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Monday 11th July - Friday 15th July
Hi guys and dolls, hope you are all enjoying your internships and having a fun Summer. I seem to have settled into my apartment and I have everything in order, house chores, shopping, laundry etc. It was confusing at first trying to translate everything from Dutch to make sure I was buying the right shopping and not making my laundry shrink and go pink but I’m getting the hang of it now.
After my first weekend in the Netherlands it was time to go back to work at the power plant. Monday morning began with more safety training for onsite. I should really stress to you that safety is the top priority here with GE as it is in The Netherlands in general. In the afternoon the date for my VCA safety exam was confirmed for Friday so this week was going to be all about hitting the books and cramming the Dutch world of health and safety into my cerebrum.
Moerdijk 2, not just another day at the office
In between times I had to attend a few training meetings including a permit to work presentation and a Lock Out/Tag Out (LoTo) training demonstration. Permits to work are documents which have been signed by management authorising you to carry out jobs inside the plant; you are not permitted to carry out a job without one. Loto is a procedure where electrical and other energy storing equipment are switched off and ‘locked out’ the rest of the system: this prevents someone accidentally switching on the power to something while you are working on it, making you go the way of the dodo.
On Wednesday to celebrate the team making a safety milestone where 2 million work hours have passed without a single lost time incident we were treated to a buffet lunch by the company at the local Restaurant Passant. Let’s hope my arrival on the scene will not make this safety record falter!
My VCA studying was put on hold for the first half of the day on Thursday when I was instructed to meet a technician at the gate and bring him onsite where we were to work on assembling a chromatograph. This expensive piece of equipment is used to analyse the water and steam that will be flowing round the various parts of the power plant for things such as pH, (the acidity level) conductivity etc. I was delighted to spend all morning putting this machine together only for us to discover the darn thing had been broken during testing. My boss was even more delighted when I delivered the good news to him that the tech guy had to take the chromatograph back to his company for repairs and this would take at least 2 weeks. Bad times. Never mind, these things happen I suppose. Later in the afternoon my boss Gregory, the commissioning manger, gave me an in-depth presentation of the work I will be carrying out for most of my internship. I won’t bore you with all the engineering terminology and jargon, but basically I have to monitor and analyse the steam and water as it goes round the plant and make sure conditions are met to prevent all the piping and equipment from rusting, getting blocked, exploding etc.
After a week of studying the big day came and on Friday I sat the VCA exam in Anterwepen, Belgium (we are pretty close to the border here) and success I passed! Now I am qualified to work onsite by myself for the next ten years and my certificate is valid in Holland, Belgium and France, not to mention having a new addition to add to the old CV. So much for exams being over for the summer! Though I suppose this kind of thing comes with the territory of working in a dangerous and practical field.
To celebrate obtaining my new diploma I ventured into the Breda night life with my new friends Anna and Lisa. First stopping by the Spanish bar which sadly is very quiet on a Friday night, no free drinks this time. Boo. After that we met up with some of the GE guys and I took them to an Irish bar in the vain hope of finding some of my ancestral kinsmen. As you can imagine there wasn’t anything very Irish about the place, the bar staff were Australian. Occasionally U2 came on the jukebox and I introduced the girls to Guinness which actually comes in pint glasses, or 0.5 litre glasses I should say. The funny thing is that back home I never drink Guinness but my old Papa would be proud, though he isn’t on the internet to read this so I’ll tell him when I return home. My French colleagues, like the Dutch, aren’t too familiar with the idea of pints and I didn’t even think I was a heavy drinker for a Scotsman, oh well. I suppose when you think about it, the fact the Irish bar isn’t very Irish is quite ‘Irish’ in itself…
So another week of my Saltire internship had passed but the weekend had only just started. Next time on my blog I will tell you all about my trip to Amsterdam!
Chris x