Celebrating Our Amazing Engineering Team

Statistics: A team of 30 (though not all the positions are filled all of the time) made up of highly trained and skilled individuals.
Andy, as Chief Engineer leads the team along with his three 2nd Engineers Dave Fryer, Irik Mallie & Ananda Samaraweera.
There are 3rd Engineers & a 4th Engineer, a HVACR Engineer & his Assistant (HVACR = Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning & Refrigeration)
There are Welders, Plumbers, Electricians, Electronic Technicians, Mechanics, Fitters, Motormen & Engine Hands. In addition to this there are 20 local Beninoise day volunteers working in Engineering.


Our Engineering Team celebrate an amazing achievement this week. Since the beginning of this field service, Engineering have been operating the 4, thirty year old Frichs Generators instead of the 2 Harbour Generators. Previously, one Harbour Generator was run at any given time, while the other was on standby. However they created so much noise and vibration that we stopped using them at the end of last year because only 4 out of the 6 Operating Theatres could be used. Running the Frichs Generators instead of the Harbour Generator sets has massively impacted the workload of our Engineering Team. To produce the same power output, 3 Frichs Generators have been required, more than tripling the maintenance workload.

Because of running on the Frichs Generators, all 6 Operating Theatres could be fully functional. This has significantly increased the number of surgeries we have been able to undertake, resulting in so many more lives impacted.

Mercy Ships is currently fund raising to replace all these Generators with 4 brand new 1,000 kw MAN B&W L21/31 Generator sets which will run on heavy fuel. These new Generators will significantly cut the noise & vibration, with the added benefit of reducing fuel costs, emissions & maintenance.

This Friday 20th November saw our last surgery on the Africa Mercy for this Benin field service. Post-Op follow up will continue this week and then the Hospital will close down. Patients requiring further follow up will be referred to a new local clinic, run by a former "Mercy Shipper". The pack up process has begun in earnest and we will leave Benin around 8th December for our annual sail to Tenerife for ship maintenance time. Our end of field service report will be available soon, detailing just how many lives have been impacted during this 10 months, at which time I will post it to our blog.