Wow G1, do you ever get to go home? Or is it life from one hotel to another?
That was the one thing I stipulated when I had a job that had me on the road; always home on the weekends; and they did grant that to me.
And I'm curious; how noisy are those plants? I see the hard hat, but do you have to carry the hearing protection and the steel toed shoes just for traversing to your work area?
During the spring and fall outage seasons I will pretty much live on the road performing maintenance and working on upgrade projects. During the rest of the year I will spend about half the time in the office preparing for outage season work and the other half of my time in the field making customer requested changes and/or replacing failed control system components. Most of this work is scheduled such as to allow us to be home on weekends.
Steel toed shoes and a hard hat is standard procedure in a power plant anytime outside the admin buildings. Depending on the plant various forms of vision and hearing protection is required in certain areas at certain times. Generally double hearing protection is required to work near the turbine when they are in operation so I carry both ear plugs and big ear muffs that attach to my hard hat.
While noisy in certain areas gas turbine power plants are designed to be as quiet as possible from the outside. Standing 100 yards away you would never know that there is an active power plant there if you did not see it.
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