`LNG tanker shipyard plate selection and testing circumvention`

The runoff-plate fraud. Sparrows Point steel typically barely passed 20 foot-pound spec at ~20.5; once a month a plate would come in at 30; the yard cut that plate up into runoff tabs for *all* the other welds. They tested the best plate, not the plate going into the ship.

By the way, fine grain size is the only thing we know of that gives you both toughness and strength. Most things that give you higher strength give you lower toughness. We saw that in the Ratio Analysis Diagram. But fine grain size will give you both. The average that Bethlehem was shipping from Sparrows Point, Maryland, up to Quincy, Massachusetts, was like 20.5 foot-pounds. It just barely passed. But every now and then they would find one that had thirty foot-pounds of toughness. The Coast Guard required that you had to have a runoff plate to measure the toughness. If this was a plate, and you were welding the seam between these two tables, they would have a runoff plate, and they would weld that seam a little further into the runoff plate, cut off the runoff plate, send it to the lab and measure the toughness. So when they found this one plate that would come in once a month with thirty foot-pounds of toughness, what do they do? They went and cut it up into runoff tabs. So what they were measuring was not the toughness of what was going to go in the ship. They were measuring the toughness of the best plate they could find. And that was one way to get around the spec. If the ship had blown up because of that, someone probably would go to jail, but nonetheless, that was what they were doing. Maybe that's why you need more and more toughness, because people are going to find more and more ways to slim things down and try to meet the spec.