Bechtel in trouble with the Big Dig in Boston just like Fluor

[Gerald Newton3]

I hope they do better with the Missile Defense Project at Fort Greely,
Alaska. If they engineered a tunnel that leaks, I wonder if the Missiles
will hit another missile?
Oh well, they aren't the only one's. Fluor oversaw the construction of the
Valdez Marine Terminal on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in 1975-76. They
somehow forgot to make sure the tray cables had equipment grounding
conductors in them or around them (they were in nonmetallic sheaths.) The
entire terminal with all 14 miles of cable trays was a grounding disaster.
The steel tray cable support system was used as an equipment ground. But
oops, what happens when the cables leave the tray and go underground to get
to the loads in buildings and outside buildings. Well, they put the cables
in directly buried rigid conduit with no protective coating in concrete .
The conduits were bonded to the tray at one end and at the equipment at the
other end to serve as the grounding path. But after 14 years the conduits
started rusting through and equipment grounds were being lost all over the
place. Valdez is a very wet place! Considering that many areas are Class 1,
Division 1 hazardous locations this was a real safety hazard. Also,
consider that almost 20 per cent of the Nation's Oil was being loaded onto
tankers from this terminal and you can see the concern. So how did Fluor
fix this after the federal whistleblowers went to Congress in 1993. They
engineered there way around the problem by jumpering all the conduits
together at both ends so the rusted ones would be bonded to the conduits
that had not rusted open yet. That is the way it is today.
Oh yes, one State Electrical Inspector would not accept this fix so they run
his ass off and replaced him with an in house appointed inspector. Believe
me, I know.
This is a true story.

 

[Gerald Newton3]

I hope they do better with the Missile Defense Project at Fort Greely,
Alaska. If they engineered a tunnel that leaks, I wonder if the Missiles
will hit another missile?
Oh well, they aren't the only one's. Fluor oversaw the construction of
the Valdez Marine Terminal on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in 1975-76. They
somehow forgot to make sure the tray cables had equipment grounding
conductors in them or around them (they were in nonmetallic sheaths.) The
entire terminal with all 14 miles of cable trays was a grounding disaster.
The steel tray cable support system was used as an equipment ground. But
oops, what happens when the cables leave the tray and go underground to
get to the loads in buildings and outside buildings. Well, they put the
cables in directly buried rigid conduit with no protective coating in
concrete . The conduits were bonded to the tray at one end and at the
equipment at the other end to serve as the grounding path. But after 14
years the conduits started rusting through and equipment grounds were
being lost all over the place. Valdez is a very wet place! Considering
that many areas are Class 1, Division 1 hazardous locations this was a
real safety hazard. Also, consider that almost 20 per cent of the
Nation's Oil was being loaded onto tankers from this terminal and you can
see the concern. So how did Fluor fix this after the federal
whistleblowers went to Congress in 1993. They engineered there way around
the problem by jumpering all the conduits together at both ends so the
rusted ones would be bonded to the conduits that had not rusted open yet.
That is the way it is today.
Oh yes, one State Electrical Inspector would not accept this fix so they
run his ass off and replaced him with an in house appointed inspector.
Believe me, I know.
This is a true story.

For those of you that might be reading this post, I will follow-up with some
more tidbits, since I had the rare opportunity to have such a personal
relationship with Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, Whistleblowers, and
Fluor engineers.
One of the defenses for allowing and entire cabling system to be installed
without equipment grounding conductors in the cables was the fact the design
for all voltages above 208V, such as 480/277 volts used high impedance
grounding with ground fault alarms. This would limit the ground fault
current to some low magnitude on the order of a few amperes above the
charging current. This is fine until a second fault occurs on a different
phase before the first fault is cleared. And the likelihood of this
occurring is nil? Not quite. In the year 2001, apparently, Alyeska had cut
the maintenance electricians so badly that there were not enough manpower to
repair a ground fault for several months. This is particularly true when
such a fault occurs the the winter. Valdez gets up to 20 feet of snow
making it very difficult to find faults in outside runs of conduit and
equipment in the winter. Such was the case in 2001. So during the summer
the maintenance electricians were attempting to find a ground fault that had
been left over from winter. During that summer a temporary installation was
made by a contractor to supply power to for other subcontractors using parts
of the same system. This was done by using the existing feeders to mixers
on crude tanks. Somehow during the 20 years of maintenance someone had used
varnished cambric to insulate some damaged wires on these feeders. Of
course, with the high annual rainfall, these repairs were wet and varnished
cambric is absolutely worthless when wet. As such, the cambric was in
contact with a grounded metal object. Now when the maintenance crew started
to troubleshoot the ground fault, they turned on the circuit having the
ground fault. Now the varnished cambric repair was on a different phase so
instead of seeing 277 volts to ground it saw 480 volts RMS or 1.4 times this
for a peak voltage of 678 volts. The cambric broke down and smoked the
repair job and no breakers tripped because the equipment grounding path back
to the source was of too high an impedance. This led to a major
investigation by Alyeska into the contractors workmanship that did the work
using the cambric repaired wire for temporary power. This investigation was
short and incomplete but did not address the real problem of NO EQUIPMENT
GROUNDING CONDUCTORS IN THE CABLES because no one wanted to even mention the
root cause of the problem, especially since Alyeska had spent about $400
million doing an upgrade project in 1993-94. And part of that was to
repair the grounding problem at the Valdez terminal.

Fortunately, the 2002 Code contains a small but important change to prevent
this in
Section 250.4(B)
(4) Path for Fault Current. Electrical equipment, wiring, and other
electrically conductive material likely to become energized shall be
installed in a manner that creates a permanent, low-impedance circuit from
any point on the wiring system to the electrical supply source to facilitate
the operation of overcurrent devices should a second fault occur on the
wiring system. The earth shall not be used as the sole equipment grounding
conductor or effective fault-current path.
FPN No. 1: A second fault that occurs through the equipment enclosures and
bonding is considered a ground fault.
FPN No. 2: See Figure 250.4 for information on the organization of Article
250.

If this requirement had been in effect when the terminal was built, the
justification of using a high impedance grounded sytem could not have been
used to justify not having equipment grounding conductors in the cables.
The clear solution to this error is to replace the cables.