Rodent shuts down FCCU

Roasted rat meat when it chews through a powerline. Not a pretty site. That’s what shutdown the FCCU at Citgo Corpus Christi last week.

That’s not the first case of animals in the refinery.

I’ve watched deer walk into the BP Cherry Point Refinery. I’ve seen photos of grizzly bears climbing the ladder cages on various units and storage tanks.

Insects can cause problems too. In 1947, Grace Murray Hopper was working on the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (a primitive computer). When the machine was experiencing problems, an investigation showed that there was a moth trapped between the points of Relay #70, in Panel F.

The operators removed the moth and affixed it to the log. The entry reads: “First actual case of bug being found.”

The word went out that they had “debugged” the machine and the term “debugging a computer program” was born.

So what’s the lesson learned? Be prepared by having procedures in place for the unexpected.

-Paul Orlowski
Co-founder and Community Builder
CatCracking.com