PAINTSQUARE BLOG

When I was nine or 10, my summers were spent with gun-toting workmen, driving around Chicago in old blue Metros, lining the exterior bottoms of 275-gallon tanks in the city’s basements. 

I would watch as these guys ground the tank bottom to SSPC-SP3 (long before the standard existed), cleaned it with “jet clean,” hand-applied one of the first 100% epoxies on the market, and embedded fiberglass cloth.

Photos: Warren Brand

Back in the day, our Metro would stop at a light, and the sloshing of 500 gallons of oil in the tanks welded into the back would rock the van back and forth. The workers lined; I mostly whined.

They would then hoist a row of heat lamps to force-cure the coating and return the tank to service.

Being a kid, I would complain about the smell and the boredom and ask if we could finish and go. But they were meticulous.

“Nope,” Robert would say. “It’s done when it’s done.”

Or Vic would say, “Can’t rush perfection.”

Back then, we offered a 20-year guarantee that the tank bottoms wouldn't leak—and we honored it.

The 275-gallon tank was a canvas for Robert's and Vic's lining artistry. And the work was guaranteed for 20 years.

When an elderly  lady called 18 years after a job to say her tank was leaking, Robert and Vic were out there the next day to fix it at no charge.

Specifications Stakes

Fast-forward some 45 years, and I fear that something has changed.

Granted, as a consultant, all I see are jobs that have gone bad.

But just this past week, I spoke with a contractor who said this about specifications: “Yeah, we look at them, but don’t really follow them unless we know an inspector’s coming.”

The same week, I reviewed a specification that had a number of simple, careless errors. And this was from a Fortune 100 company.

And just a few weeks ago, I identified serious flaws in a tank lining specification for a major automaker.

The client understood how serious the concerns were: They would, with 100 percent certainty, either cause a catastrophic failure or severely shorten the coating system’s service life.

Specifications? Said one client: “Yeah, we look at them, but don’t really follow them unless we know an inspector’s coming." Experience tells me that that's too late.

But our repeated calls and emails to her went unanswered.

‘Just Paint’

What is going on here? Complacency? Lack of understanding? Project overload?

Whatever it is, it resides in varying degrees throughout coating procurement, in engineers, architects, salespersons, contractors and inspectors.

Owners, reliability engineers and others are overworked and tasked with responsibility for painting projects whose complexities elude them.

The refrain is the same: “It’s just paint. How hard can it be?”

Where’s the Coating?

Here's how hard.

We recently conducted a summary failure analysis of a floating roof tank in Wisconsin. The tank had been lined just four years earlier. Yet, chunks and pieces of it had been collecting in filters.

And as I peered at the tank's interior with my 70,000-candlepower firefighter's light, my mind became confused at what I was seeing—or, rather, not seeing.

The tank looked as if it had never been coated. There was no coating on the floor, none on the walls, and none on the bottom of the roof.

The lining had been applied four years earlier. And the tank looked as if it had never been coated.

There was a thin black layer of something that looked like mill scale, but what was it?

Eventually, we found a black, greasy area that looked like a folded pancake hurled on the griddle. It wasn’t a pancake.

It was a coating. And when scraped with a multi-tool, it peeled right off.

The conclusion: The tank had been only minimally blasted before coating.

The consequence: failure of a magnitude I’d seen only once before.

The Pool that Peeled

That earlier case, about 15 years prior, involved the lining of a stainless-steel pool for a new high-rise in downtown Chicago.

About 18 months after the installation, the coating was cracking. The contractor and I were able to peel it off in 15-foot strips.

Why?

As it turned out, the stainless steel had not been blasted at all. You could see the grease pen marks from the original construction.

With no profile, it was a miracle that the coating had adhered for as long as it had.

The 18-month-old coating peeled clean off. As it turned out, the stainless steel had not been blasted at all. The only surprise was that the coating system had adhered as long as it had.

The case of the floating tank, however, was different. That later project had on-site inspectors, protocols, competent contractors and highly competent engineers.

Yet, in both cases, the catastrophic result was the same.

Bad Specs, Good Projects

Fellow PaintSquare blogger Lee Wilson recently wrote a great column called, “When Bad Specs Happen to Good Projects.”

The blog does a great job of exploring the flaws found in too many specifications—documents that you can hold, read, review and see the lack of care.

But while Lee focused on the "how" of bad specifications, I would like to address the why. I feel that the ubiquity of bad specifications is a symptom of a much more serious problem in our industry: complacency.

I wrote two blogs in the past six months critical of some of these practices and was crucified for them.

But the longer I’m in the industry, the more evident these serious issues appear.

Knowing, Not Caring

In recent weeks, I’ve reviewed specifications for a car maker, a chemical company, a school district, and a wastewater plant. Each specification was filled with errors that could compromise service life, if not cause outright failure.

Lee offered a variety of great solutions for such problems:

• Ensure that specifications are compiled by competent painting and coating engineers;

• Regularly review and update company specifications;

• Always review a corporate specification before new painting project;

• Ensure that the specification is constructed for the new painting project, not the previous one; and

• Insist upon a pre-job conference; it's the perfect stage to deal with any of the above issues.

What to Do

Now, I don’t know what can be done about complacency, since the word implies a degree of not caring.

But I do know what can be done about owners, asset managers and others who feel demoralized and overwhelmed: Educate them.

Asset managers and owners who learn the basics and importance of the specifications will stay in the swim, along with their facilities.

Complacent individuals lack the motivation to do better. Demoralized individuals care, but need the tools and support to do better.

Seeding Solutions

Here are some tools and support I offer. Last year, I launched a vendor-neutral conference for asset owners and managers called Engineered Corrosion Solutions (ECS).

Attendance was thin, but the program was a technical Mecca. One NASA professional said it was one of the best technical conferences he’d attended.

Second, we just developed a brief educational quiz that more than 500 people have taken.

The experience has clearly proved both vexing and enlightening. Few people have gotten all eight questions correct.

The feedback (including a sincere offer to punch the test maker in the throat) has been colorful, to say the least. But we all have learned from it.

Whether you’re demoralized, overwhelmed, complacent or none of the above, I hope you'll check it out and share your thoughts.

ABOUT THE THE BLOGGER Warren Brand Warren Brand’s coatings career has ranged from entry-level field painting to the presidency of two successful companies. Over nearly three decades, he has project-managed thousands of coating installations and developed specs for thousands of paint and coating applications. NACE Level 3 and SSPC PCS certified, Brand, an MBA and martial-arts instructor, now heads Chicago Corrosion Group, a leading coatings consultancy. Contact Warren. SEE ALL CONTENT FROM THIS CONTRIBUTOR