91^st General Meeting Speaker Presentation
“What If?”
Ken Barkdoll

The following presentation was delivered at the 91st General Meeting Monday General Session on May 15, 2023. It has been edited for content and phrasing.

INTRODUCTION: Ken Barkdoll is a risk engineering consultant for Zurich. He has been a commissioned inspector since 2012. Mr. Barkdoll has over 30 years of technical and electro-mechanical experience spanning multiple industries including boiler and pressure vessel fabrication, aerospace body structures, sporting optics, and semiconductor production, testing and assembly. He is actively engaged with risk engineering, jurisdictional compliance, and boiler and pressure vessel inspection training.

Mr. Barkdoll’s slide presentation can be found here.

MR. BARKDOLL: So, what if? It's a question I bet a lot of us have asked from time to time. Like me, you've asked it probably a lot more than most people.

I got my commission in 2012. I was a late bloomer. I didn't start until I was 46. And it all started when I got a phone call in 2008 from a company wanting to know if I'd come to work for them as an inspector. My response was, "I think you got the wrong number. I think you're trying to get a hold of my dad, Dick Barkdoll." And for those of you who may be asking that question, yes, I am Dick Barkdoll's son. He was retired. And they said, "No, we're trying to get a hold of you." They probably figured the apple didn't fall too far from the tree. We talked for a little bit, but as it turned out, it wasn't my time to make the jump.

So, I go back working and 2010 comes along, and I'm not as happy in my position as I used to be, so I got to thinking about it and said I need to look into this more. I bit the bullet, bought some code books, took a couple of the online courses at the National Board and started studying during the evenings and on weekends. A couple years go by, I'm feeling pretty good. I think I've got a pretty good handle on this stuff. I look around and have some preparatory classes and I signed up for the National Board course because at the end of that course you can sit for the test for free. It's included. What better way to get an idea of what's on that test, so when I'm really ready to take the test, I'll be prepared. Well, lo and behold, I take the test and I pass. Who'd have thought it? Now, I have the privilege to be speaking before you today.

Well, in a perfect world, boilers never alarm, right? Controls never fail; there are never any PMs to do; no catastrophic boiler failures; no discrepancies are ever noted, right? And we probably would not be here today either, right? There wouldn't be any need for us. My goal today, hopefully, is to foster a positive perspective on documentation and hopefully inspire the practice of using that – or utilizing that documentation to better protect our clients, our commissions, our employers, and, of course, ourselves, families, and careers.

So how can documentation help protect us? Well, for one, it establishes uniform, repeatable procedures and practices for conducting our tasks safely. We have a pretty good, long history of safety in our industry, and this helps make it more sustainable. One of the things that's very near and dear to me is the lockout/tagout and confined space entry programs. I crawl through a lot of boilers, and I want to make sure that they're safe.

When things are running along steady, there's not a lot of changes. It's pretty safe. But when we're making those transitions – starting up, shutting down – it's important to make sure that we have procedures in place to make sure we're doing it safely. This also includes auxiliary fuel operation. Most of the time if there's auxiliary fuels, it's probably for a rapid test. By chance you happen to switch over to auxiliary fuel, there's probably already an emergency going on. We want to make sure that we have a smooth transition, and that we have documented procedures to make sure we're doing it safely.

One that we should all be familiar with: Boiler PM and safety control testing/calibration programs, making sure that we have documented systems in place, that all the controls are being accounted for, they're in test programs, they're functioning, and that the necessary PMs that keep the boiler safe are being done. And if any calibrations are needed, they're being done in a timely fashion so that those controls can be relied upon to be accurate measurements. Also, boiler water chemistry is another one we should be familiar with. We want to make sure those boilers are not developing any kind of scale or corrosion inside of them.

So how can we protect our commissions with documentation? For one, it does document what we do and provides us a resource to go back to and review. I'm pretty sure that most of us know of someone or heard stories of someone that may have been in a position where they have to testify in court about their inspection activities after a catastrophic boiler failure. And having the ability to go back and review our notes is a lot better than having to rely on our recall or memory, right? It puts us in a lot better position to answer those questions. Helps to justify our time.

