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Episode 5 - Boilers Were Blowing Up · Upon Further Inspection

• 0:00
  Upon further inspection, a Mechanical Integrity podcast goes beyond the data and dives into the people challenges and stories behind reliability and inspection.
• 0:11
  Whether you're in the field or in the office, this podcast is for you because mechanical integrity isn't about assets.
• 0:18
  It's about the people who keep them running.
• 0:20
  You are listening to episode five.
• 0:22
  Boilers.
• 0:23
  Were blowing up mechanical integrity then and now.
• 0:39
  Branden Stucky: All right, Greg, well welcome back Today today ki kind of wanted to try talking about the the idea of kind of the evolution of mechanical integrity.
• 0:50
  Branden Stucky: Kind of a a then versus now and maybe kinda what, what caused us to get to this point?
• 0:57
  Branden Stucky: I mean, you, you are gonna have a lot more insight into this than, than I will.
• 1:01
  Branden Stucky: But I wanna make sure, I wanna try and get some of that information out of kind of how, how did we end up where we are now?
• 1:08
  Branden Stucky: So, I mean, for you from, from.
• 1:14
  Branden Stucky: your experience or from your, what you've been a part of, what, what do you think were some of the biggest events that kind of happened that, that.
• 1:24
  Branden Stucky: Escaped the practices and the regulations that we have.
• 1:27
  Branden Stucky: Right.
• 1:27
  Branden Stucky: Because right now when we talk about inspection regulations, inspection practices, whatever you wanna call'em, kind of have API 5 10, 5 76, 53 you know, for our, our main pieces of equipment.
• 1:41
  Branden Stucky: but we haven't, we haven't always had those.
• 1:43
  Branden Stucky: So in your experience, what, what kind of drove the development of those
• 1:49
  Greg Alvarado: There were, there were safety issues and there are also business issues, right?
• 1:56
  Greg Alvarado: So five ten's been around for a while a lot longer than five 70, but it just again, points to piping and, and the personality of piping too.
• 2:07
  Greg Alvarado: So I'll get to some of that.
• 2:08
  Greg Alvarado: But, so in about 1990, excuse me, 1984.
• 2:15
  Greg Alvarado: We had the event with the Indian contactor at the Unical Refinery in Lamont, Illinois.
• 2:21
  Greg Alvarado: That blew up, that had to do with environment and, excuse me, environmentally assisted cracking being present in there.
• 2:29
  Greg Alvarado: And that vessel exploding, I think, I think there were like 17 fatalities there.
• 2:35
  Greg Alvarado: And that was in 84.
• 2:37
  Greg Alvarado: Then in about 19.
• 2:39
  Greg Alvarado: 89, 88, we had the Shell Norco explosion, which was huge.
• 2:46
  Greg Alvarado: That was in a refinery there where there was a, a, a hole that was corroded through in an elbow that allowed hydrocarbons to get out, that found a detonation source.
• 2:56
  Greg Alvarado: And there we had a couple of major considerations.
• 3:00
  Greg Alvarado: One of course, was the corrosion issue that I think a lot of it boiled down to it.
• 3:07
  Greg Alvarado: To an injection quill that had been corroded at the tip and the droplets that were entering through that were no longer being atomized, and those droplets were causing some erosion, corrosion in an elbow downstream, but there were multiple fatalities there.
• 3:25
  Greg Alvarado: And then around the same time, 88, 89 Phillips chemicals had a huge explosion.
• 3:32
  Greg Alvarado: I think killed around 20 or 24 people in Pasadena, Texas.
• 3:38
  Greg Alvarado: That was due to more work process type of issues and how they were decommissioning and commissioning equipment for an outage.
• 3:49
  Greg Alvarado: And then, and I mean, this are just a few examples off the top of my head, and then there was another explosion I wanna say.
• 3:56
  Greg Alvarado: In the early two thousands in Nigeria at the Skidrow refinery where they were processing l and g.
• 4:05
  Greg Alvarado: Actually I think it was before that.
• 4:06
  Greg Alvarado: 'cause I know the whole liquid mercury in brittle mint, you can also call it liquid metal in Bri, in Brittle.
• 4:12
  Greg Alvarado: 'cause Mercury's not the only element that can cause this problem.
• 4:16
  Greg Alvarado: And that was in a cold box that that sprung a big leak and it got everybody looking for mercury and trained in.
• 4:26
  Greg Alvarado: LNG.
• 4:28
  Greg Alvarado: So, you know, these things were happening.
• 4:32
  Greg Alvarado: There were other less big events happening, plus our, our facilities were all getting older, right?
• 4:40
  Greg Alvarado: Some of these things were built around turn of the century, some of these facilities early 19 hundreds.
• 4:47
  Greg Alvarado: And then from there on, I think I know API has done a, I think a great job with the premier jobs of writing codes and standards and rps to try to help us manage those processes better, avoid those kinds of issues.
• 5:06
  Greg Alvarado: And then you had OSHA come along back in the, like, say 19 91, 92 timeframe.
• 5:15
  Greg Alvarado: Answer to some of those earlier failures.
• 5:18
  Greg Alvarado: And there were other failures going on too, just again, not as big.
• 5:22
  Greg Alvarado: That came out with the Pro 1910 0.119 process safety management rule, which obviously includes a section in there on mechanical integrity.
• 5:31
  Greg Alvarado: So we saw those things happening prior to that too.
• 5:34
  Greg Alvarado: A lot of, and I was an owner operator for many years and, and a lot of management, I think had the initial.
• 5:42
  Greg Alvarado: Attitude of, oh, regulations are just going to strangle us.
• 5:47
  Greg Alvarado: It took a while I think, for the industry to see that, that things like mechanical integrity and reliability can not just peacefully, but successfully coexist when done right.
• 6:00
  Greg Alvarado: So anyway, I, I think, at least for us here in the US and simultaneously, I mean, we had the the failure in the.
• 6:10
  Greg Alvarado: Of that Oxy platform that there were a lot of fatalities there, just like the perfect storm.
• 6:18
  Greg Alvarado: Again, not so much anything related to corrosion or something, but just work processes and the left hand, not knowing what the right hand is doing, and realizing too that these failures don't happen in a vacuum.
• 6:32
  Greg Alvarado: So back in the day.
• 6:35
  Greg Alvarado: The, the inspection people were talking with the corrosion materials people, at least in the owner operator places that I worked at.
• 6:44
  Greg Alvarado: But we weren't always talking with the process people or the operations people.
• 6:49
  Greg Alvarado: We weren't being synergetic, we weren't being holistic about the way we implemented MI at the time.
• 6:58
  Greg Alvarado: They kind of did their thing and we did our thing.
• 7:00
  Greg Alvarado: We knew.
