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A good disaster

7th July 2017

By: Terry Mackenzie-hoy

     

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Do they still have, one wonders, the good old engineering Friday afternoon braai? For the sake of moral, it used to be that, at the end of every month, on a site, they would have a braai, usually starting at 15:00. The beers would be floating in a water-and-ice mixture in a galvanised bath (known as a ‘dog’s bath’), the coals would be glowing, the bread rolls buttered and a very small quantity of salad would be prepared. Then, as the beers vanished, the stories would be told – the stories of near disaster or actual mess-up.

I have gathered the stories in my time and told them over dinner parties. I am conscious that some of the stories have improved beyond fact and, in a way, have become what Mark Twain called ‘stretchers’ in so far as they stretch the truth. But I say never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Are you ready?

As I wrote to Lea Smit, of MLT Drives, the other day . . . there was this Transkei bridge that Pat had to blow up. They drilled six neat holes and called the liquid explosives truck to fill the holes. Some contractors popped around to see the fun, complete with beers and braai stuff. They chatted away and noticed that, after 30 minutes, they were still filling hole number one. Pat’s guys had inadvertently bored into the bridge box section, which had a volume of about 2 m3 now, half-filled with liquid explosive. They could not get it out. They retreated about 1 km away and waited. The blast blew the windows out of the bakkie. The braai was flung skywards, trailing coals, boerewors, chops and lettuce leaves. The veld caught alight. Shrapnel rained down for about an hour. The wide pool in the river thus created is still used as a cattle watering point just off the main road, which is carried on the new bridge designed to replace the old one.

I was on this refinery at the time of a shutdown. A vital component of the refinery is something called the platformer. The platformer has a platformer compressor, which can be driven by either an electric motor or a steam turbine. While it was running on the electric motor, the circuit breaker failed and the whole refinery came to a halt for two days. For a refinery to stop production is, to the operators, something worse than unthinkable, much like discovering that your child likes playing the bagpipes. They got the platformer steam turbine going and I was instructed to have the circuit breaker repaired and have a standby circuit breaker arranged so that, if the main circuit breaker failed again, the standby would take over.

It took weeks to design and wire the circuitry together but, finally, it was ready. We started the platformer electric motor up and, when all was stable, switched off the steam turbine. All good. I explained to the operators that, if one circuit breaker failed, the other would take over seamlessly, automatically. I said the only way to trip the platformer motor was to push both breaker emergency stops simultaneously. “Both?” asked the senior operator. “Yes,” I said. “Like this?” he said . . . and diligently pressed both emergency stops. There was a short heart-stopping pause and the emergency flare lit up the sky and the refinery ground to a halt.

My all-time favourite – concerned about the silting up of the Nahoon river mouth, in East London, in the Eastern Cape, the provincial administration called an environmentalist in. He said the only solution was to open the sluice gates of the Nahoon dam and scour out the mouth where the river met the sea. Yes, they would lose all that water but the environment, you know. He implied that not to do as he recommended was to condemn the Nahoon river to the status of a swamp. While the authorities pondered the environmentalist’s report, there arose a great storm, which caused the Nahoon dam causeway to overflow six feet deep. The river mouth was completely scoured out. Six months later, it was fully silted up again.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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