Gearing Up

I am working on a project in a California refinery as a safety supervisor. This just means that I advise the workers and management on working safely and following OSHA rules. I go around doing job audits most of the day and correcting anything that is out of compliance. The other part of the day is spent sorting and filing forms and other paperwork that may be needed if there is a safety investigation. The job itself is pretty good, I get to travel pretty frequently, see new places, meet a lot of people and watch craftsman build some pretty amazing pieces of equipment. My work is project based so I'll typically work for 3-6 weeks on a project, have a week or two of downtime, then start on another project. I usually work 7 days a week for 10-12 hours per day. I really like being able to make a nice chunk of money in a short time period and then have a week or so to spend at home doing nothing. Being in one place for too long drives me crazy and I start to feel like a working stiff that's getting nowhere.
The project that I'm starting right now is an upgrade to a coker unit. The coker unit in a refinery is basically the last stop in the production process of crude oil. The oil gets all of the useful products pulled out of it along the line and the stuff left over is called coke, it looks like black porous rocks or black gravel. The coker unit I'm working in has four coke drums, about 100 feet high and the unit operators have to manually dump the coke out of the bottom of the drum into a pit by using a pneumatic wrench(similar to what is used in auto shops to loosen lug nuts, just bigger) to take all the studs out of the bottom flange, slide the bottom head off, wheel a chute into place over a hole in the floor and let the coke fall into the pit. This is very time consuming and labor intensive. What the project is going to do is automate this process by replacing these bottom heads with gigantic valves that open and close by the push of a button, thus eliminating the need to move these heads on and off every 10 hours. I've worked on a project similar to this before and the process is pretty cool. They will use a "water laser" which shoots a 35,000 psi water stream to cut off the bottom of the drum which is made from thick steel, weld a new piece on that will fit the valve, then use an enormous crane to lift these enormous valves into place(the valves themselves are probably around 15-20 feet long). The crew I'm with will hook up all the electrical components to make the valve work and all of this will be done in about 30 days. There will be 1000 workers total working day and night to get this done. It's really neat to watch this from beginning to end.
Refinery work isn't for everyone though, there is a lot of money in the construction side of the oil business but the long hours and traveling are too much for some people to take. I meet a lot of interesting characters as well, I'll probably talk about some of them in the future.