Confined Confined Space Entry - Inside Pipeline

[minimutly]

When I was young and fit I used to be the only one able to squeeze between the roof supporting rsj and the top of the cold store in the dairy where I worked.
One time I managed to wriggle into the second section of the buttermaker to fit new gauzes, and some joker turned the drum! **** myself

 

[Gragson]

Looks like an american pipeline , on some wheeled boards to repair a defect in a pipeline 1400ft deep in the 3ft dia pipeline, How can they be sure they even have oxygen

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Looks rather dodgy in my opinion however anyone seen anything like this?

Did BA emergency response, trained up with regular brigade as part of response crew at a big plant I worked at, we even had our own appliance as well as all the BA to maintain.
Volunteering to rescue at that depth even with BA would take some balls, its hard enough getting out of a burning smoke filled room with lump to carry

 

[Pete.]

Did BA emergency response, trained up with regular brigade as part of response crew at a big plant I worked at, we even had our own appliance as well as all the BA to maintain.
Volunteering to rescue at that depth even with BA would take some balls, its hard enough getting out of a burning smoke filled room with lump to carry

I had to do some work in a 900mm pipe once and I know I couldn't have turned around with a rescue set on. Found it near impossible in just overalls. Only went in about 4m there's no way I would have gone 400.

 

[northwest]

Long story and I will omit details but alongside to bunker one day some A**E filled a fresh water tank with fuel oil. (I know, it must have taken some creativity).

Working shifts off the east coast of a South American country that I wouldn't send my worst enemy to we lined the tank with chlorinated rubber paint wearing a combination of Breathing Apparatus and umbilicals. I will never forget that job.

 

[addjunkie]

Volunteering to rescue at that depth even with BA would take some balls, its hard enough getting out of a burning smoke filled room with lump to carry

And a real person is always far heavier than a training dummy and you cant bounce them around as much. We had to rescue a guy with a broken leg from a tank. Only had to move him about 15 yards to below the rescue hoist in a stretcher. Would have been far harder in BA too.

On one of the emergency response traing courses I did at the FireBrigade training place Moerton on the Marsh they have a sewer complex they put you through in BA where they teach you to take the bottles off and push them in front of you to squeeze through small spaces. Wasnt pleasant at all.

 

[James1979]

And a real person is always far heavier than a training dummy and you cant bounce them around as much. We had to rescue a guy with a broken leg from a tank. Only had to move him about 15 yards to below the rescue hoist in a stretcher. Would have been far harder in BA too.

On one of the emergency response traing courses I did at the FireBrigade training place Moerton on the Marsh they have a sewer complex they put you through in BA where they teach you to take the bottles off and push them in front of you to squeeze through small spaces. Wasnt pleasant at all.

Did that as part of the fire rescue team training for ships. The worst part was going along a floor with no headroom, then down a hole and 180 back the way you came with no headroom. Pushing the bottles all the way. Never done it ‘live’ but in a training rig with artificial smoke and dark was bad enough.

On the plus side, when we did another equally hideous course I was teamed with a big fat **Language** who was mega unfit and had sucked his air just waiting to go in so his alarm went as we went through BA control. As his buddy I had to turn back too. Result!!

 

[minimutly]

My mate was with me on an escape set training, the instructor sent him down on the winch with an almost empty bottle. Cue smoke and noise, mask on, winch him up. Half way up his air ran out, he couldn't take the mask off (or wouldn't), by the time we got him up and took his mask off it was flat on his face, red as a beetroot, and not very happy. We all thought it was hillarious of course.

 

[Wedg1e]

We did an inspection job in the service tunnels under the drydocks at a navy base; it was 45 feet to the drydock floor and the tunnels were a dozen feet lower still.
Shaft was 4 feet square with a number of pipes dating back to Victorian times carrying sewage, fresh water and at least one fuel oil, plus power and telecoms cables alongside them. There were rungs across one corner but too rotten to rely on so it was a case of being manually winched down the remaining space whilst avoiding getting snagged. Due to the shafts being brick and the inner basin being full, seawater was spraying through cracks at varying heights. The tunnels originally had floor drains that emptied to a sump but the drains had long-since blocked up, so we had a vacuum tanker with an 8" hose down the shaft as well, furiously trying to drain the tunnel before we got down to it. Various gases also accumulated in the shafts and tunnels. So we were wearing full rubber suits, long wellies, gloves, hard hat, rescue harness, masks with air piped from a trailer full of bottles plus a pony botle strapped to your leg, carrying gas monitor, torch, camera, tools and wearing a throat mike and earphones. It took about 15 minutes to winch down and more like 30 to get back up!
Historically, the job had been done by the Royal Navy divers, but their risk assessment said it was now too dangerous. Ours clearly didn't. The bloody gas alarms hardly ever stopped bleeping.
The guys manning the vac tanker said they had a contract to empty the sewage tanks on the navy ships, which included periodically climbing in (on BA) and jetwashing the interior walls - and the tanks weren't nice rectangular things but fitted around other structures in the ship, so lots of tight gaps to squeeze though... and some of their staff were big blokes

