Stepped into a refinery in Baton Rouge last week and noticed something odd with their boiler setup

I was walking through the south end of the ExxonMobil plant and saw they'd rigged a bypass line on a waste heat boiler with a manual valve instead of an automatic one. The foreman told me it's been that way for 8 years and never caused an issue. Has anyone else seen sketchy workarounds that just keep trucking without failing?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamie79415d ago

Used to roll my eyes at stories like this. Then I saw a cooling tower at a chemical plant in Texas that had been running with a patched PVC line held together with hose clamps and epoxy for over a decade. The engineers all knew about it, plant manager just shrugged. That bypass with the manual valve sounds dumb on paper but sometimes these things just work. I had to eat my words when that tower ran without a single issue while I was freaking out about it.

ray_mitchell14d ago

Man, that cooling tower story is wild! My buddy works maintenance at a paper mill and told me they've got this steam line that's been leaking for like 12 years. They just welded a steel plate over the hole and called it a day. The leak slowed down but never stopped. Engineers keep saying they'll fix it next shutdown but everyone knows it's not happening. That manual valve bypass sounds like amateur hour compared to some of the stuff I've heard about.