Blog on the Lillypad
Saturday, December 13, 2003
 | Working Overtime
I had a chance to work overtime today, so I drove down to the jobsite (an hour) and put in a full day, alone, writing lockout/tagouts for every piece of equipment in the Media Prep room. "Media Prep" is the short hand term for the phase of pharmaceutical production where the liquid food to feed the bacteria (which will ultimately eat itself to death) is cooked up in enormous tanks (Three of them are 5000 liter capacity). The process starts in one tank, and as the liquid reaches a given setpoint of pH, yeast content, temperature, etc., it's transferred to the next tank, and from there to the next and so on through five tanks. By the end of the process, the bacteria has grown and becomes dense enough in solution to be processed into vaccine. |
A lot goes into each tank: the growth media, water, steam, additives. And a lot goes out of the tanks: condensate, off gases, and the media. All of those input and output valves, pipes, and pumps have to to be written up with specific directions so that technicians don't get hurt when they go in to repair something on a tank. These tanks are so huge that they have "manways" in the top, which are narrow openings just big enough for a man to slide through so that he can drop into a tank and effect repairs. You couldn't pay me to do that. the techs who do it use rappeling gear to get in and get out.
It was difficult enough for me to crawl under the tanks today and look for valves to shut off the inputs and outputs so that each tank can be separated from the process for repair work. I'm not young any more. I realize that. Sliding and pushing my way under these behemoths and around the stainless steel pipes and numerous tubes and wires took a lot out of me. I'm sore, especially my knees. And it wasn't a dignified process, so I'm just as glad I was alone on a Saturday. I had to slide on my back in a few places because there wasn't room to turn over. Some of the valves were positioned between the massive tanks and the back wall of the room, and nobody could have gotten back there to check the valve numbers. I climbed up on a steel maintenance platform above and peeked through the cracks to verify the valves were there. But I had to document their purpose and use through the engineering drawings. (Ideally, purpose and use of components are verified by both the drawings and a visual verification.)
Anyway, I put in a good eight hours, and now the day is over.
