Spent 4 hours chasing a steam drum leak that was just a gasket seating wrong

I was crawling around Unit 3 at the refinery last Thursday thinking I had a tube failure, but it turned out the gasket was cocked in the flange from the last outage. Wasted a whole shift with mirrors and dye when the answer was right in front of me on the bolt torque sequence. Anyone else ever overlook a simple gasket issue and go straight to thinking it's something major?

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1 Comment

aaron_wilson171mo ago

Why do we always assume the worst first? Had a similar thing happen on a feedwater heater where I was checking for a tube leak with ultrasonic and it was just a bad spiral wound gasket that got pinched during install. The torque sequence is always the culprit when you rush a flange make up. Nothing worse than burning four hours on something a half decent torque wrench and a step by step would have caught.