

Today, December 9th, will be a day that I will not soon forget. At work last night there was a power failure, so at a little after midnight I got a call from the shift foreman that the DCS had only rebooted 1 computer, and I told him that since the plant was shutting down in a matter of a month that it would probably be okay to let the units idle and I would take a look at it in the morning. Well in the morning the computers were in the same state, so I re-booted the two that didn't restarted and they worked fine and the servers were okay. Unit 3 was still down because it didn't act right when they tried to run it in idle after the power blip. So we tried it, and the furnace didn't look right and I didn't think that the blower sounded right, and I had the electrician take a look at the motor control. It checked out okay. Then we checked the valves and the instrumentation to make sure we didn't just 'think' we had a problem, but they checked out too. So we fired it up again and this time the air rate coming through the furnace was noticeably not right as the flare on the furnace was smoking (not normal) and the valves had opened as needed. The only explanation was that the heat exchanger was leaking from being shutdown so abruptly during the power outage (this is usually the last thing you check for because it means mega downtime to change the heat exchanger). Well Dean Markum and his gang checked the old heat exchanger module and sure enough if wouldn't pass the pressure test, so in all likelihood Unit 3 has produced its last pounds of black. I would be curious to see how bad the exchanger got burnt up, but in all probability I won't. During this ordeal the day shift tried to start to other unit. Apparently during the power outage some of the sets in the DCS were reset though and the valve that allows are exhaust gas to be used for fuel was shut. Needless to say when we started calling for the fuel gas it was unavailable. I radioed to the controllman that the valve should be 100% open, well just as he opened it BOOM. It actually sounded like 2 large metal canisters being banged together, but was definitely due to the hot gas meeting the air. There was no significant damage from this as far as I can tell yet, but the unit collector must have been damaged during the power outage as well. Either way ye haw. So Unit 3 maybe done for good and the other unit may be down for a while as well. No biggy as we are not pressed for orders and the plant is going to shut down anyway. My boss was at our corporate headquarters today and yesterday, 'Hey remember how we wanted to shut the plant down and stuff? Well don't worry we took care of it.'

Note: not posted until after the first of the year, after I had left this facility.

Update: I originally did this post on the 9th and in fact unit 3 did run again and I did get to see the heat exchangers and man were they bad. The tubes were almost all the way gone in the third exchanger and partly gone in the second. A couple of the guys said this was the worst they had seen but it made sense since they tried to coast the unit for an hour or so. It basically means all of the combustion was taking place at the heat exchanger and not the reactor as the gas wasn't being burned until it met the leaking air and basically torched the last two modules. In the end we didn't run very much the rest of the month though, in fact none in my last two weeks.