• 7:01
  Greg Alvarado: How they operated the equipment had an impact on us, but we really weren't working together as a team.
• 7:08
  Greg Alvarado: So that's another evolution I see we've gone through over the years is realizing that we need to work together as teams.
• 7:19
  Greg Alvarado: We need to be more understand the interdependencies of what we do and how that can affect things.
• 7:24
  Greg Alvarado: And, and so at API, you know, today, now you see because of that.
• 7:29
  Greg Alvarado: Rps around things like integrity, operating windows, which really speaks to how process impacts things.
• 7:38
  Greg Alvarado: We have 5 79 the fitness for service document now, which evolved out of that atmosphere.
• 7:45
  Greg Alvarado: And, and really one of the organizations that was responding early on to some industry explosions is New American society, mechanical engineers.
• 7:53
  Greg Alvarado: Of course there's the famous, I'm trying to m the Aldon, the Sultana, there was the infamous Sultana Steamboat explosion that occurred on the Mississippi River somewhere between like St.
• 8:05
  Greg Alvarado: Louis and Memphis after the Civil War.
• 8:08
  Greg Alvarado: That killed a whole bunch of people.
• 8:11
  Greg Alvarado: And that's, you know, around and of course we had steam locomotives and, and other things, and, and we were seeing failures.
• 8:20
  Greg Alvarado: Boilers were blowing up.
• 8:22
  Greg Alvarado: And that would, you know, eventually spur some of the boiler rules that we have that came directly into our world, right?
• 8:31
  Greg Alvarado: Because some of those behaviors and activities, metallurgies, inspection, all that kind of stuff are, are similar.
• 8:40
  Greg Alvarado: You know, you can, you can migrate those from the steam industry over to the process industry.
• 8:46
  Greg Alvarado: Just add a whole, whole lot more chemistry and metallurgy.
• 8:51
  Branden Stucky: Yeah.
• 8:51
  Branden Stucky: That, that's why it's boiler and pressure vessel code.
• 8:54
  Branden Stucky: Right.
• 8:55
  Greg Alvarado: Correct.
• 8:55
  Branden Stucky: we had a lot of issues with the boilers in the past.
• 8:57
  Branden Stucky: Yeah.
• 8:58
  Branden Stucky: Let me, let me back up.
• 8:59
  Branden Stucky: You were talking about API so you mentioned rps.
• 9:03
  Branden Stucky: Those are, are recommend recommended practices.
• 9:06
  Greg Alvarado: Yes.
• 9:06
  Branden Stucky: What is the difference just for anybody listening that doesn't know what's, what's the difference between an RP and a standard or a recommended practice and a standard?
• 9:14
  Greg Alvarado: A standard or a code.
• 9:16
  Branden Stucky: Well, the five ten's a standard, isn't it?
• 9:18
  Greg Alvarado: Five 10, the inspection code and it is a standard,
• 9:22
  Branden Stucky: Yeah.
• 9:22
  Greg Alvarado: there's a pressure vessel inspection code, and so
• 9:26
  Branden Stucky: yeah.
• 9:26
  Branden Stucky: Talk, talk, talk about those.
• 9:28
  Branden Stucky: What, what's, what's the differences between those?
• 9:29
  Branden Stucky: What.
• 9:29
  Greg Alvarado: yeah, typically speaking codes are at a minimum what you have to do, and those are usually referenced in regulatory documents or requirements, whether it's osha, absa in Alberta.
• 9:45
  Greg Alvarado: The Australians are in the EU and the countries that belong to the eu, they have their basic rules.
• 9:52
  Greg Alvarado: Those are not optional.
• 9:54
  Greg Alvarado: If you say you do it, you have to do it, and you have to do something.
• 9:58
  Greg Alvarado: So most people have adopted those like API for instance.
• 10:02
  Greg Alvarado: Those are APIs, an ANSI accredited organization.
• 10:06
  Greg Alvarado: Those are considered consensus standards, and that's why you'll see those typically followed.
• 10:12
  Greg Alvarado: But you know, that was always the case.
• 10:14
  Greg Alvarado: There was a transition there too, even after the existence of those codes.
• 10:18
  Greg Alvarado: So for a while in the United States, in our territories, whether it's Puerto Rico St.
• 10:24
  Greg Alvarado: Croix, whatever, and some states, they would follow the National Board rules instead of the 5 10, 5 70 rules or five 10 rules.
• 10:35
  Greg Alvarado: But eventually the National Board realized that.
• 10:38
  Greg Alvarado: Things like the five 10 code were more applicable than rules about boilers for heavy wall reactors making you know, cattle and catalyst ca catalyst reactions for refinery.
• 10:53
  Greg Alvarado: So anyway, there, there were these things going on, and so the codes are things you have to do.
• 11:00
  Greg Alvarado: So if, if you, in general, okay, there are a lot of ca but in general, and it's relatively accurate that a code is mandatory and a RP is a suggested, recommended practice you can use to not only comply with the code, but work smarter.
• 11:19
  Greg Alvarado: Okay, so they're usually optional.
• 11:21
  Greg Alvarado: A code's considered by most people a license to operate.
• 11:25
  Greg Alvarado: If you don't comply with the code, you can be shut down by the regulator for not following the code.
• 11:32
  Greg Alvarado: The RPS are optional.
• 11:35
  Branden Stucky: Okay.
• 11:36
  Branden Stucky: there's a lot of effort that's put into those rps,
• 11:38
  Greg Alvarado: Absolutely.
• 11:40
  Branden Stucky: just because they, people recognize that there is value right.
• 11:44
  Branden Stucky: In, in continuing to develop them and potentially, I mean, some of them have moved into standard form, haven't they?
• 11:50
  Branden Stucky: Or quote into a code.
• 11:51
  Greg Alvarado: They, they do, they do sometimes shift into a code.
• 11:55
  Greg Alvarado: But what the RPS do is they help you, they give you options to operate smarter.
• 12:01
  Greg Alvarado: So instead they, they help you.
• 12:03
  Greg Alvarado: Like for instance, the five 10, you know, code has a 5 72 rp.
• 12:10
  Greg Alvarado: The five 70 code has a 5 74 rp, so the RPS also help the users of those codes get their heads around the codes better so that they, they, it gives them more direction on how to do it.
• 12:27
  Branden Stucky: Okay.
• 12:28
  Branden Stucky: And, and you, you, you also mentioned national board, so I've, I've heard some people say, or state is a national board state.
• 12:36
  Greg Alvarado: Yep.
• 12:37
  Branden Stucky: what, what, what does that mean when people say that
• 12:40
  Greg Alvarado: That typically means that the chief boiler inspector for the state is much more heavily involved in what they're doing.
• 12:50
  Greg Alvarado: The program has to be approved by the Chief boiler inspector of that state, not so in non code states, but.
