Tower Maintenance Corp.

           Winters in New York can be brutally cold, and residents rely on power plants to keep their homes and businesses heated to comfortable temperatures. Each component of each power plant is crucial to its operation, so when a 500-square-foot (46.5m²) deaerator tank inside a Westchester County power plant showed signs of extreme rust and corrosion, the Westchester Department of Public Works and Transportation - Valhalla Operations Division needed a solution fast. 
           Deaerators remove the gases from the water that attach to the metallic components of a steam system and cause corrosion by forming oxides, or rust. In simple terms, this deaerator tank is vital to keeping the entire steam system of the power plant free from corrosion. If it continued to run outside normal operating conditions, it would continue to accelerate corrosion throughout the entire plant system, causing significant short- and long-term damage. "It was November, and the temperatures were approaching freezing very quickly. The county didn't have any time to waste in getting the deaerator tank up and running," said Peter Vera of Tower Maintenance Corp., the company that was hired to recoat the tank's interior.
           With the clock ticking and the temperature dropping, nondestructive testing was performed on the tank by a third-party inspection service. "Before the county made any decisions about the tank, testing was done to check for pits and to check around the welds," said Vera. While the inspection revealed that the total wall thickness of the tank was not compromised, the asset owner was still very concerned about the condition of the tank, especially considering the rest that existed over the entire steel interior. 

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