Unfamiliar noises

I had just picked up a rental car to use during a work trip, of a make and model I'd never driven before. Just as I pulled out of the parkade onto the road leaving the airport and the speedometer moved above the 10, the car shook and a made a sound that had me frantically looking in the rearview mirrors to see what piece of itself the car had just dropped on the road behind me.

Nothing. The road was clear, the car wasn't shaking or making any funny noises anymore, and was accelerating smoothly. Weird.

Just as I pulled off the airport road onto the freeway, and accelerated further, it happened a second time. This was really weird. Still nothing on the road behind me.

It was probably 5 minutes later, as I was driving around a 270 degree freeway ramp to get going the way I wanted, that I figured out what the noise and vibration was. Something not visible inside the rental car parkade, and not in my line of sight when driving the car due to keeping my line of sight on the road.

Impeccable timing on that thunder, Mother Nature.

I'm glad the funny noise wasn't a sign of anything damaged or about to fail, but I've encountered those conditions more than a few times. One reason I pay attention to them!

Don't look under the hard hat

One morning, my co-worker picked up a hard hat off a chair in the site office trailer. This would normally have been a perfectly normal thing but on this day, there was a tarantula hiding in the cozy, dark, and air-conditioned cool place it had found overnight.

After a bit of surprised dancing, the tarantula was left alone. They're pretty mellow and not dangerous, and besides, we had to get to work outside in the hot.

A while later when we went back into the office, the tarantula was on the ceiling. With a hard hat minus its harness, we got the tarantula into the hard hat to put it outside. After, of course, my co-worker asked for a photo of himself with the tarantula.

The tarantulas, as scary as they look, weren't the scary ones in that area. It was the sort of place where you banged your boots around a few times before putting them on in the morning to make sure nothing had taken refuge inside.

I never had anything inside my boots, but one morning I did wake up to a scorpion on my pants.

What did I learn?

Some random stuff I've learned from my field work: some of this is really blindingly obvious in retrospect, but which I didn't learn in university and thus didn't think of until I ran into it, sometimes embarrassingly face first and sometimes by trying to use an existing bad design.

> Operations and maintenance don't like crawling on their hands and knees on gravel to get at equipment that needs maintenance.

I told you some of these would be blindingly obvious. I have seen limited access to not only equipment for maintenance, but also to valves that need to be used on a regular basis. I have also personally needed to work a valve several times per day where I had to thread my hand between several tubes just to reach it. Fortunately I have skinny hands, and none of the tubes were hot.

Violent separation

In keeping with my original plan for this blog, I am now going to teach myself something new.

Here is something I have known about and occasionally seen since I was a kid, and know the name of, but hadn't seen it in operation and didn't actually know how it worked until I decided to write this post and figure it out:

It works exactly the same way as this thing, which I saw for the first time as an adult:

I am not a flower

I was on a job site, walking outdoors, when something small and bright moved near my shoulder. My first reflex was to swat at it; there are no lack of wasps around here. Fortunately I managed to stay my hand when I recognized it—a bright yellow butterfly, exactly the same colour as my yellow safety vest.

It landed on my vest, took off, landed, took off, and kept doing that for about a minute.

"Sorry, butterfly, I'm not a flower," I said to it, standing still next to the reactor.

It landed on me a few more times, then eventually realized I wasn't actually a jackpot of a bright yellow flower, and flew away.

My co-workers probably think I'm crazy. I've rescued a ladybug from one of the tanks in the same plant. As it was walking all over my hand the way ladybugs do, one co-worker asked me why I was talking to a bug.

"I like ladybugs," I said. "They eat the bugs that eat my garden."

We've also rescued a small frog from one of the tanks, and chased another out of its daytime hiding spot inside a short length of 1/2" PVC before using it. On moving an orange road cone, another co-worker commented that he was going to go fishing, after catching some of the explosion of crickets that burst out when the sun hit them.

Despite all that, I don't like it when wasps build nests on my equipment. They're the only ones I'll get out the killing spray for—not because I have something against wasps, only that they can't be building nests on my equipment when people need to be working in that area. They can build their nests somewhere else. Unfortunately, convincing them not to keep rebuilding in the same spot requires that killing spray. I hope after hitting two nests they're getting the idea.

Sunshine and sharpies

With a sheaf of drawings in one hand and a felt marker in the other, I wandered through the plant. It was stinking hot, but I'd rather be out here than in the air-conditioned trailer; I had to be outside anyway, and every stop in the trailer is one more shock to the system that I didn't need. Acclimatization makes the temperature easier to bear, but not all of my co-workers believed that and they kept the office trailer cold. I know colds are caused by viruses, but the co-worker who spent the most time in the trailer and turned the air conditioner the coolest was also the only one of the crew who caught a cold.

