Day 7, 10/30/13

             As usual, I got to work at 8:30 am and did so prep for the job until my mentors were able to get any work for me to do. My waiting did not take to long because at 9:00, Adam Kent comes up to me asks me to go over one of his field reports. Basically, he had some edits written with red pen on the paper and he asked me to write it in. The field report was about a fire flow test that he did on a site. And no, he was not lighting stuff on fire to see how fast the fire burned stuff. Basically, when you have a building about to be opened, you have to check to see if all the fire hydrants are up to snuff. That basically extends to knowing if the pressure in the pump is enough to work in a fire engine. To, check this you have to look at a number of features. First, you turn on a pump and test its water pressure. Then you go down the line and turn on another hydrant. This will allow you to collect a whole number of data points for the water main between the two pumps. First, if you have two pumps on, you will be able to see the pressure drop at the first pump. Then you can calculate numbers like the friction in the pipe, water flow, gallons of water per second in the pipe and so on. After going through this task, I went to another one of my mentors, Mr. Raina, to get another task. Here I learned about a job happening at Stormking high school. The school is on a hill so the waste water and rain water naturally goes down. But, the waste water has to get cleaned first. So, it gets chemically treated with chlorine and otherwise and then detoxified. Afterwards, it sent to one of two rivers. And, in order to keep track of how much water goes through the system, they have several sensors to measure the water flow every 15 minutes. Why 15 minutes? Eh, I was told that it is small enough that you can get a lot of data but not so small that it gets to a crazy amount of data. The problem is that somehow more water is getting into the system from rain water and is causing spikes in the charts. The place wants to see how much of a problem is to see whether or not it should be fixed. Thus, my company was hired to make an excel of how the rain has added to the system, and what the readings would be like without the rain. I can say that during this time, I learned more cool things about excel then I did before. Once, I was done with that, I went back to the pipe thing from last week to make sure everything was done. Afterwards, Adam went back to me with some more work. He had an AutoCad sketch that need to get edited. There were some measurements that had to be read and some charts that had to be added. Overall, it was pretty trivial. At that point, the day was over and I went home.