13-15th September 2005
Nothing happened during my shift on the 13th. I spent all day sitting in the plant, doing checks and taking readings. After my shift, I went to chow with the other guys. I came back, showered, changed into my Air Force PT gear,(which looks bad ass at night when it's reflecting), and went to the rec center called the Clamtina here. I played in a Texas Holdem tournament. If you win the tournament, you get Aafes gift certificates for up to I think 70 or 80 bucks. Not bad really. You can get a lot for that much here. The best thing is that it's not gambling cause you don't have to put anything in. I didn't win but I didn't do too bad. I made it to the 3rd table out of 6. Around here you either have to wear your DCU's or Air Force PT gear. The PT gear has reflective properties on them. On the back of the shirt is the Air Force symbol in reflective material. It looks awesome at night. Around the shop though, I wear civilian PT clothes. When I got back from the tournament, I stopped into the plant to let the fellas know how I did. While I was there, I asked one of the new bosses if he minded if I worked the night shift. He said no problem. So I stayed up until about 0230 so I would sleep most of the day before work. I got about 3 hours of sleep though since I had to go to a new comer's briefing. I didn't think that thing was ever gonna end. I swear they had every squadron or agency on base brief us. After that, I came back and went straight to sleep. I awoke for my shift. There are only 5 of us on night shift. We have a TSgt in charge. He's from the Alaska air national guard. He has 4 years in power pro. Power pro guard at that. He just needs to calm down and learn how to manage a shift and not worry about what day shift thinks we do or don't do. These new guys are all worried about accounting for time so we don't get lent out to do escort or something like that. The thing is if something comes down to where they need some bodies for something like that, me, Brian, Lilly, Nick, AK or Rockwell will be lent out because we're active duty and we're not part of their unit. I think 90% of this new rotation in CE is guard. Guard guys have no management skills. They give away rank. They don't have to test or try for their rank like we do. So a Tech sgt or master can be in charge of you and not know anything about the job or have as much experience as you. Anyway, my first night shift was uneventful. We cleaned the shop a little bit. After I got off shift, I went to dinner, which is breakfast for everyone else, then read a little and went to bed. I would have written but I wasn't really in the mood. I haven't been in the mood to write that much lately. Maybe it has something to do with the shift change.
I woke up around 1430. I went to the bathroom and came back to my room and put on sun block and my bathing suit and went out back to sit by the pool and read. Lilly and Brian were out there too. It got a little hot sitting out there so I decided to jump in the pool. It felt great! I stayed in there for about a half an hour. I got out, laid on a lawn chair and was reading soaking up some sun. While I was doing all this, Black Hawk helicopters were coming in frequently and landing on the medical helipad. Something must have been going on down town or somewhere off base. I dried off quickly in the hot sun. I put in a load of laundry and took a shower and did all my other morning routine stuff. I got on shift and did my normal thing like check email and check a couple things on the internet. There were 3 generators on line. A little while later, I decided that the load was low enough that we could take one off line and only use 2 genertors. Lilly agreed. So, we proceeded to take the load off of the one we were taking offline. As we were doing this, we were both thinking that we forgot to do something. So, i'm turning down the frequency to take off the load and got it pretty low and then Lilly all of sudden turns off the circuit breaker to tht generator. All the lights go out. Shit! What the hell happened? We both say at the same time, "battle short!" The battle short switch is a switch used to keep the generator running if any faults come up. Whenever we turn on or off a circuit breaker, we get a ground fault, which is a dangerous fault that can electrocute you if you touch any high voltage wires. Well, we forgot to turn on the battle short switch and as we switched the breaker, the plant went down and the base was out of power. Oops! We recovered quickly and all was good. After everything calmed down, the 4 of us spent some time placing what we call spider boxes between all the generators. Those are used as a tent's source of eletricity. We were using them to plug light trees into so we can do maintenance at night. We were also running cable to connect the spider boxes to each other. These generators used for the power plant are big and loud. Each one is capable of producing 750 kilowatts of power and 4,160 volts. The control panels for these are located indoors, which is our control room. We connect the generators to primary distribution centers or PDC's. Think of those as sub-stations. Then more cable is run to secondary distribution centers or SDC's. These take the 4,160 volts and steps it down to voltage that can be used by normal equipment, which is 120 or 208 volts. Amazing huh? Then from the SDC it goes to the spider boxes which tents plug their eletrical equipment into. So after we did all that, Nick and I drove out to our other smaller power plant located near the runway. On our way there, we heard a short siren. That meant tht we were attacked or in the process of being attacked. We didn't panic at all. We didn't even hear any explosions. We just kept driving until we got to the other plant. Then we just walked to the fire sttion to chill until it was over. We heard that it ws an air burst over one of the other fire stations on base. So I experienced my first rocket/mortar attack. No big deal. The rest of the night passed without any other major incidents. I've been watching a lot of Family Guy. That show is so funny! That and The Simpsons are my 2 favorite shows. I didn't go to dinner tht morning because I was so tired for some reason. I just read a little bit and went to sleep.
