Ownership of the Processes Involved

For many assets condition monitoring is a thankless task in which staff are asked to monitor various attributes related to the asset without ever seeing where their data goes or without knowing what the data is collected for. This is very common where maintenance staff complete the condition monitoring on large passive assets such as canals, dams and major pipelines.

It is vitally important that staff understand the reason for these activities and see the feedback from the systems that is used to analyze and monitor the assets concerned. It is more important where the assets may have a critical failure mode and have a high consequence of failure.

Example — Baldwin Hills Dam (USA)

An example of this is the Baldwin Hills dam failure in Los Angeles.

In this example the Dam Superintendent had for many years recorded toe drain water volumes and flows and completed all the piezometer readings.

One day in 1982 he noted high flows in the toe drain system. He immediately tried to contact the head office staff who were responsible for dam safety but due to illness and other work related reasons he was unable to make contact with them. Because he understood the reasons behind why he had been doing this condition monitoring and the implications of the changes he was witnessing he took responsibility for ringing the local Emergency Services who commenced the process of evacuating people from the densely populated areas downstream of the dam. When the dam finally piped and collapsed some 3 hours later only 3 human lives were lost and it is estimated that the actions of the Superintendent resulted in the saving of some 5 000 lives.

As our corporate structures flatten and we devolve responsibility to lower and lower levels of staff, managers must ensure that these staff are aware of the overall processes in which they may play only a small but critically integral part.