It's turtles all the way down!
...
After a wild thunderstorm last night, today the weather was pretty mild.
My on-call week continues. Last night was a shocker.
One slaker faulted, so I brought the standby online remotely, which performed fine for about 40 minutes, before faulting as well...
So I drove into the plant, eyeing the approaching thunderhead over the sea to the west as it moved onshore.
I found the first slaker's feed belt had seized. I was able to free it by hand with some coaxing. I restarted the plant on that slaker, before moving to the next:
Which was the proverbial nightmare. Completely packed up with slaked lime in the lower section, and powdered lime in the top.
I cleaned it all up, which took over an hour, and diagnosed the problem. Somebody had left just one valve closed that should have been open...
The plant was running sweet again, pH correction functioning okay; the first slaker was performing well. I was just about to leave to come home when the centrifuge shut down at the sludge plant.
Both the duty and standby feed pumps had faulted.
Right.
So down I go to the sludge plant to see what was going on.
I tried flushing out the pipework leading into the pumps, to no avail.
It was clear there was a blockage somewhere in the inlet pipe, but there was no way I could dismantle and clear it out then and there.
Because,
Remember that thunderstorm I remarked on earlier? It had just rolled in overhead, with a fury heretofore unseen.
As I write, I'm reading that there were approximately 300,000 lightning strikes around the city from this storm.
Very electrically active.
It was quite a spectacular light show. Pounding rain and a brief moment of hail in the maelstrom. This kept up for about half an hour.
One thing that I feel we can universally agree upon as human beings, is how we all love to sit and experience a thunderstorm in a safe, dry space, whenever the opportunity arises.
Watching lightning through a window, or from a porch, patio or verandah. Listening to the raindrops on the roof overhead, the bassy rumble of distant thunder. Or the sudden startling aural explosion of a lightning bolt discharging very close by.
I witnessed one such strike last night.
So good.
There was a short power outage and/or spike at around 11:30PM, which caused issues with the plant control system.
It meant I had to go through the site checking and resetting pumps, valves, air compressors, the polyelectrolyte batching system and one of the six flocculators we're currently using.
Strange that it was only one...
I finally got home at quarter past one the next morning.
The turtle picture on yesterday's post...
This one:
Was from earlier in the day...
There's a small lagoon out back of the Sludge Plant that needs pumping out from time to time. The pump sends the water onto a floodplain, where it sits, slowly draining back into the reservoir through a swale.
I happened to catch him out of the corner of my eye as I was walking back from turning a pump off.
He (or she, yes) was in the freshly pumped water on the floodplain, which was completely dry just a few hours beforehand.
There's a few resident turtles in the lagoon, we see them all the time.
And we don't pump it completely dry for that reason.
Gotta think of the turtles, man!
The sides of the lagoon are pretty steep though, too steep for a Turtle, or so I thought. But then, there it was, one turtle who had braved the journey.
I got some footage too, but who knows when I'll have time to edit that down...
...
I'm beat, time for sleep.
See ya.