I woke up around 1430. I went to the bathroom and came back to my room and put on sun block and my bathing suit and went out back to sit by the pool and read. Lilly and Brian were out there too. It got a little hot sitting out there so I decided to jump in the pool. It felt great! I stayed in there for about a half an hour. I got out, laid on a lawn chair and was reading soaking up some sun. While I was doing all this, Black Hawk helicopters were coming in frequently and landing on the medical helipad. Something must have been going on down town or somewhere off base. I dried off quickly in the hot sun. I put in a load of laundry and took a shower and did all my other morning routine stuff. I got on shift and did my normal thing like check email and check a couple things on the internet. There were 3 generators on line. A little while later, I decided that the load was low enough that we could take one off line and only use 2 genertors. Lilly agreed. So, we proceeded to take the load off of the one we were taking offline. As we were doing this, we were both thinking that we forgot to do something. So, i'm turning down the frequency to take off the load and got it pretty low and then Lilly all of sudden turns off the circuit breaker to tht generator. All the lights go out. Shit! What the hell happened? We both say at the same time, "battle short!" The battle short switch is a switch used to keep the generator running if any faults come up. Whenever we turn on or off a circuit breaker, we get a ground fault, which is a dangerous fault that can electrocute you if you touch any high voltage wires. Well, we forgot to turn on the battle short switch and as we switched the breaker, the plant went down and the base was out of power. Oops! We recovered quickly and all was good. After everything calmed down, the 4 of us spent some time placing what we call spider boxes between all the generators. Those are used as a tent's source of eletricity. We were using them to plug light trees into so we can do maintenance at night. We were also running cable to connect the spider boxes to each other. These generators used for the power plant are big and loud. Each one is capable of producing 750 kilowatts of power and 4,160 volts. The control panels for these are located indoors, which is our control room. We connect the generators to primary distribution centers or PDC's. Think of those as sub-stations. Then more cable is run to secondary distribution centers or SDC's. These take the 4,160 volts and steps it down to voltage that can be used by normal equipment, which is 120 or 208 volts. Amazing huh? Then from the SDC it goes to the spider boxes which tents plug their eletrical equipment into. So after we did all that, Nick and I drove out to our other smaller power plant located near the runway. On our way there, we heard a short siren. That meant tht we were attacked or in the process of being attacked. We didn't panic at all. We didn't even hear any explosions. We just kept driving until we got to the other plant. Then we just walked to the fire sttion to chill until it was over. We heard that it ws an air burst over one of the other fire stations on base. So I experienced my first rocket/mortar attack. No big deal. The rest of the night passed without any other major incidents. I've been watching a lot of Family Guy. That show is so funny! That and The Simpsons are my 2 favorite shows. I didn't go to dinner tht morning because I was so tired for some reason. I just read a little bit and went to sleep.