The first step is finding out what the plant’s name is. It turns out that the name most engineers use is just a colloquial name based on its location, and it has another official name. Several of them, even. There is the name of the internal project that designed it, and the name of the joint venture under which it was actually built.
There was a unique ID assigned in 1998 as part of a document-management revamp. There is another unique ID, assigned in 2001 for digitization purposes. It’s not entirely clear which document management systems are current, incidentally. Also, some of them point to other document-management systems.
No luck here. The 1998 ID points to documents located in a “library” at an address that hasn’t existed since long before 1998, which might explain why that 2001 ID doesn’t point to any digitized documents older than some recent reports on routine maintenance. At the time, I had naively hoped digitization would solve our problems forever. My manager was reading a dense book about it that I picked up out of curiosity. It had seemed persuasive.
But, the old-fashioned phone and email tree worked a bit better. The old research division is still mostly intact, and their physical library exists. Someone there is able to find documentation on the plant’s polymer processes, as well as copies of some engineering documents duplicated for the R&D library’s local records. Big paper blueprints and engineering drawings, as well as books of data, in dusty filing cabinets. The paper documents tauntingly sport IDs announcing that they had been digitized by Big Digitization Corp at some point in the past. Who knows what happened to that archive.
Deciphering documentation
Some documents assembled, the engineers get to work trying to get a handle on how to organize a debottlenecking project. Unfortunately, the documents seem to be written partially in hieroglyphics, and are only partly complete. They make some very slow progress. The manager half-jokes that engineering schools should teach a course in engineering archaeology, where students are given a pile of 30-year old documents and asked to figure out what’s going on. I like the idea. Maybe even read an old engineering textbook, like the collectors into repairing old vacuum-tube electronics do.
Some of the methods and notation are familiar, but others are long obsolete. Even where nothing has officially changed, cultural assumptions about what should be documented explicitly or can be assumed have changed, making interpretation difficult. And it would really be nice to have a big-picture overview book. At the end of the project someone should’ve been commissioned to write a book, “What This Goddamn Plant Is: And, How It Works”. That book is effectively being written now, only by archaeologists.