Of course, a lot of things go wrong. Constantly there's things going wrong. We're chronically shorthanded and underfunded. The owners can't pay their bills, so spare parts and tools are next to impossible to obtain.
But still, we make 127,000 pounds of steam per hour at 655 PSIG, and make a turbine spin, and we make 12.5 gross megawatts of power. Not that much, not really. It's not even 17,000 horsepower, in the end.
Things break a lot. We burn wood, not coal or oil, so it's harder to start fires ... but they happen.
And every day I come to work, I have a little bit more respect for the men who sailed to war in steam-powered ships.
It's next to impossible to keep this plant running well, when it doesn't rock back and forth. There's nobody shooting at us. We're not dependent on the amount of steam we can make at any given time to save our very lives.
The amount of power we can make doesn't enable us to aim the guns to return fire at an enemy we can't even see down in the fire room.
We don't have emergencies where our ability to stay online is what keeps our bilge pumps running, what keeps us from flooding, and drowning.
We don't have black oil spraying from any fuel lines, threatening to burn the engineering spaces down around us.
At the end of the day, I get to go home. Decompress. Have a glass of scotch. I don't have to keep power going during a typhoon, when my 2,500-ton Fletcher-class destroyer is pitching horribly.
God, I don't even really know how to put it. What to say. Those men, those engineers, were absolute giants.
No comments:
Post a Comment