• 12:59
  Branden Stucky: in, yeah, and so in non code states then who, who then decides
• 13:05
  Greg Alvarado: The non code state is typically totally governed by osha.
• 13:10
  Greg Alvarado: So whereas, so that's a federal entity, right?
• 13:14
  Greg Alvarado: Whereas the codes are a code state.
• 13:16
  Greg Alvarado: Now you can have code counties are code cities where certain cities in that state aren't covered by the boiler code for that state are.
• 13:29
  Greg Alvarado: What?
• 13:29
  Greg Alvarado: What's called the chief inspector.
• 13:31
  Greg Alvarado: The Chief boiler inspector for that state.
• 13:35
  Branden Stucky: Okay.
• 13:38
  Branden Stucky: All right.
• 13:38
  Branden Stucky: So I just, I wanted to make sure those were a couple terms that we talked about that you, you threw out there.
• 13:42
  Branden Stucky: So I wanna make sure that we, we at least kind of talk about'em and cover'em for anybody.
• 13:46
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah.
• 13:46
  Greg Alvarado: And another important thing is that most operators who fall under OSHA 1910 0.119.
• 13:53
  Greg Alvarado: Which is based on what kind of chemicals are you processing and how much of that chemical is there?
• 14:00
  Greg Alvarado: They they at a minimum have to follow 1910 0.119.
• 14:05
  Greg Alvarado: For us, it's paragraph J for mechanical integrity.
• 14:09
  Greg Alvarado: And of course they have a whole lot of, you know, 13 or 14 other elements they have to comply with too.
• 14:15
  Greg Alvarado: But what I've seen happen over the years is for the National Board to gradually turn more of that responsibility over to 5 10, 5 70.
• 14:29
  Greg Alvarado: And in fact, in the National Board Inspection Code, there is a code book for the NBIC.
• 14:35
  Greg Alvarado: They'll often now say.
• 14:37
  Greg Alvarado: We recommend that if you're operating a chemical processing facility, you know, such as the refinery or a LNG plant or even a gas plant in the middle of nowhere, that you follow the more suitable codes like five 10 or five 70, for example.
• 14:54
  Greg Alvarado: So five 10 especially pressure vessels.
• 14:56
  Greg Alvarado: That's the other thing too about jurisdictions is some of them only handle pressure vessels.
• 15:01
  Greg Alvarado: Some of them handle pressure.
• 15:03
  Greg Alvarado: Our oversee pressure vessels and piping.
• 15:06
  Greg Alvarado: So you kind of, kind of pay attention to each state and what they regulate.
• 15:13
  Branden Stucky: So, so bringing this back to kind of then versus now, I mean, it seems like.
• 15:19
  Branden Stucky: Right.
• 15:19
  Branden Stucky: Way back in the day, you mentioned the Steamboat incident during the Civil War.
• 15:23
  Branden Stucky: So from there forward, there was probably some level of people trying to figure out the jurisdictional pieces.
• 15:31
  Branden Stucky: Is it just that different places, different states, different cities are still continuing to try to figure out how they're gonna be governed?
• 15:39
  Branden Stucky: Or is it, you think it's more just they've been grandfathered in different ways?
• 15:43
  Branden Stucky: It seems like there's been a transition in a lot of different.
• 15:47
  Branden Stucky: Ways of transition.
• 15:50
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah.
• 15:50
  Greg Alvarado: Well, I, I think another thing that's changed over the years is that we've done a good, a better job of educating the regulators,
• 15:57
  Branden Stucky: Yeah,
• 15:58
  Greg Alvarado: over time.
• 15:59
  Greg Alvarado: And so they're willing to abdi, I don't know if abdicates the right word, but they're willing to let go of certain things as long as they go into a more logical bucket, so to speak.
• 16:12
  Greg Alvarado: So, like I said, there's a national board inspection code.
• 16:16
  Greg Alvarado: Which if you went back 15 years or so, they held on that stuff.
• 16:21
  Greg Alvarado: Whereas about 15 years ago, we began seeing them let go of some of that and even write it into the code again.
• 16:30
  Greg Alvarado: You know, we think it's more appropriate to you follow API types of codes for, you know, this type, these types of facilities.
• 16:37
  Branden Stucky: Yeah.
• 16:38
  Branden Stucky: Okay.
• 16:39
  Branden Stucky: How, how else have you seen.
• 16:42
  Greg Alvarado: The national board and the state boiler inspectors still pretty much hold on to boiler.
• 16:47
  Greg Alvarado: So if you've got a plant with a code stamp boiler they're typically gonna go through whatever that frequency is.
• 16:54
  Greg Alvarado: Every two years, they gotta have a boiler inspection.
• 16:58
  Greg Alvarado: And that's usually a combination of, of the state boiler inspectors rules oftentimes being applied by authorized inspectors who work for.
• 17:09
  Greg Alvarado: The underwriters.
• 17:10
  Greg Alvarado: So usually the authorized, the asme, the national board authorized inspectors are either an owner operator or an insurer or work for the state boiler agency.
• 17:27
  Branden Stucky: Ha.
• 17:28
  Branden Stucky: Have you been a part of any of those boiler inspections
• 17:31
  Greg Alvarado: Yes.
• 17:31
  Branden Stucky: in the past?
• 17:32
  Branden Stucky: Yeah.
• 17:33
  Greg Alvarado: Many years.
• 17:35
  Branden Stucky: Do, do they tend to be routine?
• 17:38
  Branden Stucky: They're, they, they happen.
• 17:39
  Branden Stucky: So I guess my question is they happen so frequently.
• 17:41
  Branden Stucky: I've never, I've never been a part of it, but I know that, you know, they have such short frequencies on those boilers I feel like, I feel like now compared to back, you know, in the 18 hundreds we probably have.
• 17:54
  Branden Stucky: A bit better granted due to the progression in the codes and the standards.
• 18:01
  Branden Stucky: But like a, a two year interval seems so, so frequent based off of, you know, what we know now about the way things are designed.
• 18:13
  Greg Alvarado: Well, yeah, good point.
• 18:15
  Greg Alvarado: I mean, there are times on certain types of boilers that an owner operator may justify an extension that usually takes a type of very scrutinized fitness for service.
• 18:29
  Greg Alvarado: And then you present that to the state boiler inspector our chief.
• 18:34
  Greg Alvarado: And oftentimes companies can get a deferral on those, or there's another name for it.
• 18:40
  Greg Alvarado: I'm trying to, an exception to those if you can justify it.
• 18:45
  Greg Alvarado: But yeah, I mean, I've been there with them and they're poking their heads inside the steam drums, the mud drums, the fireboxes, they're looking at the economizes, the Super eaters.
