Until recently I was still in Panama, under Covid lockdown, based at a copper mine where operations are currently subject to two separate stop orders from the authorities. One of these is related to Covid, whilst the second relates to environmental performance and is essentially the reason I went there in the first place.
Getting home was not an option until last week. Even if I had managed to get past the site’s ‘cordon sanitaire’, Panama’s borders are shut and the airport is closed (and will remain so for at least another month). On top of all that, Panama has incredibly stringent Covid lockdown measures. Men and women are only allowed out on alternate days during the week, for a short period at a time determined by the last digit of their identity card. No one is allowed out at all at weekends. There are police roadblocks stopping travel without written permission, and anyone driving without permission gets a three-month licence suspension. I could go on. It’s strict. It looked like I was there for the duration.
Anyway, my mission – should I choose to accept it – was to upgrade two effluent treatment plants to allow the environmental stop order to be lifted, and somehow achieve this whilst the Covid-related stop order remained in place, due to new positive cases still occurring on site. There was consequently a continuing unreplaceable loss of many of the tradespeople who would normally be necessary, and I could only use those materials either already on site, or still readily available in a site lockdown, during a countrywide lockdown, during a global pandemic.
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My original design would have to go out of the window, and I would have no draughtspeople to draw a new one. I would also have no mechanical engineers, pipers, electrical or software engineers. I would have limited access to electricians and pipe fitters (and those I did have wouldn’t speak English). I would have some used shipping containers, assorted plastic tanks, pipes, cables, pumps, variable speed drives etc.
I’m guessing that real engineers might almost be jealous at this point, because it sounds rather like being in an episode of Scrapheap Challenge (Junkyard Wars in the US) at large scale. It also brings to mind Star Trek, because in common with all ship-bound engineers ever, Scotty had to do what he could with what he had most weeks.
Each of the two supplementary plants would need twenty 40-foot shipping containers to be made watertight, fitted with nozzles and so on, and placed on beams (the last remaining guy on site who could run the concrete plant succumbed to Covid, so mass concrete would no longer be available).
An electrical substation from elsewhere on site would be repurposed to run the first of the two plants, along with a load of stuff delivered previously for other jobs. I would be rejigging and recommissioning old plant, and simplifying my original design to the point where it could be built with the people and materials at hand. The only area where there would be no compromise was safety.
This would probably all cost me some of my margin of comfort on performance, (though great improvement would still be achievable along with potentially complete and reliable compliance) and would keep me pretty busy running things in manual to get the plant up and running.
Of course, the weakest link here would be me. Since the plan would basically be in my head, and would differ from the design I had been developing in many ways, I would have to backdraft as I went along, and there would be no scope for me getting sick. That said, we wouldn’t be able to afford losing many more electricians, welders, pipefitters or plant operators either.
So, whilst this wasn’t what I planned to be spending half of 2020 doing, in some respects it might be rather more fun than the things I hear many other people are unexpectedly doing with 2020.
Or at least, that was the plan. As it turned out, we lost still more people, and eventually, it was too many. There were not enough people to do the job, or to support doing the job, even to Scrapyard Challenge standards, and it was unclear when there might be again.
In mid-May, the Panamanian Ministry of Health allowed people with a sufficient record of blood tests and daily monitoring by Ministry staff to leave site, and less than a week later, the Mexican government organised a humanitarian flight to Mexico City, still in air travel contact with Europe. I collected the necessary paperwork (a first come first served air ticket, two letters from the British Embassy and another from the regional director of the Health Ministry), and left site on Wednesday 21 May, arriving back home on the following Saturday.
I hope to go back and finish the job once the pandemic is over, but for now, there’s no place like home! The impossible we do immediately, but miracles take a little longer, as they say.
