« Christmas - the Chinese way • Startseite | The Joint AdVenture in Shanghai - I »
The Black-out
Lei • 2.Januar, 2008 @ 03:36 • Abgelegt unter: Forschung und Entwicklung
3:20pm: The executive vice president of finance of our Chinese subsidiary shook hands with K, pleased with what K had shown him. Suddenly, „Boom!“ Then darkness. Then, emergency lights came on. I turned around to K, my hands still on the assembly machine “Dude, what did you just do?” - “Nothing, I swear!” - “Yeah, sure, you did nothing to make the electricity go out in the whole plant?” I joked, and looked around, all the foreigners were puzzled. Turned out the electricity was cut off from the factory, because some supply cables outside were broken for whatever reason. In any case, one probably does not experience this very often anywhere else than here in China.
3:25pm: Everybody appeared amazingly calm, the workers kept working. Well, our line was more or less manual, so we were less affected in this incident than other lines.
3:30pm: The notice came, everybody should leave the production floor and indirect workers like engineers and managers should go back to the office while direct workers gather in the Canteen. The emergency plan was in place, and the entire production floor was cleared in almost no time. 3:35pm: In the office, people who have laptops kept working on battery and those without either had small chat or did some paper work under dim emergency light when they could still see anything.
4:35pm: Our manager came back and announced that we are running on power supply generated by our own diesel engines. One of the mini-factories started running because that part of the factory apparently sits on a different power grid than the others. All the other production lines are scrapping heaps of parts that are half finished because the data were lost. They are counting the loss and getting ready to file insurance claim. When the inventory count is over, the mini-factories will start one by one every 5 minutes so that it does not overload the emergency power supply. Our line naturally gets the last priority, since we have not even started the production yet.
Just the 3rd day working in China, I already went through another small adventure.