• 18:55
  Greg Alvarado: They're looking at everything and, and we oftentimes, and the de aerators deaerator, remember, those are all part of that too.
• 19:02
  Greg Alvarado: And we have had industry incidents back.
• 19:06
  Greg Alvarado: I don't know of any recent, recent ones of de aerators blowing up because of corrosion fatigue, cracking and de aerators That's.
• 19:15
  Branden Stucky: there, there's a, there's a NACE document out about it, right?
• 19:18
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah.
• 19:19
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah, we've, I think we tackled that a while back and
• 19:22
  Branden Stucky: Mm-hmm.
• 19:22
  Greg Alvarado: the importance of things like heat treatment.
• 19:25
  Greg Alvarado: You know, that's another thing too I've seen happen over the years is we've learned, you know, after incidents like where you get failures with hydrogen induced cracking stress already, and hydrogen induced cracking, our corrosion, fatigue, cracking, and there are other ones, but we've learned over the years the importance of heat treatment and how heat treatment can get us out of susceptibility.
• 19:47
  Greg Alvarado: To certain damage mechanisms.
• 19:49
  Greg Alvarado: But then there's, was the heat treatment done right?
• 19:52
  Greg Alvarado: Was it done thoroughly?
• 19:54
  Greg Alvarado: Did we get everything we needed to?
• 19:57
  Greg Alvarado: And that oftentimes was something difficult to to manage because sometimes repairs, even something as simple as a fillet weld on a vessel with wet H two s in it could lead to a cracking problem because.
• 20:13
  Greg Alvarado: You thought the whole thing was heat treated, but somebody had done some repairs on it in the past.
• 20:19
  Greg Alvarado: It wasn't really documented well or wasn't heat treated and you wind up with cracking issues.
• 20:26
  Branden Stucky: Yeah, lo, local heat treatment obviously can have its own, own issues of,
• 20:30
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:31
  Branden Stucky: stress, gradients.
• 20:32
  Greg Alvarado: But it can be a good practice as long as it's managed correctly.
• 20:35
  Branden Stucky: I, I once had somebody ask me, and I'll ask, I'll, I'll pose this question to you too and see what your thoughts are, but I once had somebody ask me if cost was not a factor.
• 20:46
  Branden Stucky: Is there any reason not to heat treat a piece of equipment before install and, and I'm not talking local, I'm talking the whole thing, right?
• 20:56
  Branden Stucky: If you had an oven large enough to be able to heat treat the entire thing once it's been fabbed up, if cost wasn't a factor, is there any downside?
• 21:06
  Greg Alvarado: Not that I'm aware of.
• 21:07
  Branden Stucky: Yeah.
• 21:08
  Branden Stucky: Right.
• 21:08
  Branden Stucky: So it's interesting when, when you start thinking about it, I, I, I couldn't come up with an answer, right?
• 21:13
  Branden Stucky: Stress, stress relief, heat treatment causes you know, solves a lot of problems when it comes to the, the stress radiance and, and cracking and, and resi, you know, all, all of the other issues that you can create.
• 21:28
  Branden Stucky: but it was an interesting question.
• 21:29
  Branden Stucky: I had somebody ask me, and, and I.
• 21:32
  Branden Stucky: I had the same answer as you.
• 21:33
  Branden Stucky: I, I don't think there's, I couldn't think of any reason why you wouldn't if, you know, if cost wasn't a a concern.
• 21:41
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah.
• 21:42
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah.
• 21:42
  Greg Alvarado: I mean, I would, I would reserve that for a bonafide metallurgist or experienced metal or blacksmith.
• 21:50
  Greg Alvarado: Metallurgist.
• 21:51
  Greg Alvarado: Those are the best ones.
• 21:52
  Greg Alvarado: The, the blacksmith, metallurgist to me are, are worth their weight and gold.
• 21:57
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah.
• 21:58
  Branden Stucky: What, what is what's the difference between a a, a regular metallurgist and a blacksmith metallurgist?
• 22:04
  Greg Alvarado: Well, somebody who's, for instance, gotten their degree and as a welding engineer is gonna be much more familiar with the, the heat impacts on metals than non and and the welding engineers, which I call the blacksmith types.
• 22:23
  Greg Alvarado: They're gonna have a, in my opinion, the ones that I know have had a lot more hands-on experience with welding, seeing the impacts of welding.
• 22:32
  Greg Alvarado: You know, that can be a pretty hairy thing.
• 22:34
  Greg Alvarado: I mean, there are some huge, heavy pieces of equipment out there that in addition, or in the absence of heat in service may have, and, and chemicals may have some tremendous structural stresses on'em, like, big ions.
• 22:51
  Greg Alvarado: With huge axles on them holding up hundreds of thousands of pounds of weight.
• 22:57
  Greg Alvarado: I mean, when you consider, you start to get cracking in something like that and you've gotta repair it, and then if you've got some temperamental metal allergies out there, that can be a huge challenge.
• 23:10
  Greg Alvarado: So, like I said, I'm, I mean, there's a lot of good metallurgists out there, but they all don't have that practical hands-on experience in the field.
• 23:19
  Greg Alvarado: Some of the heat related issues.
• 23:23
  Branden Stucky: Gotcha.
• 23:24
  Branden Stucky: Yeah, there's I mean some, some facilities, they have people where their only job is just writing welding procedures.
• 23:31
  Branden Stucky: you know, they, they.
• 23:32
  Branden Stucky: Know the, they know the, the need the heat put, the heat input, the flock.
• 23:38
  Branden Stucky: They know all of those pieces so well that, you know, anytime they get to do repairs, like that's that person's job.
• 23:44
  Branden Stucky: Writing up the, writing up the procedures.
• 23:47
  Greg Alvarado: And cost is always an issue.
• 23:49
  Greg Alvarado: Right.
• 23:50
  Greg Alvarado: And that's why over the years I've seen too, we've been learning from one another.
• 23:55
  Greg Alvarado: And now you see people that are able to affect the residual stresses in a heavy weld by doing temper bead welding, where they're actually using subsequent passes of welding.
• 24:12
  Greg Alvarado: And heat treating and preheating and during welding heating to control the amount of residual stress in a weld
• 24:22
  Branden Stucky: Hmm.
• 24:23
  Greg Alvarado: or other things like soaking up hydrogen and then having hydrogen cracking problems later too.
• 24:30
  Greg Alvarado: But I think we got most of those covered and, and, and there's all kinds of now micro alloying that can go into different metals and things like.
• 24:40
  Greg Alvarado: To affect heat treatment, cracking, susceptibility, and corrosion.
• 24:45
  Greg Alvarado: You know, like we learned about the residual elements, issues associated with equipment and hf alki service, right?
• 24:52
  Greg Alvarado: We learned about the effects of micro alloying and high alliy furnace tubes, heater tubes like in pyrolysis.
