I was working in a control room at the smelter here as an apprentice many moons ago, replacing bulbs in the "panagraph" (old style control station using the Swanson system). I dropped my screwdriver, and it landed handle down right onto a stop button for a conveyor. No big deal, until I realized EVERYTHING was interlocked with that conveyor. The sound of everything in the noisy plant grinding to a halt was disheartening to say the least. It ended up totally shutting down 4 other plants and caused a backup of SO2 gas in the system. The automatic gas sensors turned on the evacuation alarms. As it was, the plants were evacuated for 45 minutes (about 700 workers) and after the evacuation was done it took 3 hours to get the plants all up and running smooth again. It took a long time to live that one down.
Now here's one that didn't happen to me, but it did happen at one of our local hydro generation plants. They had just finished a generator re-build, the rotor was put back into place and everything was fine, until one of the electricians doing last-minute checks had a 6" metal ruler fall out of his pocket into the gap between the rotor and stator. They had to pull the rotor out again just to get the ruler out, and lost many thousands of dollars in power revenue. After that their policy changed: everyone going onto the generators had to empty their pockets.
[This message has been edited by Sixer (edited 12-12-2005).]
