Rosie, the way it happened on the technical side:
Ships Engineers would say what they wanted done during the refit. Repairs, modernisations, suggestions for making the dept more efficient, save money get another 2 knots out of the tea boiler etc......That was a joke BTW.
Engineers bosses would pare down the list. Dont forget the Chiefs were the only ones who knew how many staff would be available, sometimes the staff did not know until a month before who was going to be in the drydock. Was it a union DD or non union etc. If it was union then our ships crew could only do "maintenance" items That would mean that Engineer Officers would have to do some of the other replacement jobs. Only jobs that were absolutely required to be done while the ship was shut down were considered. After the jobs were accepted by the Chief then we would gather details: size of pipe, how many bolts etc, this was to enable the dockyard to give an estimate. The estimates would go up to London or wherever...and they would say: "HELL NO!"Would come back to the ship and we would say OK we will get this done in Honk Kong on the WC where labor was cheaper and half the pax would go overland to China. About half our requests were approved. Safety concerns came into play. Was my welding good enough to repair 900psi pipe etc. Did the repair have to be inspected. Could the ship operate while the repair was taking place. Think things like fire systems, watertight doors...etc etc.
In Bremerhaven, there was never any problem with the NUS doing work. Dockyard would also lend tools, drag a welding cable over for a wee job etc.
All dockyard work was inspected by ships staff....bigger the job the more gold braid inspected it!.
I have also seen many posts on various threads regarding the flooding, burst pipes, "Nigerias" as we left drydock. This was unavoidable. QE2 I read somewhere had over 20 miles of copper pipe,varying sizes, installed in 1968, copper pip and chloros/bleach do not mix...and in the salt air and you have a problem. During a big refit whent the water was shut down, scale, both inside and outside the pipes might break loose, especially when the temp changes from 140F to maybe 40 f...pipes contract and the scale breaks loose, thus creating a hole. ALL of these pipes in the pax area were hidden...if we couldnt see a leak...we couldnt report it and get it fixed. Nigerias were more embarrasing to the Hotel Service dept than you would ever think...You just went through a $30m refit and couldn't fix one lousy pipe.
My own opinion...they should have had every cabin every system up and running for 24 hours before the ship silled from the refit. BUT, that was above my paygrade!
Any other question...ASK.
Rod
