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By Rolly Angeles
22 yrs, ago, I can still vividly recall my first work as an oiler in a 1500 gross tonnage cargo ship we call MV Sea Raider. Employment during those time was scarce in our country and I was a fresh graduate from Mechanical Engineering and who have just taken the Mechanical Engineering Licensure Board Examination which I did passed. This ship was owned by my closed friend in high school. Knowing my situation that I don't have work since I find it most difficult to find work, he asked me if I was interested to work in one of their ships to gain experience, and I said “YEAH” which I gladly accepted. Today, this ship had already been totally scrapped due to its age.
I belong to the engine room and this is where I first got my taste of work as a maintenance man, I mean as a mechanic. I was later on promoted to a position of a Preventive Maintenance Administrator in which I have no idea what it meant or what its all about and all I can say is “WOW”, what a name! Most of our work includes some sort of scheduled maintenance, inspections, gauge readings and partial overhauls of a twin 750 hp diesel engines. We also have a couple of generators to maintain, the main generator which was run by a diesel engine generator and another backup generator in a form of a dynamo coupled to one of the diesel engine which we inspect from time to time. We used this back up generator when the main diesel engine generator was out of service or under scheduled overhauls or simply when it was down. I just can’t recall if the dynamo was positioned on the port side (left) or starboard (right) side of the engine.
Here was also where I first experience some sort of love/hate relationship between operations and maintenance, although there where no operators on the ship except for the crane operator, I am referring here to the people on the navigation side and the engine room people. The Chief Engineer was always in a debatable and argumentative mood with the captain of the ship. When the officers on board want more speed, the Chief Engineer always said, Do you really want to destroy our engine ? I guess you can understand the rest of the story. It seems that they just can’t seem to get along most of the time. While the officers on navigation together with the captain were highly responsible for meeting the schedule of the cargos, we at the engine room with our Chief Engineer were responsible for taking care of the equipments and making sure that the equipments are up and running whenever we need it.
We compose around 20 crew members, myself included. Six from the engine, six people from navigation, 2 cooks while the rest under the supervision of a boatswain which were on deck of the ship most of the time. Most of the route taken by this ship is to carry and disembark cargo from Manila to Singapore and vice versa. Singapore is one of the busiest ports in the world, and you can just see the beauty of the city during night time where we watch at a distance from our ship. I believe it took us around 6 to 7 days travel time at around a speed between 18 to 21 knots. I spend a year or so in this ship and it was my first time where I celebrated my birthday at the sea. I also spend Christmas and New Year and all of the holidays on this ship where at night you can only see the moon and the stars while during daytime all you see is the sea and a thin line at the end. We don’t even bother and think about Christmas time or holidays and go on as usual with our routine work, because, thinking about the holidays will just make you think of your family. Well that was the advise of most of the crew members with me and I believe I got along with it pretty well. There were no cell phones or internet during those times and the only means of communication was a radio.
There were several occasions where the Chief Engineer visits us during our routine shift not only to inspect the engines himself if operations was normal but also to inspect our hands which should be dirty and full of stain, dirt, grease and so on, since his thinking was having a clean hands was a sign of being lazy during your shift and as a sort of punishment you will be spending around a couple of hours with him after your shift and do whatever he wants you to do. Our mindset during those days is that if you want to be a good mechanic like him then you need to keep your hands dirty “ALL THE TIME”. During those days I have no idea in my mind what Root Cause Failure Analysis was all about so I don’t even bother to argue about analyzing problems.
Funny to think that as I age, there are many things I tend to forgot easily, yet there are quite a few things that remains stuck in my skull and never seem to forgot. And one of them, I used to set this example in my RCM class where I explain about what you call the operating context of an equipment. That not all the same equipments will have the same maintenance tasks since the consequences of failure might differ.
I used to asks the participants in my class when I’m teaching if they have some bulbs say 30 or 40 watts in their home to provide some illumination and light during nighttime or whenever they need it and most of them would say yes. The next question I asks is if they have some form of notebook or paper checklists indicating if they check this everyday or daily to see if it is still working or not and most of them just laughing out loud (LOL), and when I say that I am serious in this question because I seem to perform inspection on these bulbs in my home, not once, not twice but six times a day everyday. And there is a roar of disbelief some claiming that I am stupid or crazy for doing that. And I said, that I am not crazy or stupid in doing that and I am in my right frame of mind on doing it because I believe it is the right thing to do and in fact will dare them and prove it to them beyond reasonable doubt.
