Action!

This is Martin, my favorite technician..
Posing while the water and steammixture is roaring behind him..(he was the one who noticed the "leak".) The noise was tremendous.
A set of drainvalves was left open in the desuperheating pipe in the high pressure system of unit EC 5.
At the time this picture was taken nobody knew what was causing this (maybe a torn off pipe?) and by the shiftleader on duty the decision was made to stop the unit. It was the second run of this unit, just coming out of a major overhaul.
When the unit decreased the load the roaring and steamblowing stopped suddenly.
I was just on my way up to see if I could do something and I when the steam decreased I saw the two open drainvalves, just between a blockvalve and a regulating valve. So I closed them and called the central control room to cancel the stop. I've been lucky...
Why did the blockvalve close? Well, just because the unit decreased the load and the need to desuperheat the steam was not present anymore. (so: automatically)
Why not on the first run? Well, the temperatures where not high enough.

Sorry about the quality of the picture, the atmosphere was a bit bad.

Here in LARGE....