Monday was too wet and windy to work on the tower so nothing happened there. The generator was scheduled to arrive on this day also but with the rain and mud, everyone was afraid the 18-wheeler carrying the generator and the crane that would lift would either sink in the mud or tip over when lifting so it was put off until Friday when, we hoped, things would be a little dryer. So the workers in the building kept tracking mud in because the front parking pad had not been poured yet. We received about a half of an inch on Monday at the site. What a mud hole.
Tuesday was worse. The tower crew hung up the horizontal runs of feed line in the building out to the tower and brought MORE mud in from the rear of the building. We received 2 inches that day and over 1 of those inches in about 20 minutes time.
Wednesday we had the Assistant VP of Engineering for the stations group and the electrical design engineer down to see the progress and to answer any last minute questions as we make this last push to finish things out. Needless to say the general contractor was stressing heavily that the building wasn't as presentable as he would have like it with all of the mud for the "visitors from the north", but they did a good job of getting things in order and all of the trades on site did try to keep the mud down to a minimum, which wasn't easy.
Wednesday the sun came out and the building wasn't in too bad a shape for the VIPs. Everything went well with that.
Thursday the automatic transfer switch for the generator was to arrive. It didn't. It was to arrive Friday by 5pm. It didn't. Then it was to arrive by 7:30pm. It didn't. It finally got to the site at 11pm Friday night after riding to Charlotte and back. So as you can see we had been stressing a little all week. On Friday, the front parking area was finally poured!!
That is why when the generator arrived on site Friday morning on schedule, everyone sigh a little for something had finally gone right.
The crane arrived after lunch and then lifted the generator (about 16,000 lbs worth) off of the trailer and then on to rollers to be rolled into the generator room. The lifting was the easy part. The rolling was a different story.
There is a 5 inch drop off over the 18 foot equipment pad to have water run off from the building. So trying to push an 16,000 lb generator up hill wasn't going to be as easy as a bunch of people getting behind it and pushing it. And because of the space, you were not getting a truck or something like that to push or pull it so the crane riggers slide it in as far as the crane could and then a large folk lift came up from behind and then boomed it forward into the opening. The generator sits at a 90 degree angle in the room from the way it had to get into the building so it then had to be rotated 90 degress to get the rest of it in.
So once the generator was in straight as far in as possible, the folk lift had to move to the exhaust opening and then pull it in and around that 90 degree turn to align it in the room.
Once it was in the space, and was level, man power could easily move it anywhere we needed it but it took 2 and a half hours to get to that point!
But there it now sits all ready to be hooked up and ready for service. The plan is to have it fired up by Christmas. Now that would be a GREAT Christmas present!
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