Again, as I have mentioned, my first work was with this ship as an oiler, I considered it my 2nd home during those days with the 20 crew as my family. Our shift was every four hours, my shift was from 4am to 8am then rest then resume my shift at 4pm till 8pm. There were six shifts a day. At the back of the twin 750 hp was a wall, and on this wall six bulbs were placed, three for the port side and another three for the starboard side (right). It is the same bulb you place in your house, we just dipped it in paint, green, red and yellow. The first thing we do when we go down to this engine room was to check if each of these bulbs was working or not and replace the bulbs that are not functioning. We perform a functionality check and inspection on each of this six bulbs to capture which bulb was busted or not working. In RCM we termed this as Failure Finding Tasks since the failure of any of the six bulbs is hidden in nature. Of the six bulbs, two were green in color, another two were yellow and the remaining two was red in color, just like the color of a traffic light. The most critical will be the two bulbs which were red in color. When we were in voyage and the ship was set forth in motion, both green bulbs are on light indicating that the ship is moving forward. When the people from navigation wants to build up more speed, these green bulb will blink which means that we at engine room should increase the speed. Well in some cases the Chief Engineer would surpass that order, yet in most cases the Captain of the ship will always have to be followed since I believe he is always the highest ranking officer on board a ship. When the yellow light blinks, we need to watch out and be alert as any moment since it simply implies that either the red or green bulb will blink or appear. If the red bulb lights up and appears, we need to fully stop the engine, if both red bulb from the port and starboard side lights up then both engines should be stopped. If the red bulb blinks very fast, then we need to put the engines in full reverse since it is our assumption that this ship will hit something. Kindly remember that there were no brakes to apply on a ship, the only way of stopping a ship is to put it in full reverse. In fact, the life of the 20 crew members on board that ship highly depends on the functionality of this red bulb. And so after hearing my story out, I once again asked my participants if I am crazy of inspecting these bulbs which is the same you have in your home every shift or six times a day. Every time that red bulb lights up or blinks we were there and place the engine in reverse position. We always feel some sort of being a hero every time we do that since it is our thinking if I did not do my job, you might be all dead right now so thanks to me. Well of course that was what’s on my mind only. And yes of course these consequences of the bulbs you have in your home is a run to fail situation where when it fails you just need to replace it, but not in our case 21 years ago. And the case of inspecting the bulbs six times a day, case is closed and I was right and not crazy.
Well after a year or so I decided to step down and work on land industry. Its time to see what was it for me on land. The machines, equipment, operations remain different but most of the things I’ve experience when I was on board that ship was not that different after all in land industries, feud exists between operations and maintenance and sad to note that in some industries maintenance is considered a stuntman and a scapegoat for all the operation’s problems when something is wrong, when output is not reach then all fingers points to the mechanic. Most industries depict maintenance as a form of something evil, a cost center. There is some mild sort of discrimination and most operations see maintenance as some form of mechanic functioning as a plants repair business. I just am not certain if this sort of misunderstanding can finally be put to an end, and I am struggling to convince industries of the value and importance of the maintenance function. All I know is that it takes a great amount of time to “CHANGE”, as it takes a lot of time where black Americans were treated as slaves during the time of Abraham Linclon to a point in time where a Black African American is now the leader of the most powerful country in the world.
"I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly , those who desire it for others. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally," Abraham Linclon 16th President of the United States March 4, 1861 to April 15, 1865
Maintenance will always have a place in any organization, and that I believe, the best positions any industry have belongs to the maintenance function. But we need to understand that maintenance is not a repair business and the goal of the maintenance function is not to create repair men. Maintenance is not about how fast we repair and put the equipment in operations but understanding why this part fails. When we understand these failures then new doors would open up for the maintenance function. Lubrication, spare parts, failure analyst, tribologist, fractographer, reliability people, CBM or predictive maintenance group, CMMS, vibration analysis, thermographer, oil analysis, oil contamination control group, etc. are just some of the many positions we can have in our maintenance function.
With, the Christmas and New Year holidays just around the corner we take the time to break off with our work to spend some time with our families in order to celebrate this season. Yet, as we celebrate, there will be people that will celebrate this season not with their families, not with their love ones but with their equipments. Despite these holidays, they need to light up the plant, provide power through their substations, cool of some portions of the plant with their Air Handling Units. And as the New Year begins, they peek outside the open to see the beautiful fireworks, yet they remain vigilant and try their best to remain awake so they can monitor their equipments. These are the maintenance people from your plant’s facilities / utilities. These people will always be “The Last Man Standing.
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The distinction between a maintenance and a mechanic is that a maintenance uses his brain much more rather than his hands in analyzing problems while a mechanic uses more of his hand in fixing failures and then later on becomes good at fixing failures. Let us treat our people with the respect they deserve, let us treat them as maintenance people and not as mere mechanics . . . |
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Issue No. 18 - October 2008 |
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Since establishing this website last May of 2007, I have made many efforts to improve this site and provide some useful insights about our common link which is all about improving our equipment reliability and the way we do maintenance.
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