• 25:00
  Greg Alvarado: Furnaces are in reformer furnaces, catalytic heaters.
• 25:05
  Greg Alvarado: So we've, I've seen a lot of improvement over the years in these things.
• 25:11
  Branden Stucky: It.
• 25:12
  Branden Stucky: And it's interesting how, it's interesting how those, those learnings that we've had have also driven technology.
• 25:19
  Branden Stucky: You know, PMI.
• 25:21
  Branden Stucky: ability to do PMI, I mean, that's such a cool, such a, for me, it's a, I don't know why.
• 25:26
  Branden Stucky: I think it's just really cool that you can just take A-A-A-P-M-I gun and all of a sudden it just tells you the whole.
• 25:33
  Branden Stucky: of of your piece of metal.
• 25:35
  Branden Stucky: So now you know that technology allows us to do a hundred percent PMI in our alies.
• 25:41
  Branden Stucky: You know, whereas 40, 50 years ago maybe not having that level of technology.
• 25:46
  Branden Stucky: You know, we don't really have the ability to figure that piece out.
• 25:49
  Branden Stucky: So now we gotta come up with a different way.
• 25:52
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah, that was, that was huge.
• 25:54
  Greg Alvarado: Back when I started, we used to use these things called IDQ test kits, and we had basically one of those big block, what are those?
• 26:03
  Greg Alvarado: Not nine volt batteries, but you know what I'm, I'm talking about like a half a brick, and they had.
• 26:09
  Branden Stucky: the, yeah.
• 26:09
  Branden Stucky: That you, that you, yeah, you put'em in like the little the little kids cars that that
• 26:14
  Greg Alvarado: I mean,
• 26:15
  Branden Stucky: around,
• 26:15
  Greg Alvarado: yeah, I'm not, these, the ones I'm talking about are like four inch square around, and they stand about five or six feet in six inches high.
• 26:24
  Greg Alvarado: They have two tur.
• 26:25
  Greg Alvarado: They used to be in the big floodlights or, and you know, the floodlights you could carry, they'd put those in there.
• 26:31
  Greg Alvarado: But we used to hook those up to a a metal electrode and put some chemicals on a piece of Watman paper and see what color that turned and go through different chemicals to tell, Hey, does this have moly in it?
• 26:44
  Greg Alvarado: Does it have nickel in it?
• 26:46
  Greg Alvarado: But now we have, like you're saying, these different types of test instruments we can use for PMI.
• 26:53
  Greg Alvarado: Are based on different principles, and you have to pay attention to those too, because sometimes some of the most important elements for us to know if they're in that piece of metal or not can't be detected by certain other tools.
• 27:09
  Greg Alvarado: And the rule of thumb I always use is things like carbon, things like sulfur.
• 27:15
  Greg Alvarado: If you really need to know the amount of those elements in a, in a piece of metal.
• 27:21
  Greg Alvarado: Then you might have to use something that's more like a an emission spectrometer type basis.
• 27:27
  Greg Alvarado: But then some of the other ones, you can get 90% of what you need or even a hundred percent out of those.
• 27:33
  Greg Alvarado: But carbon and sulfur are really important because you can't measure them with the other tools and you have to really pay attention to technique because there's so much carbon just in the atmosphere.
• 27:48
  Greg Alvarado: You've gotta do a good job of surface preparation and, and technique and some of these things, technique matters.
• 27:55
  Branden Stucky: Mm-hmm.
• 27:56
  Branden Stucky: Mm-hmm.
• 27:57
  Branden Stucky: Six volt battery is what you
• 27:58
  Greg Alvarado: That's it.
• 27:59
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah.
• 28:00
  Greg Alvarado: Thank you.
• 28:03
  Branden Stucky: So what, what else, I mean, in your experience, right?
• 28:06
  Branden Stucky: You've been, you've been in the industry for a long time, and what, what else has changed as far as mechanical integrity over the years for you?
• 28:16
  Greg Alvarado: Well people, I think people have gotten smarter and got their heads around looking at things programmatically.
• 28:23
  Greg Alvarado: 'cause now we're talking programs.
• 28:26
  Greg Alvarado: And I don't mean computer programs, but I mean the way these things.
• 28:29
  Greg Alvarado: These programs are structured in corporations and in plants and facilities.
• 28:35
  Greg Alvarado: Like for instance, with 1910 0.119.
• 28:38
  Greg Alvarado: Now you have to have a mechanical integrity procedure or a mechanical integrity document.
• 28:45
  Greg Alvarado: Now you'll see in most companies, they'll have a corporate level policy document, and then they'll have a local level mechanical integrity procedure document that supports the corporate policy document.
• 28:58
  Greg Alvarado: I've seen that evolution happen over the years that I think has helped.
• 29:01
  Greg Alvarado: I think another thing that's that's happening today is we're becoming more holistic.
• 29:06
  Greg Alvarado: We were tending toward hyper-specialization, but I think now we've seen the pendulum coming back the other way a little bit and realizing generalists do have an important role and they're the ones who have to figure out how all this stuff fits together.
• 29:27
  Branden Stucky: I, I was just gonna say, do, do you think that we're realizing the generalists are important or do we think that, do you think maybe that the drive of having to appease shareholders keep costs down has driven need for, you know, or keeping a handle on expenses and so has by, from that then caused us to just have more generalists and our generalists are having to just figure it out.
• 29:55
  Greg Alvarado: It's a combination of those things.
• 29:56
  Greg Alvarado: I, I think one of the big changes I have seen, I don't think I know, and I'm glad you framed it the way you did, is we see less and less mentoring going on.
• 30:08
  Greg Alvarado: I.
• 30:09
  Greg Alvarado: People are just being thrown.
• 30:10
  Greg Alvarado: Oh, you have a certificate, that means you can do it.
• 30:13
  Greg Alvarado: Oh, you have a degree.
• 30:14
  Greg Alvarado: That means you can do it.
• 30:15
  Greg Alvarado: Just throw you out there.
• 30:17
  Greg Alvarado: And we've lost the mentoring, which means we're losing critical thinking skills.
• 30:22
  Greg Alvarado: We're losing the ability to capture past learnings and to pass those on so that people can have better critical thinking stills.
• 30:32
  Greg Alvarado: And there's a myriad of reasons why I think that's happening.
• 30:37
  Greg Alvarado: But again, the hyper special.
• 30:38
  Greg Alvarado: I remember I read an article in Harvard Business Review about 15 years, 10 years ago that was talking about this, and they said, we need more general.
• 30:50
  Greg Alvarado: We're afraid we're gonna lose the generalist, the people, because imagine the generalist is usually gonna be a specialist in some area.
• 30:59
  Greg Alvarado: First of all, I, and one of the other things too is I think we undervalue the generalist.
