That day a 3 inch steam leak shut down half the plant for 8 hours

Was working a turnaround at a paper mill in Wisconsin last spring. We had a 3 inch steam line that was supposed to be isolated but someone left a valve cracked. Fixed the leak but then had to wait for the whole section to cool down before we could retorque the flanges. Lost a full shift. The foreman just stared at the ceiling for like 10 minutes. Anyone else ever lose a whole day to something that simple?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_wyatt1mo ago

Honestly, I've seen that same exact thing happen more times than I can count. At a chemical plant in Louisiana we had a 2 inch drain line that someone didn't double check before starting up a reactor. That little mistake caused a pressure spike and we had to shut down a whole unit for 12 hours while they purged everything and checked for damage. The worst part was the safety meeting the next day where the supervisor basically said "read the tags next time" like it was our fault for trusting him. It's wild how a small thing like a cracked valve or a misread gauge can snowball into losing an entire shift.

the_felix1mo ago

Does that ever just make you feel like they're covering their own back while throwing you under the bus? I had a similar thing at a refinery in Texas where a supervisor skipped a lockout tagout step, and then blamed us for "not catching it" in the safety meeting.