The pipefitters had almost finished with the large pipes, and would be starting on the small pipes soon after, which is why I was out with the marker. Nobody told me in school that felt markers would be an important part of the engineer's toolkit.

Since any given tank might have a half dozen ports all the same size, and some of them are very specifically placed where they are for a reason, they can't just be hooked up willy-nilly. This was why I was standing on top of a tank in the hot summer sun this time. No gas masks needed this time, fortunately, as this was still a construction site and nothing toxic had been introduced anywhere yet.

I'd study the tank drawing for the tank I was standing on, re-verify that the ports were all placed and sized properly, then kneel beside a port and write the port number and connection beside it with the sharpie. After burning my knees on the sun-hot metal of the tanks, I'd tug my pant legs up so the holes weren't directly under my knees. Nobody told me in school that burnt knees were a hazard of the field, either!

I marked every single port, and killed more than one marker doing it. Not so much that it was a giant plant, as the markers just didn't last long, writing on hot metal out in the sun—maybe a tank and a half to two tanks per marker. Tedious jobs are part of engineering, and while I don't particularly enjoy them, it is good to just put your head down and plow through them and then they're done. And, in this case, once finished I wouldn't be interrupted repeatedly by the pipefitters asking me which pipe went where.

The next day, as I wandered around the plant to see the piping progress, my markings had faded dramatically. It wasn't many days until they were nearly gone. Well, I tried.

Delayed effects

Pin holes in my jeans, above the knee. How did that happen? I don't remember them being there before I put them in the laundry. There were a half dozen on each thigh, ranging in size from just a few broken threads to something I could put a pencil through.

I wore them anyway; they're my work grubbies, intended to get dirty or damaged.

While titrating a sample, I realized a possible route to those holes. The sample was about 2 litres; the chemical dropped in from well above the edge of the container. If micro-drops had splashed back out, unseen, and landed on me, the chemicals involved could have eaten holes in my jeans. But I hadn't noticed them until after doing laundry. After getting them wet.

Here's a funny paradox for you: 98% sulphuric acid is safer (or at least easier to store) than 50% sulphuric acid. Why? Because 98% doesn't have enough water in it to dissolve the acid and activate it. Not saying it isn't still very dangerous stuff: it is, and if water gets in the tank you're in trouble.

Maybe the chemical droplets stayed on my jeans until the water activated it enough to eat a bit of the fabric, until the wash cycle diluted it to the point where it couldn't do anything anymore.

I think it's time for a lab coat. Must ask the boss for one. It's safety gear!

Puff

There's nothing quite like standing on top of a tank in the hot summer sun, surrounded by other tanks all reflecting the heat back up at you. Except, maybe, if you're wearing a full face gas mask and taking samples of a gas that is just about everything bad you can call a chemical.

Toxic, corrosive, flammable, explosive, carcinogenic… The whole system ran at a slight negative pressure, so that if there were any leaks air would go in instead of toxic gas leaking out, and they monitored it carefully to keep the concentration out of the explosive range.

I was testing the performance of a new scrubber which was taking the gas in question out of the exhaust, so I had to climb up to the top of the tanks then up on a scaffold, carrying a vacuum flask, to stand next to the exhaust stack and suck a sample out of the flow. All around me were explosion hatches; small explosions ("puffs") were undesirable but routine, and there was a well-established procedure for re-starting the system after it shut itself down following a puff.

For all that, it was pretty safe: as safe as it could be, considering the material. One day when I was taking a sample, a puff happened while I was on top, and I barely noticed it. I think I heard a bang as the explosion hatches jumped, but by the time I turned to look they had fallen back into place and re-sealed the tank, exactly as they were designed to do.

The gas mask was uncomfortable, but I was happy to be wearing it. It sealed all around my face, forehead to chin, and the sweat it generated improved the seal. I couldn't wipe the sweat off my face however, and it's no fun to get sweat in your eyes while you're climbing around a scaffolding system.

After a couple of weeks of this (I could only take one in/out sample set per day, and if there was a process upset that day I had to throw my results out) I noticed that my hair smelled … strange. For all it was a treated gas stream, with low levels of the toxic chemical, I had been spending enough time exposed to it that the gas had started doing something to my hair. The smell was that sickly-sweet smell of rotting fruit, and it lingered for a week or so after I finished that particular project. It took a few washes before the smell finally went away.

That smell in my hair was the only effect the gas had on me. Gas masks are wonderful things.