Not all boiler inspections are created equal. There are different designs, different types of controls and they require protected inspections. A lot of times when we're doing our job, many people don't realize what we're doing, both us and the people who are working on the boilers. Having good documentation helps give a little bit of value to that. I always tell people if you're not willing to give yourself credit for the work you do, you can't expect someone else to do it. Documentation gives us value to what we do. People can read over it. It also helps develop an accurate risk-based inspection program. I have a little bit of history when I was a black belt practitioner.

When collected right and used properly, data can be a very powerful tool for predicting outcomes and failures. And when we keep good data and good documentation, that could be used to help us to build better risk-based inspection plans, prevent those catastrophic failures from happening and to make sure that the boilers are maintained and running safely.

Organization. It helps improve our resource management. This one is pretty big to me because when I go into locations, a lot of times people have the same complaint. We don't have enough resources to do all this work. And there's a lot of lives that can be at stake. I often have to explain this risk exposure to people so that they understand the importance of doing the maintenance on these boilers, doing the safety control checks. And I always encourage them to make sure they’re keeping logs because it gives you credit for what you do. And over time, it's surprising how many locations – when they implement log programs – actually end up getting the justification to increase head count to perform those necessary tasks. Also, it gives us a more accurate resource for forecasting. Several of us have lots of territories to cover. Knowing how much time it takes to do all our inspections, having good documentation so we can better project how many people we need to cover those areas is pretty important.

Helps with engagement. When I go to a location, I want people to be in touch with their equipment. I ask questions about it, and I read through their logs. I try to encourage them to go through them as well periodically so they have a good idea of how it's running. That helps increase the understanding and knowledge about their process, which, in turn, also helps improve their safety. It also helps improve their awareness. So, when they're out there working on their equipment and we have little things that come up out of the ordinary, we can start identifying these small issues before they become big problems. What are some of the documents that are at our disposal? I'm not going to hit on all of them, just a few that we see all the time.

Lockout/tagout. As I said, it is near and dear to me. Same thing with confined space entry. I will guarantee you before I go into any boiler, I'm going through that lockout/tagout, locking it down, making sure I understand it and I've identified all those risks before I put my lock on there and sign off on it. The same thing goes with confined space entry. I want to make sure that when I go in that boiler, if something happens, there's a safety emergency rescue plan in place. And that No. 1, when I go in there, I'm not going to be put at risk.

This is an example of a generic lockout/tagout for a location I was at. They had twin boilers that use a common economizer. And normally when one boiler is running and the other boiler is down, we do the internal inspection, and everything usually went along swimmingly. One year we had an issue with some CO gas being detected in the firebox. Turns out they had pneumatic valves that were controlling the damper that switched between the two boilers. And it had a little leak by the valve, so it was lifting up a little bit and we were getting some leak backing gas. What we ended up doing was changing our lockout/tagout so that those were addressed. And I just wanted to show where they were in our plan – that we put them in there. First, they didn't know how we were going to lock these out. But they find we can put a plug on the caps or on the lines, put some caps on them, lock them up, tag them so someone doesn't inadvertently come back, put them back into service in the boiler.

There was a confined space entry permit for the same location, so we already went through the lockout/tagout and signed off on that. We checked our ventilation, made sure our atmosphere was good, reviewed our emergency plan, and made sure that everyone understood whose role and what was going to be done if there was an emergency. We also made sure that everyone had their protection equipment, their PPD, made sure that everyone was up-to-date on their training, and made sure all the gas meters were calibrated and reviewed the rescue plan.

