Day One

Today was my first day "on the job." As part of our move, I decided to put Danielson, CT at our half-way point. Danielson is home to the Quinabaug Dam (on the Quinabaug River) and the Five-Mile Dam. We were here to perform maintenance on the Quinabaug Dam, more specifically, to remove the #2 generator which had been overheating.

Phase 1 of this job involved the arrival of a huge-ass crane. With eight massive wheels this thing was going to be reaching out over the dam and retrieving a 15,000 lb. generator from inside the power house. I have to say, between the crane, which was very nice, and the operator, who really knew his shit, I could not believe how subtle of adjustments they could made to the position of the crane. "I need to take it up an inch" was not even remotely a problem. Very impressive.

So the first trick for getting a 15,000 lb. chunk of metal out of your (power) house it to remove a portion of the roof. This next picture is the section of roof we took out that just happens to be designed to be removed. This part was pretty straight forward. The next part is the tricky part. 

I can't say I've ever put any real thought into how you attach a hook to a giant generator before. It never really occurred to me that it might be a challenge. It has a couple (large) eyelets on top, just slap some hooks on them and let's go! Well, not exactly.

Turns out that our generator is at an angle, because of how the water goes through the turbine. I'm not 100% clear on why exactly this is, but it is. This means that you need to rig it at an angle and pull it very carefully so it doesn't mess any of it's connector bits up. This is very important... and we messed it up.

So there's a technique to making sure the crane is exactly above the center of what you're trying to lift. You drop the hook all the way down so it's hanging just about your target and have the operator adjust the crane till it's dead center. This way, when you lift, the target (our generator in this case) won't shift. Let's just say that you don't want a 15,000 lb. generator shifting.

So we didn't do that... Yeah, totally just eye-balled it. oops.

Thankfully when the generator shifted it only shifted a little and nobody was in the way. We recognized the problem too late to fix it but early enough to make sure nobody was nearby. You're not going to stand there and stabilize something that big. If it wants to swing over and hit the wall it's going to do that with or without you in the way. So we made sure nobody was in the way and thankfully it didn't actually hit the wall.

Once that part was done we just lifted it up and put it on a (big) truck to ship it to the factory for refitting. Things weren't very exciting after that. We did some other maintenance that need the crane (you rent it by the day) and I ended up heading back to the campground around 1:00 to make any early start on the remainder of the trip.

Quinabaug Dam

Things didn't really go the way I planned though. I had been out in the sun too long and ended up with sun-stroke. I couldn't do anything but kip-over for a couple hours to recover. The put our early start rather late. Just to make sure it stayed interesting, I hit a deer on the highway in northern VT with my van. The super-bumpers took most of the force but it still did some damage. We'll have to see exactly how much when I get it to a shop...

I'm pretty sure that was the "Welcome back to the North Country" deer, too...