I am a National Board Authorized Inspector with R-Stamp authority and a Pennsylvania state ASME Section I commission, and when I tied out eleven months of an acute-care hospital trust’s weekly chemistry logs on a Sunday afternoon against the sealed feedwater samples I had personally pulled at the hospital boilers and shipped from my field truck to the Pennsylvania state laboratory I saw that the trust’s Director of Facilities Engineering — the man who paid for my coffee in Harrisburg and invited me to keynote his Pennsylvania Hospital Engineers Association conference — had run two pressure-relief valves on a hospital sterilization-steam main without a function test in seventy-one weeks under an engineer-of-record whose National Board countersigner credential had expired fourteen months ago.

I am a National Board Authorized Inspector with R-Stamp authority and a Pennsylvania state ASME Section I commission, and when I tied out eleven months of an acute-care hospital trust’s weekly chemistry logs on a Sunday afternoon against the sealed feedwater samples I had personally pulled at the hospital boilers and shipped from my field truck to the Pennsylvania state laboratory I saw that the trust’s Director of Facilities Engineering — the man who paid for my coffee in Harrisburg and invited me to keynote his Pennsylvania Hospital Engineers Association conference — had run two pressure-relief valves on a hospital sterilization-steam main without a function test in seventy-one weeks under an engineer-of-record whose National Board countersigner credential had expired fourteen months ago.

ByDorte Karman