• 31:05
  Greg Alvarado: We think they don't, they don't add value.
• 31:08
  Greg Alvarado: They're not really working.
• 31:10
  Greg Alvarado: They're the general guy.
• 31:12
  Greg Alvarado: They don't understand the difference between a face centered cubic crystal and a body centered cubic crystal and metallurgy or metallurgy or whatever.
• 31:20
  Greg Alvarado: Oh, they don't know OMS law, you know, if it's an electrical type thing.
• 31:25
  Greg Alvarado: So, you know, but usually the type of person I'm talking about is gonna have a strength in a particular area, whether it's.
• 31:32
  Greg Alvarado: Mechanical, chemical, whatever, are a really seasoned inspection person, but they're gonna understand how all this stuff fits together.
• 31:41
  Greg Alvarado: And so they're gonna help us create effective overall mechanical integrity or fixed equipment reliability programs, and now enter the enterprise asset management programs.
• 31:55
  Greg Alvarado: So now we have computers.
• 31:57
  Greg Alvarado: Back when I started, we didn't have computers at, at our desktop.
• 32:02
  Greg Alvarado: And, and now too, we have with that CAD programs and the ability to create drawings and to manage drawings and the store drawings and things like in the old days we had blueprint machines and I could probably smell those things going down the hall with the chemicals in'em.
• 32:18
  Greg Alvarado: And you'd come out with these three by five sheets of paper.
• 32:22
  Greg Alvarado: With, you know, the, essentially the equipment drawings on'em or maybe some PFDs P and I Ds.
• 32:29
  Greg Alvarado: So that's another thing that's happened too with OSHA coming along.
• 32:33
  Greg Alvarado: Now you have requirements to have UpToDate P and IDs process and instrumentation diagrams, and people are being forced to, to understand the thermodynamics and the interdependencies in these units and how they operate.
• 32:48
  Greg Alvarado: And I'll tell you, I think RBI had a huge.
• 32:52
  Greg Alvarado: Risk based inspection had a huge positive impact on the industry because it forced people to try to understand how these things play on one another and lead to equipment degradation.
• 33:05
  Greg Alvarado: So, and, and the other thing too is don't underestimate the value of the SME.
• 33:12
  Greg Alvarado: So I see another potential pitfall is we become so dependent on.
• 33:18
  Greg Alvarado: The latest shiny rock, which right now is is ai that you can't, you can't get everything out of ai.
• 33:28
  Greg Alvarado: You know, you, when you get it outta there, you gotta validate it, make sure it's credible, but then we use models to be better predictors of how long a piece of equipment is gonna last.
• 33:39
  Greg Alvarado: And then now we have onstream monitoring.
• 33:43
  Greg Alvarado: We look at reliability, operating limits or integrity, operating windows, whatever you wanna call'em, safe operating limits, all kinds of stuff out there.
• 33:51
  Greg Alvarado: Really, really good stuff with a lot of good promise.
• 33:54
  Greg Alvarado: But if the generalist isn't there to help people understand how this stuff all fits together, we're, we're gonna lose the effectiveness.
• 34:03
  Greg Alvarado: And I think we're gonna lose efficiencies.
• 34:05
  Greg Alvarado: You're gonna see a lot of rework being done because we painted ourselves in the corner.
• 34:11
  Greg Alvarado: Before we started this big, let, let's say it was an automation implementation, say an enterprise asset management program.
• 34:19
  Greg Alvarado: But if we didn't understand the work process from beginning to end and how it comes full circle, we may be doing a lot of rework.
• 34:28
  Greg Alvarado: And wishing we'd have say, created our equipment hierarchies differently.
• 34:34
  Greg Alvarado: Our naming conventions.
• 34:36
  Greg Alvarado: People talk about like one real popular tool is SAP and they talk about functional location numbers on equipment.
• 34:44
  Greg Alvarado: You know, I've had, I've seen people have to go back and take years to totally redo the way their equipment was organized to effectively implement an initiative.
• 34:55
  Greg Alvarado: It's, but they could have anticipated if they had the right people engaged in the beginning, but they.
• 35:01
  Branden Stucky: or, or they didn't know, right.
• 35:03
  Branden Stucky: I mean, or they didn't know.
• 35:04
  Branden Stucky: I mean, how many, how many companies out there do you think if you asked them if they, knowing now what they know, would they have changed the way that they set up their SAP Maximo ERP, whatever, right?
• 35:16
  Branden Stucky: Like, yeah.
• 35:16
  Branden Stucky: At the, at the time when you set it up, you're like, all right, this is the best path.
• 35:20
  Branden Stucky: This is the best option we have.
• 35:22
  Branden Stucky: it may not be the best, but the best overall, but it's, it's what we got for right now.
• 35:27
  Branden Stucky: And as you start building those things, I mean, they become behemoths and so difficult to try and, and make those changes after the fact.
• 35:35
  Branden Stucky: You, you, you, it's, it's really difficult to have that foresight.
• 35:38
  Branden Stucky: It, you know, 10, 15 years out of how you're gonna be using it and, and what it's gonna look like.
• 35:43
  Greg Alvarado: I had a good buddy ask me the other day, Hey Greg, you know,'cause there's people that naturally debate over different aspects of technology.
• 35:52
  Greg Alvarado: I'll just use example.
• 35:53
  Greg Alvarado: The generic failure frequencies and API RRP 5 81, the RBI document, Hey, we're gonna go to this other, we think we're gonna go to this other technology That calculates it a different way, right?
• 36:05
  Greg Alvarado: And they're still not systematizing their circuits correctly in the refinery.
• 36:11
  Greg Alvarado: I'm like, we gotta get the blocking and tackling right first guys.
• 36:15
  Greg Alvarado: Okay, let's get the blocking and tackling right.
• 36:17
  Greg Alvarado: First, let's get our heads around this stuff, then let's move in.
• 36:21
  Greg Alvarado: This that reminds me of too often we try to be efficient before we're effective, and when we do that, we may catch ourselves doing the wrong thing faster.
• 36:33
  Branden Stucky: Yeah.
• 36:34
  Branden Stucky: Yeah.
• 36:34
  Branden Stucky: I mean, RRBI has been, i'll, I'll call it a buzzword.
• 36:37
  Branden Stucky: I think people, maybe it's losing that, that piece.
• 36:41
  Branden Stucky: It's'cause more people, more and more people are moving towards it as opposed to, you know, AI's a real buzzword.
• 36:45
  Branden Stucky: But can't tell you how many times I've had people come to me and say, Hey, you know, we wanna start an RBI program.
• 36:52
  Branden Stucky: The first question I ask, you know, here's the list of things that you need to be able to do that.