NB-6 forms. I see different kinds, but this is a generic one. One area I like to pay attention to is we have access to national database, JO, hopefully JRS pretty soon. And I'll go look at inspections from time to time just randomly. I'm curious to see what's being seen out there and what are people writing up about. The Section 9 here is basically asking for a general accounting of our inspection activities and what we see with the boiler. It wants to know state condition of all tubes, tube ends, coils, and nipples – describe any adverse conditions with respect to gage class, gage cocks, and safety valves and report any conditions that have changed since the last inspection.

This is one of those reports I pulled at random. I don't know who it is or who it was, but the main point is I wanted to point out the work and fix in and accounting of the activities. It says the boiler was externally inspected while in operation to evaluate the condition of its pressure parts and safety devices. The boiler was found to be in satisfactory condition. The protective devices were in good order. And the maintenance of the vessel appeared to be adequate. They did a low-water field cutout test. They evaluated the mechanical room, and it was adequately sized with good air ventilation and good housekeeping. In the end, they ultimately recommended that they get issued a permit to operate.

This one, I'll take credit. It's one line. It's just field notes. Since we're out there doing our inspections, it's a good idea to make notes on what we're doing. And it’s mainly a bunch of chicken scratching, but I don't care what other people think about it as long as I can understand it. So, you're up there, walking around the boiler, getting a little IR candle looking for hot spots, checking for leaks, monitoring how the gas is or the burner is going. You’re also looking at some of their logs and seeing how it's been running. You’re looking that they have a pressure relief valve testing program in place. This one does. Also, I made some notes on how we're testing similar controls like the high gas pressure supervisor. We're using a 3/2 valve. And then on the high-pressure lube test, we tested it by adjusting the set point up to where it would trip the alert the control. You go back home, and it gets transferred into our NB-6 report form.

Basically, the operations of the lockout and shutdown were evaluated, and there were no issues. We also looked at the high/low gas pressure supervisor, the combustion air, and flame safety. We looked at that under start-up and under fire. And then we also went through and noted that we did the slow drain test and it passed and that all the pressure relief values were within compliance with the jurisdiction requirements.

Here's one that I found online going through the database. And when I first saw it, I thought, “Wow, someone put a lot of time and effort into this.” As I got to reading it, I saw some things that made me stop and pause. This was at a hospital, but they were referencing someone from a food manufacturing place that was satisfied with the results of the water treatment program. That may be the case; I don't know. Like I said, these are just reports I read at random, and I'm not familiar with everything so it could be this is the case or not. They also referenced that this boiler was over 31 million BTU input, but then they have a reference about ASME/CSD-1 below, which is not what we would be looking at for a boiler that size. Why I bring this up is it made me think of a lot of times we use cut and paste when we're doing things because when you have a wheel that works, there's no sense inventing a new one. To hurry things, we'll cut and paste things, but I want to caution people on this because we don't want our documentation to come in question at some point if there were an accident.

Water chemistry logs. This is another one we should be pretty familiar with. A lot of us have third-party companies that come in there to do water chemistry inspections for us, monitor it for us, and does training. I'm not a big expert in water chemistry, but I do know how to look at specifications and seeing if something has been inspected or not. As we look through these, look over what people were there with and make sure that everything is within the spec ranges. If there's something that's outside the spec ranges, we should be asking questions about what was done. Was that action appropriate? And get a little understanding. It helps us engage with input and understand how it's running and helps engage them in it, too, to make sure it's running safer.

Here's an in-house water treatment program. I'm familiar with this one, too. They have some readings that are way out of specifications for the alkalinity and conductivity. They had some issues with their water softener, and they also had a bad conductivity meter. But working with their outside vendor, they were able to get all that straightened out. The interesting part is this had been going on for quite a while until someone came along and made a point of it and engaged them in taking care of it. It's important to do that.

Boiler operating and PM logs. There are all different kinds out there. This is one of my favorites. For me, it's easy to go through and see how the boiler operates. I can thumb through the pages, see all the uptime, downtime, and understand why the boiler was down. What kind of alarms was it having? If I don't see that, I encourage you to do that. I want to make sure it’s documented whenever that boiler is down, and I explain to them why. If I'm asking them to do this, the least I can do is to put down my own inspection comments in there. I know it's a lot of writing. If you're like me, I'm not a big fan of writing longhand anymore. But when I'm done, I take a picture of it. And then when I get home, I put it in my NB-6 form notes.