 

[Tinbasherdan]

You’ve never lived until you’ve had to work in the bilges on a submarine

 

[KTMart]

Where I used to work all the casting pits had to be media blasted and repainted every few years, around the furnace were a number of dedicated compressed air supply points for the air fed helmets the operators wore but the guy doing the blasting wanted to use a point closer to the pit he was about to blast, annoyed that it had a different fitting he breaks out the adjustable spanner and changes the fitting and stabs his airline in, all fine so far, he sets up to start blasting and dons this helmet a bit like the old fashioned diving helmet and within seconds crumples up on the floor, thankfully his workmate was next to him and yanked the helmet off to find out what was wrong thinking he was having a stroke or heart attack, it was neither the pipeline he was plugged into was the inert Argon supply for the furnace, had his mate not been there it would have been a very different outcome!

 

[TechnicAl]

I couldnt see any equipment or any signs of equipment, such as cables......how were they repairing the pipe?
and there appears to be 2 of them....one filming and one being filmed.....why would there be 2
I bet it was 1400 feet from this side and 10 feet from the other

 

[mr_splatter]

In the late 80s I worked as a labourer for an Irish firm subcontracted to the local water board putting in a big water treatement works. They had laid about 200ft of concrete pipe about the same diameter as that in the video (about 3ft - the same as they put in kids playgrounds), about 20ft deep and had backfilled it. When they pressure tested it, it failed. The pipe was about 1/3 full of water and they told me to crawl along the pipe, count the joins and run my fingers round the joints to see which sections hadn't gone together properly. They wanted to measure and just dig out that section. I had no torch and there were big Volvo earth movers above. Scariest thing I think I've ever done but being young and stupid didn't think I could turn it down. H&S was appaling back then and I can think of a load of situations where I could easily have been killed but we always knew when we were going to get an inspection and the whole morning used to be spent sorting out guarding, properly shuttering trenches etc. I wouldn't dream of doing it now.

 

[Gragson]

And a real person is always far heavier than a training dummy and you cant bounce them around as much. We had to rescue a guy with a broken leg from a tank. Only had to move him about 15 yards to below the rescue hoist in a stretcher. Would have been far harder in BA too.

On one of the emergency response traing courses I did at the FireBrigade training place Moerton on the Marsh they have a sewer complex they put you through in BA where they teach you to take the bottles off and push them in front of you to squeeze through small spaces. Wasnt pleasant at all.

Did mine at Aylesbury FB training centre, setup was domestic and industrial buildings but no pipe work thank christ. The heat, smoke and total blackness was very disorientating until you got the hang in the final days.
I think the weight of the dummies is a bit relative tbh, the ones we trained with were all 12st dry for adults, can't remember the kid weights, but agree it's not realistic situation wise.

Was watching one exercise, crew got lost in the building (teams of 3) they found a hatch to the roof then lobbed the dummy off the top so pleased to get out, they failed that one..
Work mate could not resist the very close pub on the final day, went on his own woofed down 3 pints and a pie before final exercise restart, threw up in his mask and carried on and passed, nutter but top bloke.

 

[addjunkie]

Did mine at Aylesbury FB training centre, setup was domestic and industrial buildings but no pipe work thank christ. The heat, smoke and total blackness was very disorientating until you got the hang in the final days.
I think the weight of the dummies is a bit relative tbh, the ones we trained with were all 12st dry for adults, can't remember the kid weights, but agree it's not realistic situation wise.

Was watching one exercise, crew got lost in the building (teams of 3) they found a hatch to the roof then lobbed the dummy off the top so pleased to get out, they failed that one..
Work mate could not resist the very close pub on the final day, went on his own woofed down 3 pints and a pie before final exercise restart, threw up in his mask and carried on and passed, nutter but top bloke.

Apparently the mask holds a pint and 3/4, or so we were told when I did the marine fire training way back in 1980. Odd the things you remember.

 

[Morrisman]

The American guy I worked for in the yacht marine in Singapore earned his original coin as a sat diver doing this sort of stuff. He once told me a tale of swimming up such a water intake pipe for a rig, film inspecting for damage or something, but when he turned to swim back out his pipes wouldn’t pull across the numerous mussels etc that had grown in the pipe, he was trapped. He had to sit there for four hours in this 30” pipeline, waiting to see if the rig could reverse water flow to get everything pointing the other way.

