Notes from the Outage Floor
My first outage was at Plant Hatch in February 2017. It was also the first time I had worked a night shift — five in the evening to five in the morning, which really ran until about six once you factored in turnover — and I prepared for it by asking people who had done it before what to expect.
Between then and 2021 I supported five more. February 2018. February and March 2019, which was scheduled for four weeks and ran six. February and March 2020. Fall of 2020. Spring 2021.
I wrote to my newsletter list every week through all of them.
Reading those emails back years later, they turn out to be a record of something I never set out to record: what an outage actually is. A technical problem you have to solve on somebody else’s loud, ticking clock. Several hundred people who flew in or drove from everywhere to work nights beside you, all of them away from home. And a set of lessons about circuits and instruments and people that you cannot learn from a desk, because they only arrive when a panel is open and somebody is waiting on you (who is himself getting calls from the OCC asking for updates).
These are those pieces, in order.
The series
1. First Outage: Hatch, February 2017 — coming 15 August. Learning to sleep on nights, and the lesson I took from the Plant Hatch VP a few weeks after Unit 2 set a Southern Nuclear fleet record for shortest refueling outage: Leaders teach.
2. Two Things You Learn Standing at a Panel — coming 22 August. Whether you can run one equipment grounding conductor instead of five, and what happens when you land two conductors on a single terminal. Both are questions that only ever come up with someone waiting on the answer.
3. Outages and Leadership — coming 5 September. Written from the middle of critical path, about what supervisors are carrying and why leadership is not a one-way street. If you have a bad boss, is it because he is reflecting the character of those under his care?
4. Outages and Rodeos — February 2019, week two. The white line on the drive home at dawn, cowboy hats in the parking lot, Chris LeDoux selling tapes out of his truck, and what the traveling life costs the people who live it.
5. EDG Load Rejection Peak Voltage: The Technical Specification Limit and How Other Plants Raised It — March 2019, week four. A technical problem that threatened an outage delay. Why grid voltage creep can push your load rejection peak past the tech spec limit while the diesel behaves perfectly, and the public precedent trail for raising it.
6. Outages and Operations — coming 19 September. A friend wrote in after the rodeo piece to say I had left out the people who actually make an outage safe. He was right. His words and my commentary on tagging boundaries, outage risk profiles, and getting the unit back to full power.
7. What an Outage Teaches You About Your Own Designs — coming 12 September. Spares, labeling, conductor labels, and what a schematic is worth when you are troubleshooting against a clock.
8. Tan Delta Cable Testing — coming 29 August. Water treeing, cable aging management, and how a phase-angle measurement tells you which of your thousands of cables is failing.
9. When the Instrument Is Lying to You — coming 8 August. The isolation you assumed, the meter lead that went bad, the sliding link that looks closed and isn’t. One lesson I had to learn four separate times before I noticed it was the same lesson.
New parts appear here each Saturday. Entries without links are not yet published.
Why these are here
I sent these to an email list over the years and then left them sitting in an email archive.
The technical ones are the reason I was there. The others are what the job actually feels like from the inside, which is a part I like to write down that gets left out of on-boarding procedures, pre-job briefs, turnovers, and lessons-learned discussions.
Both belong on the same shelf.