In April/March whilst the majority of countries were still in Lockdown we were involved in one of the most challenging commissioning jobs we have ever faced.
The job itself wasn’t the issue, after all, this is the fifth of this class of cruise vessel, all of which are fitted with 3 of our 800 m³/d 2-pass seawater Reverse Osmosis plants.
James Schofield, Lee Redfern, Elliot Flynn, Luke Boal & Graham Stott flew out to Germany on February 19th to carry out checks on the three-reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plants that we had manufactured for a new cruise ship.
The machines had been installed by German shipbuilder Meyer Werft and are 13 metres long, weigh 20 tonnes and can each turn sea water into 800,000 litres of drinking water every day.
The tests would normally take up to 10 days to complete but because of Covid restrictions the team were away for 38 days and underwent a combined total of 130 Covid tests – all of which were negative.
Due to the logistics, isolation and quarantine involved this was our most challenging job yet. The office team also played a key part in achieving what seemed to be the impossible! The organisation (and seemingly continual re-organisation) of travel and logistics, with schedule changes, etc… played havoc with planning. The job was finally completed on Wednesday March 24th and after more COVID tests our engineers returned home on March 29th and had to self-isolate for another five days.
