Major project completed on time
John Thompson's Industrial Watertube division conpleted a noteworthy repair project which was carried out between July and September 2009. This was a major Waste Heat Boiler (WHB) Repair Project at the Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) in Zambia.
The original project was handed over to KCM in mid December 2008. After a mere 12 days operational use, a process malfunction caused catastrophic damage to the radiation section of the WHB. An emergency site inspection and damage assessment was conducted during the christmas break and after consultation with Alstom Germany, our technical partners on this project, KCM was provided with a solution to perform a temporary repair and thereby downgrade the WHB to maximum 50% capacity. Whilst the boiler was running.
John Thompson's bid for the repair was successful and an order was received from KCM for the supply of replacement pressure parts and the installation thereof. Using mostly foreign skilled labour ex India, the pre-shut work was completed 10 days ahead
of the scheduled 28 days in July/August and the extremely challenging stripping and installation phase was successfully completed 1 day ahead of the 26 day scheduled outage in September 2009.This final stage was done with the aid of some of our own
coded welders. This was a remarkable project that achieved an improved margin at completion, simply due to a very productive site workforce who worked tirelessly and efficiently during the outage window |
