Photo By Keith Hayes | Daniel Coghill, Industrial Electronic Controls technician, checks on one...... read more read more
Whenever the line at Production Plant Barstow threatens to grind to a halt because of equipment malfunction, the operators depend on the Production Equipment Maintenance department to keep things rolling with speedy repairs aboard Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow, Calif.
“The Production Equipment Maintenance team handles pretty much every piece of equipment in the Plant,” said Alicia Florez, manager of the Engineering Branch at PPB, Marine Depot Maintenance Command. “Whether it’s preventative maintenance, corrective maintenance or emergency work stoppage type maintenance, PEM does it.”
The PEM department and its seven artisans and one supervisor falls under her supervision. Florez said she is amazed by the skill of the small crew.
“They can look at a piece of equipment that’s 40 years old, that has no documentation on it, but they can sit there and troubleshoot it and repair it,” she said. “That is beyond impressive to me.”
Daniel Coghill, Industrial Electronic Controls technician, explained the driving force behind PEM.
“Our biggest mission is preventative maintenance, to keep things from breaking down,” he said. “We don’t want to respond to the fire, we want to make sure that the equipment stays in good shape and is ready for the artisans when they need it.”
Coghill said PEM maintains more than a thousand pieces of equipment and infrastructure within the Plant, from water coolers to the huge 75-ton cranes operating in the crane-way.
The PEM crew doesn’t operate the blasting equipment used to strip old paint and rust off of vehicles and equipment, Coghill said, but they do maintain the equipment and the blast booths used in the process.
“The blast booths are all ours, the paint booths are all ours, and all the air pollution control systems that go along with them,” he said.
The air pollution control systems siphon off all of the volatile organic compounds given off by the paint booths.
“All of the VOCs go through the correct channels and are sucked into the pollution control system and are then burned off so that we can put back cleaned emissions as opposed to just spraying and letting everything go into the atmosphere,” Coghill said.
He pointed out that there is a specific sequence of events to be followed under California law during the painting process, among them is making sure the door is closed, the fumes are contained, and then sent through an area heated to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit.
“If just one (air pollution control) unit goes down, we have 12 or 13 people not working in that paint shop, which is a lot of lost time in production,” Coghill said. “We don’t want to see that. In our line of work we want to see products put out the door.”
The PEM also maintains the hundreds of jib or pedestal cranes, gantry cranes and the huge cranes in building 573, vital to moving heavy equipment around the production line.
On the Light Armored Vehicle line, heavy mobile equipment mechanic Khen Swat was using a jib crane to do his job.
“I install hatches on the LAVs. I couldn’t do this job without them,” Khen said. “(PEM) keeps them well maintained.”
Coghill said they would rather maintain all of the equipment themselves rather than have contractors do it because they don’t want to have the artisans out of work and PEM gets the production line back up quicker.
Mickey Flores, a general equipment mechanic with 33 years at the Plant under his tool belt, said the day goes by fast because no day is ever the same working for PEM.
“We repair all kinds of stuff; swamp coolers, heaters, air conditioners, air hoses, anything the mechanics need to get their job done,” he said.
The culture of safety is never skirted with PEM. Safety is first, last and always, Coghill said.
“We have to be careful with everything we work on. We’re in man-lifts and safety harnesses all the time.”
“Above all we try and be as safe as we can because we want to make sure that we go home the way we came in. I want to go home to my family,” he said.
Dennis Blackford, supervisor, PEM, has high praise for his crew, whom he said always remember that customer service is number one.
“When they go out to a job they do the thing they were sent for,” he said, “then they ask ‘as long as we’re here is there anything else we can fix for you?’ Because you never know, it might be something they have with them that can be quickly replaced or repaired.”
Blackford summed up his view of the work PEM does for the plant and the job they do in support of the warfighter.
“Keep the plant running and keep production rolling,” he said. “Production can’t work if their equipment doesn’t work.”
| Date Taken: | 02.08.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 02.12.2018 16:55 |
| Story ID: | 265753 |
| Location: | MARINE CORPS LOGISTICS BASE BARSTOW, CA, US |
| Web Views: | 35 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, PEM artisans keeps PPB Producing, by Keith Hayes, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
LEAVE A COMMENT