The company I work for specializes in buying neglected oil and gas properties from giant oil companies and, basically, performing archaeology to figure out what the giant oil company was doing so we can do it better. It’s quite fun poring through a well file that goes back a hundred years, starting with hand-written oil rates, margin notes and initials by untold numbers of engineers and field hands. The solution to what you think is an engineering problem—say, anomalously high gas production in the historic record—can sometimes be literally a historical phenomenon, like, everybody was flat-out lying about about gas production during that time period because of something called the “80′s Gas Wars.”
It sounds like the mystery engineer worked at a very old probably borderline economical plant. The fact that the plant was so maligned by management can be read as an indication that it was a very marginal enterprise. One gets the sense that some vice president flipped a coin regarding the decision of whether to do the debottlenecking project or just shut the plant down and save on manpower. I say this to make the following point: infrastructure decay happens to infrastructure that kind of sucks. In a way, this is part of the circle of life, the work of the invisible hand, or whatever. While this plant was falling into decrepitude, other newer ones with better technology were being built according to more modern best practices by different companies. If this plant had mattered, I don’t think this would have been as likely to happen.
I am certain that someone will point out to me an example of a high-value industrial work that was allowed to fall into decrepitude and neglect, but I do think there’s a causal relationship between neglect and uselessness. The reason I am holding forth on this is that I have heard so many dozens of engineers whine about how their projects were mistreated by management and always silently ached to reply, “So what? Your project sucked. Management is trying to optimally allocate resources. Grow up.” There, I feel better.
The other possibility is something so reliable that when it does go down no one is quite sure how to get it back up, sometimes people might even forget it’s there.
I am certain that someone will point out to me an example of a high-value industrial work that was allowed to fall into decrepitude and neglect
Ok, since no one else has to date, I will. My example is the Longford Gas Plant, one of the largest and most profitable in the world. It processed pretty much the entire gas oitput of Australia’s richest oil province, and supplied virtually all the gas and LPG needs of the city of Melbourne. The revenues generated by the plant were several million dollars PER DAY. Still, the American bungee-management decided to save costs by cutting maintenance “’till it hurts”.
I worked at Longford in 1999-2000, on a backlog of modifications and maintenance requests, some dating back to 1979. Documentation decay was well and truly happening. One example that comes to mind is that certain drawings of underground piping, carrying gas and LPG, were lost. Excavations were a bit of a problem...
I’m not convinced that the engineering archology study in this case is about a factory that did suck. Quite the contrary it appears. It worked so well that it was worthwile to copy its success.
The company I work for specializes in buying neglected oil and gas properties from giant oil companies and, basically, performing archaeology to figure out what the giant oil company was doing so we can do it better. It’s quite fun poring through a well file that goes back a hundred years, starting with hand-written oil rates, margin notes and initials by untold numbers of engineers and field hands. The solution to what you think is an engineering problem—say, anomalously high gas production in the historic record—can sometimes be literally a historical phenomenon, like, everybody was flat-out lying about about gas production during that time period because of something called the “80′s Gas Wars.”
It sounds like the mystery engineer worked at a very old probably borderline economical plant. The fact that the plant was so maligned by management can be read as an indication that it was a very marginal enterprise. One gets the sense that some vice president flipped a coin regarding the decision of whether to do the debottlenecking project or just shut the plant down and save on manpower. I say this to make the following point: infrastructure decay happens to infrastructure that kind of sucks. In a way, this is part of the circle of life, the work of the invisible hand, or whatever. While this plant was falling into decrepitude, other newer ones with better technology were being built according to more modern best practices by different companies. If this plant had mattered, I don’t think this would have been as likely to happen.
I am certain that someone will point out to me an example of a high-value industrial work that was allowed to fall into decrepitude and neglect, but I do think there’s a causal relationship between neglect and uselessness. The reason I am holding forth on this is that I have heard so many dozens of engineers whine about how their projects were mistreated by management and always silently ached to reply, “So what? Your project sucked. Management is trying to optimally allocate resources. Grow up.” There, I feel better.
The other possibility is something so reliable that when it does go down no one is quite sure how to get it back up, sometimes people might even forget it’s there.
And then they turn it off and bam, nobles getting beheaded.
Ok, since no one else has to date, I will. My example is the Longford Gas Plant, one of the largest and most profitable in the world. It processed pretty much the entire gas oitput of Australia’s richest oil province, and supplied virtually all the gas and LPG needs of the city of Melbourne. The revenues generated by the plant were several million dollars PER DAY. Still, the American bungee-management decided to save costs by cutting maintenance “’till it hurts”.
Then this happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esso_Longford_gas_explosion
I worked at Longford in 1999-2000, on a backlog of modifications and maintenance requests, some dating back to 1979. Documentation decay was well and truly happening. One example that comes to mind is that certain drawings of underground piping, carrying gas and LPG, were lost. Excavations were a bit of a problem...
I’m not convinced that the engineering archology study in this case is about a factory that did suck. Quite the contrary it appears. It worked so well that it was worthwile to copy its success.