That Friday a boiler in Gary, IN nearly took my hand off

I was on a job at a steel mill outside Gary. Old firetube boiler, maybe 60s era. I was checking a manway gasket when the pressure relief popped. No warning. Scraped my arm on the lagging. My foreman said they'd bypassed the safety cutoff the night before to keep production going. I don't skip a pre-job walkthrough anymore. Anybody else run into bosses cutting corners like that on older units?

3 comments

3 Comments

olivia_lopez983d ago

Yeah the nuisance tripping thing is real. I've seen crews just wire around safety limits because the plant manager was breathing down their neck about downtime. On those old firetubes, the safeties are usually set to pop way before anything dangerous happens. But bypassing the cutoff means you lose the whole interlock chain. That's your primary protection gone. Next time you're on an older unit, ask them about the last time they did a full functional test on all the safeties. If they look confused, walk away.

keith2746h ago

Did they ever figure out WHY" is the real question here. Nobody just bypasses a safety for fun, there's always a story behind it like a bad sensor or a control panel from the Stone Age. Bet the foreman had been dealing with it for months and just snapped one night.

taylor_patel3d ago

Did they ever figure out WHY the safety cutoff was bypassed in the first place? Seems like there was probably a history of nuisance tripping they didn't want to fix proper.