Here's another example of a generic logging. You see variations of this all over. It was a new location or a new program for this location. They needed a little help, and I made some recommendations. They weren't recording boiler pressures, and they weren't recording water levels or stack temperatures. I brought that to their attention. They asked, “Why do we need to do that? We're going through doing all this.” Yes, but we're trying to get an idea of how that boiler is operating over time. And we only come in there once or twice a year maybe, so how are we going to help them monitor their process and notice things when we're not around.

And I told them, “Here's a good example: stack temperature. If you happen to notice, your stack temperatures run along at a steady state, fluctuates a little bit. When you start to see it going down, that could be an indication you have a water leak. You have some evaporative cooling going on. So, it prompts some investigative activities – to go and see what's going on. Look inside the viewport; see if you can see some water coming into the combustion chambers. On the converse, you might have temperatures raising up.”

I told them in that case it could be an indication of some scale going on in the boiler or some sooting because they're providing insulated barriers and they're preventing that heat transfer.

I told them there are very cheap ways of telling the health of your boiler. He liked it. They started to write it down and did a little training on how and when to do those temperature measurements and keep track of it. On the bottom they haven't filled out any of their PMs, but they do have it all itemized. They've identified what controls they have. They're going to be doing it monthly. They have some that are semiannual, some that are annual, but they're going to put down the dates and initial who did them when they get time to do them.

Another example: People don't always have the resources in-house to do the inspections themselves, so they hire mechanical companies to do them, and they're not cheap. But more often than not, I'm seeing locations that have an invoice that says quarterly inspection and check safety controls, billed them, and the bottom is signed off. It’s not a lot of help for us as inspectors to review it and say how has this boiler been running?

I always encourage them to talk to vendors and ask them to itemize what it is they're doing as far as the safety controls so that we're all on the same page. You ask one guy what he did for safety controls, and he might say checked low water cutoff relief valve. You ask another guy, and he may go through the combustion controls and the low water cutoff. We want to make sure we have a positive idea of what's been done and an accounting of the work they did – if they did anything on the boiler – so we have a history of what's going on.

Some people get creative and make your own using an Excel spreadsheet. I like this one, because their management was reviewing their logs each week, looking at the daily checks and making sure they made sense. On the left, they had a list of all their procedures for doing their daily checks. They also had a list of the annual checks that were supposed to be done. It was pretty good, informative, and it was signed off. I know we're in the digital age, trying to get away from paper, and there's a lot of enterprise programs out there. Some of them are like Oracle and SAP. You've also probably seen the maintenance management programs like CMMIS and CMMS.

One word of caution I want to offer: A lot of times these generate reports, PM reports, 100% completion rates. I see them all the time. And I ask people to see the task specific information – the master PM list. I'm doing this is because a lot of times things are not being communicated because they're not being reviewed. They pull reports, they see it, and everyone is happy to go along with business. What happens is they complete a task, they pull a PM, they go out there, they do a pass or fail, and the system gives them credit for having completed it. There are several instances where I went through these and found failing controls that no one was aware of because no one had been reading these task-specific information. If you're collecting the information, the documentation, I would highly recommend you encourage people to review it to make sure that these reports were reflecting what's actually happening.

I wanted to give you some real world boiler log review where I came across the logbook, went through some stuff and found some good things and helped the location identify some issues and get some correction on it. This one is for a 6,800-pound-per-hour boiler. And before anyone says anything about gage glasses, this one does have a gage glass, and it works fine. That's a question for another time.

03:40: I'm looking at this boiler log and it says low water alarm, sight glass is full, feed pump was not running. They cycled the combustion switch and reset on third attempt.