• 36:56
  Branden Stucky: And, you know, they may not have all they're, they're missing you one forms, they're missing design drawings, you know, they're missing some of the basic pieces or, you know, they're, they're still trying to get their p and IDs updated, you know, to, to match what, what they have.
• 37:08
  Branden Stucky: It's, they're, there's a lot of things that you gotta get, as you said, the blockchain tackling in place first.
• 37:14
  Branden Stucky: Go.
• 37:14
  Branden Stucky: Going back real quick, you mentioned generalists.
• 37:16
  Branden Stucky: It, it, it, it sparked something in my brain.
• 37:18
  Branden Stucky: I'm reading a book right now by Reid Hoffman, called blitzscaling.
• 37:23
  Branden Stucky: And, and so he's a, a VC guy venture capital guy.
• 37:27
  Branden Stucky: He is part of Air, Airbnb and LinkedIn and whatever.
• 37:31
  Branden Stucky: And it's interesting you talk about the role of generalists because in, in the book he talks about how.
• 37:37
  Branden Stucky: If you're trying to get going and trying to get started, having a generalist or a group of generalists, he feels is so much more valuable than specialists because you can give a generalist, right?
• 37:48
  Branden Stucky: That we're, we're putting people into groups here, but, take being able to take a generalist who can kind of do a little bit of everything.
• 37:55
  Branden Stucky: If you're trying to develop something into being more, like developing a, a mechanical integrity program, are important to be able to deal with those those nuances and, and like what are the technical pieces that we need?
• 38:07
  Branden Stucky: But the generalist is there to be able to understand how everything is involved, how all those different pieces touch each other.
• 38:14
  Branden Stucky: And that's kind of what he was getting at in the book, is having a a, a group of generalists to be able to, to scale something up is important because they can do that.
• 38:22
  Branden Stucky: They think that way, they can see that way.
• 38:24
  Branden Stucky: And then once you get through a certain point, then you start bringing in some of the specialists to help drive more of the, I'll call it the technical piece.
• 38:32
  Branden Stucky: It's, it was just interesting that, that you, you called out generalist and that was just a, a part that I had just gotten through in that book.
• 38:37
  Branden Stucky: And then the, the SME piece, you know, I think we're starting to see, know, I, I guess I don't know in the past, did we have the types of SMEs that we have now, or did we really truly have a lot more generalists?
• 38:51
  Branden Stucky: Back in the day
• 38:52
  Greg Alvarado: Oh no.
• 38:53
  Greg Alvarado: We had SMEs and we had ULAs.
• 38:55
  Greg Alvarado: Oh yeah.
• 38:56
  Greg Alvarado: And, and if you look at things, if you look at models, predictive models, those predictive models need to be acid tested by the SMEs in that area.
• 39:09
  Greg Alvarado: Right.
• 39:10
  Greg Alvarado: And the generalist at some point will get engaged from, you know, how does all this stuff fit together?
• 39:19
  Greg Alvarado: And then your costing engineers or your cost people, which your generalists may have that kind of person there too, but at the end of the day, the juice has got worth the squeeze, right?
• 39:31
  Branden Stucky: Yeah, always.
• 39:32
  Greg Alvarado: And so what, what, where I see us moving today, and what made me think about this mainly is financial management, but it's in these predictive models identifying uncertainty in the model.
• 39:47
  Greg Alvarado: And then managing that uncertainty based on the criticality of the decision that needs to be made with that information.
• 39:57
  Greg Alvarado: So sometimes it's important to get really accurate or maybe even precise, but most of the time it's probably not.
• 40:05
  Greg Alvarado: And it's understanding when it's worth it to be more accurate and when it's not.
• 40:10
  Greg Alvarado: But that also to me, says.
• 40:13
  Greg Alvarado: I gotta have a good model.
• 40:14
  Greg Alvarado: I gotta have a model that's considering the things that could affect the output or the answer so that I can manage this thing better with this information and this answer it's just that I don't wanna be any more accurate than I need to be.
• 40:29
  Greg Alvarado: 'cause I don't wanna spend any more money than I need to in order to achieve the desired level of reliability or safety.
• 40:37
  Branden Stucky: I mean, the crux of that right, is, is fitness for service level one, two, and, and three, assessments, right?
• 40:43
  Branden Stucky: I mean level, level one assessment.
• 40:46
  Branden Stucky: don't need a lot of information.
• 40:48
  Branden Stucky: You're just looking, you're looking.
• 40:49
  Branden Stucky: Things up in a, in a table or you know, on a, on a chart or a a, you know, a graph.
• 40:55
  Branden Stucky: You're, look, you're, you're looking at comparing, but then you get to a level three assessment.
• 40:59
  Branden Stucky: If you don't, if, you know, if you fail the one, the two, and then you get to a level three, I mean, you're going through full on FEA meshes, you know, now that level of accuracy, that level of precision goes up.
• 41:09
  Branden Stucky: And to, to be able to, to figure out if you, you know, where you're at.
• 41:13
  Branden Stucky: So I, I, I think that's a, a, a really good, a really good way of saying that.
• 41:19
  Branden Stucky: Figuring out, you know, saying that you want to have the right level of accuracy for, for, for the right level of reliability.
• 41:27
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah, that, that's basically you wanna achieve whatever level of reli.
• 41:32
  Greg Alvarado: Let's say I wanna, I wanna run my chemical plant or my refinery at a 95 or 97% reliability, but I wanna spend as little money as possible to do that.
• 41:44
  Greg Alvarado: That's fair.
• 41:45
  Greg Alvarado: That's fair.
• 41:46
  Greg Alvarado: You know, with this level of safety.
• 41:48
  Greg Alvarado: And naturally I want to have a license to operate.
• 41:50
  Greg Alvarado: I wanna do it safely.
• 41:52
  Greg Alvarado: That's all those all need to be considered together and that's fair.
• 41:56
  Greg Alvarado: I think what's happened to come full circle back to where we started in this conversation is if we look at if we understand what we want to achieve from the get go, that is gonna frame a lot of what this generalist, who's putting these things together.
• 42:17
  Greg Alvarado: Really needs to be aware, has to be aware of here's what we ultimately wanna accomplish right now.
• 42:24
  Greg Alvarado: Let's put together something that's gonna make that work.
• 42:27
  Greg Alvarado: Another thing that I think gets lost is when people are coming up with these big integrated software programs, which by the way is pushing holistic thinking and holistic integrated management, is you gotta think about how people work.
• 42:46
  Greg Alvarado: At the end of the day, these initiatives have to be sustainable.
• 42:52
  Greg Alvarado: And if I'm gonna be pushing this down on top of people, that they're pulling their hair out, trying to make it work, what good is that?
• 43:00
  Greg Alvarado: They're not gonna do it.
• 43:02
  Greg Alvarado: They're gonna look for workarounds.
