A Day in the Life...

I'd say that my worklife is about 95% productive, stressfree days. Some may even say cushy; hour lunches, 8-4:30, good paycheck, great location, freedom to go in and out of the office as I see fit. The other 5% is crazy, no fun, high stress, intense, will-I-make-it-out alive? kinda days. I will put today into the 5% category.

It should have been a perfect week. My boss and our senior engineer are out of the office all week on business so it's just my co-worker Steve and I holding down the fort in Substation Engineering. The morning went well; very productive, sent out a bunch of emails, was on the horn making things happen. Noon came and Steve and I drove out to Culvers for a burger for lunch. We almost got back to the office when Steve got a phonecall saying that we should come out to a substation by East Towne Mall to check out a problem some of the guys were having. I told Steve to go back to the office first as I had to check email quick, go to the bathrrom and grab my hardhat. So, at about 2:00 we get to the site.

We find out that the problem we're having is a DC ground. I won't bother you with the details of a DC ground on your system, but it's a pain in the butt to troubleshoot. You basically have to switch off control and protection breaker by breaker until you don't see a DC ground anymore and then you've isolated it. Once you isolate the panel it's coming from you trace it to the component or wire level.

Well, we traced this problem to the cable going to a 14,000V circuit breaker in the switchyard. We knew the problem was not good. This kind of problem could inadvertantly trip open the breaker at anytime and there is a major customer on this particular circuit. So we knew we had to get the load switched off this circuit so we could properly and safely address the problem.

We set up our table outside, found the wiring diagrams and schematics for the substation to we could start tracing the wires back one by one. 3 of us were right next to the breaker, doing nothing to it mind you, when BANG! the breaker opened up. Now, these breakers are about 15 ft. tall, carry 400 gallons of oil and are freaking loud standing a good distance away from it. So you can imagine when I heard it from only 2 feet away that I thought the world was ending.

I sprinted about 30 feet from the breaker so to get out of the way if things started flying apart. There is a major customer on this circuit not to mention a ton of streetlights. Not too soon after, we heard sirens which meant that police cars were going to controlled intersections to keep traffic going. We figured that the problem is in the cable from the control house to the breaker. This cable is "direct-buried" which means it is not in conduit, just laid in the ground and covered up with a bunch of other cables. So tomorrow, the crews have to start digging up the 60 ft. stretch of cable to replace it being careful to not dig into about 25 other cables right beside it. So this is my day tomorrow. At least there is no rain in the forecast.

And poor Amber; her car was having problems on Sunday so we took it to the shop this morning and I dropped her off at work. I couldn't pick her up as planned so she had to take the bus to the repair shop to pick up her car. And she missed her pilates class. Of all the days for this to happen...Murhpy's law, right?

I actually worked until 6pm tonight, that never happens!