04:15: Boiler 3 shutdown for low water. They let it fill back up and started it.

04:35: Boiler 1 shuts down again for low water. And this time, they toggle the switch really fast, push start, and the boiler starts up. The water was a little low but not empty.

Are people starting to feel a little nervous right now? They got some issues, right? But there's another way to look at this. These people are trying to keep this process working. They're trying to keep production going. And I see this as a training opportunity. They've been trained how to keep things going, but they haven't been trained on how to identify these risk exposures as they're happening, right?

05:45: The boiler went down again. The pump was having a hard time keeping up on high fire. They cleaned all the strainers ahead of the pump and made a note of how the boilers go into high fire. I skipped ahead on the logs a few days. And five days later, we're looking at the surge tank and DA tank went empty at 08:00 for no reason. No. 1 went down for low water. Seems like a little connection there, but the water was good, but they might need to clean water probes. One of the interesting things when I went through this log, I specifically looked, they made the comment about cleaning these probes. And as I looked at their logs, there was no follow-up on them.

08:30: Boiler 1 shuts down for low water. They restarted boiler 1.

21:00: Same as above. And then three weeks later, I skipped ahead.

This has been going on for months when we looked at this logbook. Nothing has been done so I sit down with the supervisor for boiler operations. There had a couple of the pages dog-eared on the logbook and asked him to look through it. And he raised his eyebrow a bit, said, "We got some problems."

I'm like, "Yeah. Have you heard about them?"

He said, "No, I haven't."

I said, "Have you ever looked at the logbooks?"

He says, "No, honestly I don't."

I said, "It's a good idea to."

He said, "We definitely need to make some changes."

I made my recommendations. Of course, one of them was provide training on responses to alarms: what to do, who to check, and who to notify. Also, I noticed when I was looking through their daily check sheets, they were not doing daily testing of their primary auxiliary level controls. We made sure that was added to their daily checks, especially with all the stuff that's been going on with their water. I also advised further investigations. It seemed all these alarms were happening either early in the morning or later in the evening. We also advised that both the operators and management would periodically review those logs and have discussion about it so there's good communication between shifts, between all the different operators to identify these issues that are coming up. It turns out it was a process issue, and they changed some processes at night that was causing them to run out of water. Their makeup water system was not able to keep up. They had to do some updates to those. They got them to finally work, and they didn't have any issues after that.

Pressure relief device documentation and testing programs. This is another one I like to pay close attention to, especially when dealing with some of these larger boilers. They have a harder time doing testing. They have to wait until they're down, send them out, and get checks on them. Here's an example of the question: was no pretest conducted, no pop test? And when we get to looking at it, it wasn't serviced. What happens is they pulled another relief valve out of stock or off a shelf somewhere, adjusted the set point, calibrated it, and added it to the system. They didn't need to have a pretest on it because it wasn't relevant to this facility. Here's another one. This one we had a question about whether it passed or failed, because if you look, it shows that it popped at 1 psi. Then over here it shows it didn't pop. We called the VR company, asked them some questions and they looked at their track, gave us some good information on it and said it was leaking at 1 psi. When we got to the set point, it did not lift. It failed under inservice, and it was a hard failure. It was stuck closed. So, of course, we had to cut back that relief valve program inspection frequency by 50%.

Here's another. It’s just an example of some inline testing, but the point I'm trying to impress on people is we're looking at these and making sure that the relief valves, if they're in test programs, are being checked. This one was a hydraulic lift test. They tested it in place, put down the document, set points on it, and everything, and passed on it.

