Pigging Little Thingumyjigs

I’ve loaded & launched and receipted & unloaded literally hundreds of Pigs since I started this game. Staying put, with the same company sometimes for years and, sometimes, moving from job to job, around the World. The experience bank has built up over many years, exposing me to countless interfaces, crew nuances, obvious & lurking dangers & different ways of working amongst others.

 There are “doh!” moments that always rear themselves of course and which I’ve added to my catalogue of lessons learned, my best practice as I go. Some are obvious things that, time after time, aren’t applied; like starting with a new company and when you ask about previous campaigns sometimes no-one can quite remember whos’ pigs were used or how and anecdotes, now forgotten, that would be good to know; “I think it got stuck….” or “I’m pretty sure, I think, maybe”.  You’ll know the score.

Databasing, taking an interest in all the evidence that you can possibly scrounge together, being bothered to capture information, this is a critical part of the job, well I reckon it is. Like pig photos c/w GVI / CVI of disc wear, all non-shaky, well exposed & appropriately titled with dates are useful in helping to get it right…next time.  Or putting pressure signatures of pig runs in the wash up report, using stats to gather data on physical pig runs like transit times or trash per pig.  In my opinion things like this are often overlooked, with a one man wash up session only saved on C: drive somewhere & then forgotten.  Re-engineering ‘stuff’ when previous ‘stuff’ could have worked fine is frustrating, dangerous and risky let’s face it.

I was on an FPSO recently…..3 ‘stuffs’ are worthy of mention and mostly pretty simple ‘stuffs’ that could, would and did have an impact on the final inspection and pigging results.

Could’ve - The humble Dowty washer, a mostly small nitrile (NBR) rubber flange insert bonded to the inside of a thicker steel crush washer can hold back enormous pressures given its size. It only really needs nipped up on the tell-tale bolt hand tight then maybe 1/8th turn with a spanner. But often it’s well overtightened, beyond it’s design, and night shift blame day shift and day shift blame nights and, before you know it, the 10 little, ‘that’ll be enough’, you brought out have mostly all been dropped through grating or crushed to hell by a stilson wielding Gorilla.  Then your campaign goes into crisis because you don’t have any more and still have a few pigs to go.  A cheap device that has, in theory at least, potentially £1000s of effort and planning dependent upon it working properly. No door seal leak test and it’s all stop. Give the wrench to the Gazelle & don’t let the Gorilla tighten it, but they often do.

Would’ve – 4” 1502 Hose Management, all 60m or so of it, figured in 8’s with loops and straights in an FPSO turret is mentally taxing. This is especially so if you try to predict if the hose is going to tighten or un-tighten as it crosses from the rotating vessel to the stationary turret. Despite wind and tide data I tried my best to map it out, ahead of the game, so we can be ready to think about lift and shift operations. The truth was the direction of swing,  magnitude and speed of that change was wholly unpredictable.  All we knew was that it could happen fast, very, very, holy-moly-oh-my-jeepers-fast swinging 360 in around 10 minutes.  Lifting 4” 1502 filled with water isn’t fun.

It’s especially not fun when the hose is getting tighter and tighter & stretching sounds are starting to be heard or great big coils are getting taller and taller, suddenly falling, making thunderous noises as they hit the gratings as the hose winds back on itself.  With a breaking strain, in tension of many, many tonnes and an FPSO of 1000s of tonnes pulling on it the effects of 1502 ‘mismanagement’ could have been catastrophic & likely very serious.  However, with a bit of cunning & resourcefulness we used 2 bright yellow scaffold caps, one either side of the turret ring. This allowed us to see how quickly we were swinging and in what direction: the turret cap stayed still whilst the FPSO cap obviously moved relative to it (or not so obviously when you’re standing there, looking at it with lightning hitting the vessel and torrential rain dripping down your neck)….it took a while to get used to that rotation if I’m honest. The scaffies kept picking the caps up though. S o we put a permanent watcher on watch to watch the wee yellow caps, devised a quick break procedure isolating the hose and knocking off the correct union to release the hose if we had to.

Did – despite using, mostly, quality ILI vendors there are things, in their supply that catch you out.  Typically, it’s stupidly over-engineered, heavy and difficult to manoeuvre loading trolleys with no design thought at all – like if earthing’s so important how come there’s no earthing points accompanied by and a thick paint coating.  That’s a different LinkedIn post. This time it was the MFL tool magnet sleigh wheels, like big, smooth, nylon roller bearings pushing hard against the pipe wall ID. Only roll they didn’t. Instead, they pretty quickly just slid over very thin ID wax debris, picked up gunge in their axles, stopped rotating and, from that point onwards just scraped their way down the pipeline until they became flattened. As the wear got larger there was very little magnet offset from the pipe wall and we then had issues landing the heavy tool in the receipt cassette. Stuff rolling over a slippy place probably needs pins or studs to help it grip. Something to look out for next time you see an expensive piece of pig for your project.

For me it’s the little things, often missed at FAT or during risk assessments that have the biggest consequences that can delay, postpone or even destroy a hard planned, engineered and impactful programme. does your pre mob RA /HAZID think of these things?