[BITList] negative GMt

[HUGH]

Frank, et al,

This is indeed a fascinating subject.  It's had me racking my brains a good 
deal, trying to work out why I did this and that and the other.  I recall 
being involved with flume tanks, though not on a drill ship.  These had a 
dump facility, though whether overboard or to a DB I cannot say without a 
search in the loft.  My problem was getting all the piping into a confined 
space and extended spindles to somewhere useful.  I think some of the valves 
were inside the tank - can't be sure, though I seem to remember being 
concerned that the extended spindles should never become disconnected.  I 
experienced this once, on the ship in the next paragraph.  She was as an ore 
carrier, with wing ballast tanks, and ballasting/deballasting was routine 
until one day a tank refused to empty. The handwheel on the deck just turned 
freely, indicating what had happened.  I observed them trying to suck the 
water out via a manhole with a hose and a portable pump - the hose just 
collapsed.  So we went into the cofferdam under the wing tank base and 
drilled a hole to let the contents run down into the cofferdam for pumping 
out via the bilge line, remembering to plug the hole afterwards.  It took a 
while, but it worked.  Ever afterwards I was paranoid about extended 
spindles and modified any arrangement I came across.  I reckoned being hard 
to remove beat easy to remove.

The duplicate wiring fiasco caps anything I've seen anywhere.  The worse I 
came across was a white painted pipe, about 2", with branches, all blanked 
off.  I traced this thing all over the ER, until it ended in a blank flange. 
I was newly joined as 2E/O, and none of those who had been there for the 18 
months the ship had existed had a clue about it either.

Reverting to the wiring, that was a disgraceful case of non-commissioning. 
Maybe the yard had an NCO for such jobs.  I wrote the commissioning for a 
North Sea support rig (BP), engineering and electrical, and every last 
switch, relay, wire, lamp, etc, had a part in a control procedure.  The 
absolutely enormous amount of control wiring was set up by a small team 
equipped with radios, drawings and tick off tables.  Basically, a chap at 
each end of a bundle of wiring identified the wire then ran a small current 
through it to check both were on the same wire.  It was then tagged and 
connected and ticked off.  Repeat ad infinitum. Only then did commissioning 
begin on an agreed hierarchy.

Hugh.