I could do it again if I needed to.

OH&S does not take into account the cost to a company for protecting individuals from life or injury risk situations. There is no reason for a worker to be placed in a situation of personal risk or danger in the area we are talking about that I know of.

maybe your OHAS is even more neurotic than our OSHA, which I would find impressive.

here, live work requires proper protective equipment, and crews with sufficient experience to undertake the project. I wasn't allowed to work electrical systems "hot" for my first year in the trade.

that IS way overcautious. the only lost time injury was the guy who was sloppy with his sleeves, and he only lost a week (and not sure all of that was due to the injury) the only other incident was when a 151' manlift had a malfunction, and the only damage was to the administration building and the operator's shorts. (the reltal yard mechanic declared it as operator error - apparently the correct course of action when a manlift main boom starts dropping is NOT to step off the deadman switch and hit the emergency stop button) the machine was sidelined at least until my phase of the job was done and my crew had been laid off (metric = made redundant)

Was that boiler indoors or out? Have done roughly the same sort of thing above 1050 Degree F boilers INDOORS. You have no idea how much heat can be retained around a boiler by walls and a roof.

I once also heard a strange sound on top of the boiler and traced it to a leaking radiographic inspection plug on the main steam line (~2600 PSI, 1050 Degrees F steam was blowing out there, just a LITTLE bit dangerous) before I contacted the operator and had him start shutting the boiler down.

I couldn't be sure. In our plant we had several equipment lifting bays that extended the full height of the building (roughly 140 feet to the top floor, and a ceiling about 40 feet above that) which could (and did) handle a manlift in a pinch. In our case, though, we had stairs and walkways that would get you close enough to the top of the boiler that you could use a 12 foot ladder (and, in one case, a plank) to get on top. (Be sure to wear shoes that had soles that would not melt, though. We had that happen a lot.)

The newest of our boilers (a Circulating Fluidized Bed boiler) was installed with inappropriate roofing materials, and on one particularly hot, sunny, day while the boiler running full-out, about three years after te boiler was placed in service, the 'tar-paper' roof caught fire from the heat.

(quote)Occupational Health And Safety. Generating plants ie power stations can be taken off-line and run down to make it safe for maintenance and repairs to be carried out. I am told bringing the the affected generating plant back on line and synchronised takes about 1/2 an hour. Now we are talking steam plant not generating plant so I would be interested to hear from an expert from this field.

In My case, it was a Hospital plant, and taking it off-line would have severely compromised the hospitals ability to be a Hospital.

Plus, as we were fitting control systems, the whole system needed to be live in order for us to prove everything was working and commission the thing.
We were not altering any of the actual workings, just the controls.

As it happens, from my main office at that time, we ran the boiler package as they had always been run for a moth to prove it was all working properly, then I started on the control schematics, within the next six months, I shaved about 10% of their fuel bills.... without compromising any hospital working practises....

The control schematics also allowed a shutdown of one boiler at a time to take it off line in order for proper maintenance, something that had been unavailable previously under the old control system which fired the boilers on a 1-2-3-4-5-6 dependant on demands.

To equalise out wear, that got changes under the new control to 2-3-4-5-6-1 on the second week, 3-4-5-6-1-2 on the third etc, and other improvements, such as the ability to take completely off-line whole sections of the building if unoccupied, but leaving a basic "Frost protect" in place automatically say in the instance of a whole ward being shut down.

in case you missed the original link, this is a 606 MW power plant that delivers superheated steam to a nearby mill as a secondary product.

What control systems were you using, as a matter of interest?...
Back in the 80's, I was using Trend, Satchwell, etc, the language was known as Trend, it was modular, and tailored to BEMS, HVAC,
(Building energy Management Stems Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning)

This was the biggest use of my programming skills I had ever known, as I had to learn the whole language "On the Fly", learn Degree Day, PID loops and a whole lot more HVAC terminology I had never heard of before....

It was also the early days of Windows, I was using Lotus 123 as well, and a RM Nimbus VX2 with a 40 meg hard drive PC Compatible.

The plant I was working on (above) provided steam for Heating, DHW, and steam cleaning of Surgical instruments, and also a steam turbine that would fire up to power important bits should the power fail....like Life support and Theatres?...
That was the first time I had seen an emergency generator THAT big?...
Most of my work was done remotely at the office, but in certain cases, where plant was "miss-firing", I had to go to site to check loose connections or bad wiring faults, or in this case, supervise complete replacement of the control system... not a light job, the controller was the size of a suitcase, the whole control board was the size of a double wardrobe....THOUSANDS of wires... pre-built on the factory site, we had to do a "Hot Swap", because of the necessity to keep the plant running at all times, that involved running the two systems side by side transferring control one piece at a time....

The control schematic I had put in required the use of the Lap-Top being plugged in, as all system commands required "Authorisation", that allowed me to un-plug each boiler one by one for instance to transfer control without getting a "Fire" command whilst our engineer was swapping the wiring on the actual boiler.... 480v a/c up his fingertips tends to give him curly hair and a need to shout rude things at me?....