Flixborough - 40 Years On

Poor management....

http://accidentsoilandgas.blogspot.com/2013/04/v-behaviorurldefaultvmlo.html

SolarEagle-

Extremely poor management! Root cause- failure to do haz ops.

Good Luck, Old Salt

Having spent most of my career in management, engineering and safety in the chemical industry, it has always amazed me as to how so many operations are designed and operated by moronic idiots. They are often so narrow minded that they only have one goal, get the job done at whatever cost it may take both in money and lives. They accept fatalities as part of the job until the time that they are personally at risk. When that happens they are usually the first ones to abandon the site and blame others for the event, the Costa Concordia syndrome. If they are smart enough to be a site manager, why aren't they smart enough to use a little forethought? Why do they think that because they are there nothing will go wrong? Why don't they admit that almost everything has some hazards and they can be identified and solutions found.

One day I will never forget is when I was told to go immediately to another plant site half way across the country. A reactor has exploded and the two people in the control room had been killed. Some body parts were found of one operator and only the wedding ring could be found of the second person. Immediate cause was they didn't realize the reaction had run away and therefore didn't dump the batch. Root cause was management was lax in training the control personnel.

Good Luck, Old Salt

GA for alerting me to Mr. Kletz and his role in process safety. I've downloaded what we now call blogs - his "Trevor's Corner" articles. Thanks for the heads up.

Here are 4 that affect me personally (it could have been me):

4 people were injured at the Ontario, California Sterigenics plant when the process chemical ETO exploded after process sequence interlocks were overridden. I've done work at another Sterigenics ETO plant.
http://www.csb.gov/videos/ethylene-oxide-explosion-at-sterigenics/

5 people were killed at the Formosa PVC plant in Illiopolis, Illinois, when an operator overrode an interlock on a reactor in mid-process, thinking it was a reactor that was being cleaned. I was there month earlier, assessing the prospects of a control upgrade.
http://www.csb.gov/formosa-plastics-vinyl-chloride-explosion/

A truck driver was killed from shrapnel when a nearby process plant's high pressure reactor vessel failed catastrophically throwing chunks of 8 inch (200mm) thick steel wall around the area. I've bought gasoline at that same I-90 tollway rest stop gas station.
http://www.csb.gov/ndk-crystal-inc-explosion-with-offsite-fatality-/

This one hasn't made the news or CSB site yet, but it's only a matter of time. The plant is a commercial bakery. I'd been there all day and was making one last connection to a field instrument when I heard a bang and noticed the room lighting get dim. I turned around to see a huge swelling cloud of whole wheat ground flour spewing out the top of a day tank. I got out of there fast, staying in the parking lot until the dust settled, but was shocked to find that no one at the plant was concerned, it turns out that this is a relatively common occurrence, on the order of once a month. To them, it was just the nuisance of a clean-up job. If the flour cloud were to ignite, the overpressure would likely take down the concrete block wall construction, bringing the roof down. But hey, it's just a clean-up job, right?

Here's a photo of my laptop covered with a half inch (13mm) of whole wheat flour on the portable table I'd set up:

It doesn't take much to knock over a brick or block wall. If the wall were holding up a roof and there were people underneath it, it doesn't take much to imagine what the outcome might be.

On a chemical plant, the only free thing is a source of ignition.

"What you don't have, cannot leak" - the late Dr. Trevor Kletz explaining the principle of inherent safety and process intensification. At Flixborough, there was a huge inventory of flammable materials in the plant held under pressure as liquid at temperatures somewhat above above their natural boiling point.