By Michael Brooks
Staff members of a Maryland power plant accidentally threw away records necessary for an audit, fruitlessly searching four dumpsters for them, NRG Energy told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week (AC15-129).
NRG’s Vienna plant, a 167-MW oil-fired generator in southeastern Maryland, had experienced an outage from April 26 to May 23, 2014, Christopher Holt, assistant general counsel of litigation for NRG, told FERC. At the end of the outage, the operations and maintenance manager for the plant directed his staff to clean out a closet and dispose of records dated before 2000. The plant’s records policy requires that log books be kept for seven years before being destroyed, but the manager was being conservative in his directions, Holt said.
FERC’s Office of Enforcement had told NRG in December 2013 that it would be conducting an audit of its capacity resources to evaluate the company’s compliance with market tariffs (PA14-1). In responding to data requests related to the audit, NRG said it discovered in July 2014 that all of the log books for Vienna, except for the current one, had been thrown away in the May clean-out. Holt said that staff did not realize that they were log books, which typically record phone calls made or received by the control room, personnel shift changes and reasons for outages.
Vienna’s staff searched four on-site dumpsters for the log books to no avail. They then contacted the trash company to determine where its trash was taken, intending to search the landfill.
“The plant assembled a team to go search the landfill cell only to realize the landfill cell in which the log books were discarded had just been closed,” NRG said. “As a result, the plant was unable to retrieve the log books.”
Since then, Holt said, Vienna has changed its log book procedure: the completed books are given to the O&M manager and placed in a dedicated filing cabinet. NRG also hired a new records supervisor manager, Holt said. The company is still transitioning to an electronic logging system, he said.
