Well said. Cracks in communication are where (potentially disastrous) mistakes happen.
They can happen due to internal or external politics, complacence, arrogant attitudes or just plain stupidity.
Paul
> > it is important that the pipe stress engineer understands a little
> >about the design of the supports, and conversely, the structural engineer
> >understands a little about the pipe force/moment design. Without this
> >overlap of understanding, it is all too easy to produce an inefficient
> >overall design.
> Without careful coordination it's also possible for things to drop
> through the cracks. Things that may seem natural for one discipline
> aren't necessarily natural for anyone else. I've gotten into a couple of
> situations where someone doing the piping just assumed that a particular
> piece of equipment would act as an anchor. The equipment was a sheet
> metal air-to-air heat exchanger, which might have supported the dead
> weight, but not much else. The equipment manufacturer may or may not have
> told someone about load limitations on his box--no one remembered when
> the question of seismic loading came up, way down the line after
> everything had been pretty much set in concrete. Turned out that the
> equipment was OK with the assigned seismic loading, but good reason to
> believe that the piping was a lot more flexible than originally thought,
> because the support which was assumed was a lot more flexible than
> assumed.
>
> The moral is that none of us works in a vacuum. Say what you want about
> 'not my job,' or 'just following orders,' but the person who's ultimately
> responsible for a disaster is the person or persons who could have
> prevented it. And it's so easy to prevent problems by checking with other
> disciplines about proper details or the actual intent of a design, rather
> than just assuming whatever's convenient at the moment.
Received on Mon Jun 24 16:51:00 2002
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