• 43:03
  Greg Alvarado: They're gonna look for shortcuts.
• 43:04
  Greg Alvarado: I mean.
• 43:05
  Greg Alvarado: I've heard these kind of complaints about it, about things like well, I don't wanna mention any software programs, but you can fill in the blank from the biggest, from an from enterprise resource planning and ERP perspective to an enterprise asset management perspective.
• 43:22
  Greg Alvarado: Those things get more complex, but the people up at the top that are making these decisions, a lot of them have no earthly idea of how to.
• 43:31
  Greg Alvarado: The troops in the field, the ground level people, what they have to do to make this happen.
• 43:36
  Greg Alvarado: So I think a good generalist is going to think about that too, and help build work processes that actually make these people on our programs more effective and more efficient.
• 43:51
  Branden Stucky: I totally agree.
• 43:52
  Branden Stucky: The, the number of times that I've heard people complain about their programs and they say, well, this is what we got.
• 43:58
  Branden Stucky: This is what we were handed.
• 43:59
  Branden Stucky: We can't do anything about it.
• 44:01
  Branden Stucky: Just because I.
• 44:03
  Branden Stucky: Executive level or, or somewhere in that area was sold on, you know, certain features.
• 44:08
  Branden Stucky: And, you know, they haven't been in, those folks, haven't been in the trenches in, you know, 20, 30 years.
• 44:14
  Branden Stucky: Things have changed.
• 44:15
  Branden Stucky: So yeah, I totally agree with you on
• 44:16
  Greg Alvarado: User.
• 44:17
  Greg Alvarado: User experience is huge.
• 44:19
  Branden Stucky: Mm-hmm.
• 44:19
  Greg Alvarado: friendliness.
• 44:20
  Greg Alvarado: User experience is huge.
• 44:22
  Branden Stucky: Yeah, it's massive.
• 44:23
  Branden Stucky: So.
• 44:24
  Branden Stucky: All right.
• 44:24
  Branden Stucky: So, so to finish out here, you know what?
• 44:27
  Branden Stucky: What do you think for, for looking to the future, what do you think would be a good piece of advice to give to, let's call it asset integrity?
• 44:38
  Branden Stucky: Engineers, inspectors, somebody just coming out, maybe just coming out of the OUTTA college, just coming outta technical school, whatever, just got their cert.
• 44:47
  Branden Stucky: Knowing what you know now compared to.
• 44:51
  Branden Stucky: 25, 30 years ago, would you tell those folks as they start their journey in mechanical integrity?
• 44:58
  Branden Stucky: What, what to look out for, what to pay attention, what to, what type of attitude?
• 45:02
  Branden Stucky: What, what would you, what type of advice would they, because we've talked about, if we knew now what you, you know, what you knew then what, what advice would you give to folks now?
• 45:11
  Greg Alvarado: Well a lot, but one of the big ones up front is if these facilities were operated the way they were designed to be operated, if they were designed correctly, we wouldn't be seeing the failures and the problems that we are seeing.
• 45:26
  Greg Alvarado: So pay attention to what goes bump in the night.
• 45:30
  Greg Alvarado: Understand that equipment failures typically rarely happen because of one thing.
• 45:36
  Greg Alvarado: Usually there's a series of things that break down, find out who the qualified people are that you can go to, and I don't mean qualified by certificate, the qualified by experience and proven performance, who you can go ask the questions of when you need to and don't make decisions you're not qualified to make.
• 45:57
  Greg Alvarado: Nobody's making you do that.
• 45:59
  Greg Alvarado: Go find the right people or in the right sources of information to help you do that.
• 46:06
  Greg Alvarado: And the other thing too that I am, I'm concerned about going forward is the role of data.
• 46:13
  Greg Alvarado: I think data is vitally important.
• 46:16
  Greg Alvarado: It's very important.
• 46:18
  Greg Alvarado: But data in the absence of knowledge, wisdom, discernment, can be very dangerous.
• 46:26
  Greg Alvarado: We need to know context.
• 46:28
  Greg Alvarado: Again, don't go get data that isn't gonna have value.
• 46:31
  Greg Alvarado: I see people oftentimes recommending doing some type of inspection or buying some software program'cause they fell under the spell of some slick salesperson.
• 46:41
  Greg Alvarado: Make sure you find some mentors that you can grab onto some sources of information you can grab onto to help you with your critical thinking skills.
• 46:55
  Branden Stucky: Those are all very, very good pieces.
• 46:58
  Branden Stucky: I think the, the last one, finding a good mentor.
• 47:01
  Branden Stucky: You, you mentioned it earlier in this discussion that, you know, mentorship isn't something that's happening very often now.
• 47:09
  Branden Stucky: but I think having a good mentor something that can.
• 47:14
  Branden Stucky: Help you so much, whether it's a mentor that's in this field, a mentor personally, professionally, whatever, somebody to be able to to use as a sounding board and to, to hawk through decision making, building your skillset, working with a person.
• 47:34
  Branden Stucky: I, I think, having mentors is, is like.
• 47:37
  Branden Stucky: Really key.
• 47:38
  Branden Stucky: Now I come from a, I come from a, a, you know, a, a past of coaching.
• 47:42
  Branden Stucky: So, obviously I'm gonna think that that mentorship is important.
• 47:45
  Branden Stucky: But I really, really do think that it's something that is, is, can, can help turbocharge people in, in not just, not just their careers, but also their lives too.
• 47:57
  Greg Alvarado: Yeah, I, I think two, two other things that are even more fundamental, Brandon, but they go hand in hand is to have a passion about what you do and have a good work ethic and, and don't get so in a hurry that you sacrifice quality of whatever it is that you're doing.
• 48:18
  Branden Stucky: Yep, exactly right.
• 48:20
  Branden Stucky: That's exactly right.
• 48:23
  Branden Stucky: Alright, Greg.
• 48:24
  Branden Stucky: Well as always, it's good, good chatting with you and you know, until next time.
• 48:29
  Greg Alvarado: Thanks, Brandon.
• 48:30
  Greg Alvarado: Good chatting with you too, buddy.
• 48:31
  Greg Alvarado: Looking forward to it.
• 48:33
  Branden Stucky: Yeah.
• 48:33
  Branden Stucky: See it.
• 48:34
  Branden Stucky: Bye.
• 48:34
  Greg Alvarado: a good one.
• 48:34
  Greg Alvarado: Bye now.
• 48:35
  Thank you for listening to Upon Further Inspection, a Mechanical Integrity podcast.
• 48:39
  This episode was co-created by inspection, hearing, and Core solutions.
• 48:44
  Our producers are Nick Schmoyer, Jocelyn Christie and Jeremiah Wooten.
• 48:50
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• 48:56
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• 49:00
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• 49:02
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• 49:05
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