Wednesday September 19, 2012

Following my breakfast of granola and a cup of black coffee, I caught a ride to the plant 20 kms away with one of the superintendents, a planner and our interpreter. 

We spent our day merging English safe work plans with Portuguese ones with at least another day or two to go.  Lunch was at the plant cafeteria where I will be having lunch for the foreseeable future.

After lunch we stopped at the first of two furnaces that we are scheduled to demolish and had a good look around. Proprietary ethics prohibit me from talking too much about the demolition process or the equipment we use to do the job so my readers will have to satisfy themselves with my general descriptions.  Suffice to say we have two separate nickel furnaces that were shut down suddenly leaving cooled pieces of nickel several feet thick.  Our job is to remove the 100’ long by 40’ slabs in 85 ton pieces including a thickness of brick and slag to a depth of about 8’. Each furnace will take about a month with two weeks on each end of the job to mobilize and demobilize.