Here's some really good, real-life benefits of paying attention to those inspection reports or the repair reports for the relief valves. This was a smelter. It was a little under 4,500 horsepower waste heat boiler, had a MAWP of just under 990 pounds. And it had a steaming capacity of a little over 155 pounds per hour. It’s not a small boiler. The heat input was controlled by a duct damper that took 45 minutes to close. That’s a long time to wait if they were having a problem. So, having controlled the drum pressure down, a couple of power valves, they were able to maintain their process stability. They also had three relief valves with a combined relieving capacity just a little over 200,000 pounds per hour, which is plenty of capacity. Then they also had documented lift tests that were 990 pounds up to 1,015 and all within spec. I call them up, and I'm showing up for my first inspection at this location. I make sure that they're aware that I'm going to be asking for this documentation. When I show up, everyone is sitting there smiling, handing me their documentation. They sit down and start reviewing it. Lo and behold, all the PRDs had failed. They're all stuck closed. I asked them about it.

He said, "Yeah, but we replace them every year. That's fine, right?"

I said, "No, these have failed while they're inservice, right? Do you have any other test reports we can look over?"

They had another four years worth. We looked through those. Same results. All of them had been failing, so this has been going on for a while. Per the NBIC guidelines, I told them we need to cut back on inspection frequency by 50%, so we're going to be doing this again in six months. Six months comes along, and I looked at the test results. It’s the same thing; they're all stuck closed. I told them, "This is serious. We need to get this addressed."

I asked if they looked into what was going on with the repair company. They said, "We haven't gotten anything back. They're a little behind. They're really swamped with their reconditioning of valves and they said they'd get back to me as soon as they could.”

We did reduce the inspection frequency again by another 50%. They're down to three months. This is not an easy task to do, because that's a lot of money for them. Three months is going to really hurt. After doing that, we come back and had failed valves again. But this time, the valve repair company did have some information for us. They said there was severe corrosion on top of the valve seats. When they heard that, they asked, “Where's the location?” They started checking their exhaust lines right away. What did they find? There was a process line someone had piped into their exhaust line system. It was back-streaming corrosive gasses into the valve causing almost immediate failure on those valves. Of course, they removed that from the exhaust system. That was a very close call.

And I've told people that when you go into a location like this and you're looking at these logs, there can be a lot at stake. I kept in contact with the person there because we live in the same town, and we see each other around. And a couple years go by, and he happened to see me and he said, "You know, we had a couple of upsets just months apart couple years after. We were no longer on the account. Even with all the power valves opened up and relief valves lifting, they were still 10% over MAWP."

And I told him, "Thank God those relief valves were working, right?" He agreed, but still there was a problem.

I asked him, "So why, why was it still going 10% over?" He said they looked into that and found that it was due to the length of the exhaust pipe runs. They had some doubles in them, and they didn't have any air gaps. They had several hundred feet of piping and no relief and no air gaps in them.

I remember going out there and asking them to see the relief valves. They're all wrapped up in insulation, fired up. I told them I needed to look at the nameplates and tags and match it with my documentation. They complained about that. I said to just open it up so I can see the nameplates, and they did that.

I guarantee you if they had taken it off completely, I would have seen if there were air gaps or not, and I probably would have said something. They put air gaps in there, and they never did have any other problems in that since then.

So back to my long night. I was my first year as a commission inspector, and I got a call from the state chief. He said he received a call from a hospital about a boiler failure explosion. That was about it. It was on my message. And I tried getting a hold of him but couldn’t. And when it came time to sit down and look at my notes, I'm sitting there wondering, gosh, I hope no one got injured, and there were no fatalities. And I can't get a hold of anyone to find out what happened, so I'm left sitting there looking at my notes wondering if I missed something. I look back to that now, and I think about it. What if someone had been injured or there had been a fatality, would I have been comfortable with those notes that I kept? The unfortunate thing is we do live in a very litigious society. And if it wasn't documented, it didn't happen.

I've been doing this for quite a while now. And I look back and I think with time comes wisdom. And with that, I developed a lot better process of inspecting boilers and documenting what I do.

What I really hope is that this has been a little inspiring to people out there to look at documentation more closely, become a partner in the health of those boilers, and make sure that not only we're looking at it to see how they're running but the clients are looking at them and maintaining them – because what if you're the next one to get that call?

Well, thank you. Be safe out there, and God bless you all.