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Rant: I counted 27 boiler tube failures in one year and only 3 were from normal wear
Honestly I got so mad last week I started going through our maintenance logs from the Gary works plant. In 2023 we had 27 tube failures across four units, and I went back and checked every single one. Ngl, 24 of them traced back to the same two things: bad water treatment and guys skipping the soot blower routine on night shift. Tbh the 3 that were actual age related wear were all on Unit 2, which has been running since 1987. I brought this up in the morning meeting and the shift lead just shrugged and said that's how it's always been. We are burning through 40k a year in repairs for stuff that a 20 minute check would catch. Has anyone else tracked their failure numbers like this, and did management actually listen when you brought it up?
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viola_lopez3019d ago
The part about "that's how it's always been" really got me because I heard the exact same thing at a plant I worked at years back. What finally worked for us was not going to management with the problem, it was going with the fix. We started a simple log where the night shift just wrote down the soot blower times on a clipboard, nothing fancy, and after two months we had real numbers showing the failures dropped on the weeks guys actually ran it. Then we brought that paper to the boss instead of just the complaint. Once he could see the dollar amount tied to the skipped steps, he put it on the shift handoff sheet and made it part of the routine. It was slow and kind of annoying to track at first but it was the only thing that shut down the shrug. Maybe try getting a couple weeks of proof on paper before the next meeting, because numbers they can see beat words every time.
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