He made light of it, 20 years on, but it was pretty obvious it had been a gruelling experience.

The guys we hung out with outside of work were on US$1000 a day, while I was earning S$80 working in the boatyard... I didn’t get involved when they started shouting rounds for everyone in the bar.

 

[Wedg1e]

Did mine at Aylesbury FB training centre, setup was domestic and industrial buildings but no pipe work thank christ. The heat, smoke and total blackness was very disorientating until you got the hang in the final days.
I think the weight of the dummies is a bit relative tbh, the ones we trained with were all 12st dry for adults, can't remember the kid weights, but agree it's not realistic situation wise.

Was watching one exercise, crew got lost in the building (teams of 3) they found a hatch to the roof then lobbed the dummy off the top so pleased to get out, they failed that one..
Work mate could not resist the very close pub on the final day, went on his own woofed down 3 pints and a pie before final exercise restart, threw up in his mask and carried on and passed, nutter but top bloke.

I did mine first time at Mines Rescue at Houghton-le-Spring. Their 'replica' mine had a narrowing section so the roof and floor got closer together, fallen beams, railway tracks, drooping wires, the lot. The instructors told us that they used to turn the lights out and fill it with smoke for added realism but HSE made them stop doing that in case someone got hurt
In similar vein, the offshore survival courses that include a helicopter evacuation used to be done in the dark, with a wave machine going and unheated water. Post-HSE intervention, lights are on, there are rescue divers in the tank, no waves and the water is heated to 20C... so just like crashing in the North Sea
Another confined space course I did (ESS Middlesbrough rings a bell), we had to rescue a dummy 'casualty'. We were told the casualty was 'x' metres distance down a tunnel, made from sewer pipes so quite generous to crawl in. Two parallel tunnels abouot 6m long joined a pair of chambers for economy of space, so In order to replicate the distance you had to crawl round and round the tunnels, ignoring the casualty until you'd gone the required distance. So my workmate and I grovelled and crawled, puffed like Ivor the Engine hauling Cyril Smith and the Roly Polys... until our low air alarms went off and the instructor shouted that we were now dead. Each of us thought the other was keeping tabs on the distance, we'd gone about 6 times further than we needed to

 

[hermetic]

Couple of years ago a BT engineer turned up at my workshop to replace an internet feed line, took one look at the loft door, and said "sorry mate we are not allowed to enter confined spaces"! The loft was boarded out and lit and not really confined at all, I ended up going up and passing him the cables down, he conducted the refit from the top of the steps, and I then replace the boxes in the loft and put the covers back on. On another occasion at home I had to crawl into a loft bedrooms storage space and recieve the new cable from the BT engineer outside, and then pass it through a door to him so he could terminate it. All the above "confined space" jobs sound horrendously dangerous in comparison to a bit of "loft work" . Every job contains an element of danger, it is up to properly trained operators to decide if they want to accept the risk, and go properly equipped, but refusing to work in a loft is a joke!
Phil

 

[qwakers]

refusing to work in a loft is because they will be sacked if they do it. DAMHIK.

 

[gaz1]

fitting cables where a customer wants it is prefered bt and most cable fitters dont want hard or uncomfortable work

they would rather just fit the wires to the side and go a quick easy job not something i want or would except so like others id rather just thread the wire to them if they refuse

if they refuse to fit it then and ive had it
ive refused them any further no point in them being there knowing full well they wont be paid for that job or there fuel to get there

then ive given there fitter contact some grief as i expect a fitter to be complient to a customers wishes if they are prepared to some of the work as well

on another note goes for both bt and cable ive had fitters refuse to hard wires the units in as i prefer a hard wired system and direct not bone idol wireless units fitted and install from there as ive seen it from both bt and cable and those are the ones i hate the most

 

[zeppelin builder]

been inside large vessels , fire gaurds inside and outside , gas tested ,forced ventilation, swipe in out system,radio contact at all times , camera surveilence
rescue plan ,team on standbye
risk assesments ,team breifing
read and understand procedures /sign on permit
i stopped the job due to a burned shield gas hose , had to write a 2 page report as to and why the hoses were unsuitable and why i had taken the action

when i was young it was common to get the laddie to do internal root repairs on heavy wall pipework , saved loads of time gouging and grinding mostly done on nightshift rope round the ankles air line and hand lamp and welding cable and grinder if you were lucky there would be a branch or a weldo to drop the stuff in
usualy the bulb went after the first knock or somthing not right with the gear , manky and bruised and eye injuries occasionaly
still goes on no doubt, either one extreme or rhe other in safety, boils down to the welder being daft enough to do it , scared to refuse , lack of knowledge/ expierence