Appreciation post: the week the rigging crew and I got a 3 day job done in 5 hours
Last Tuesday we were set to swap out a feedwater nozzle on the 400 megawatt unit in Gary, and the schedule blocked 3 days for it. Our lead fitter, Ray, walked the scaffold at 6am and saw the flange bolts were already half broke loose from the last outage, something nobody wrote down. We pulled the nozzle, dressed the seat, and had it back together by lunch, and the unit was making steam again before 3pm. What made that week stand out was not the speed, it was that Ray just looked at the job before we started cutting and unbolting. I keep thinking about how many of these long schedules are padded because nobody walks the job first. Does your crew do a walkdown before the permit meeting, or do you just take the planner's word for it?