A news report about an accident at a refinery in USA mentions that the cause of the incident was lack of inspection and maintenance of decaying 40 year old equipment. How are your maintaining your "old" equipment? Are your inspection philosophies revisited based on operating and maintenance experience? Personally, I have seen huge water pumps that are over 40 years old and are still supplying water to a large chemical manufacturing unit in India. The pumps are well maintained and look good enough to run for another 10 years!
The article mentions the following:
"On Monday, Silverstein said his inspectors determined the Anacortes accident was caused when a 40-year-old steel heat exchanger ruptured and spewed vapor and liquid that immediately exploded. Tests showed welds in the exchanger had developed cracks over the years. The rupture occurred along those weak points as the equipment was coming back online after maintenance.
Tesoro hadn't properly inspected the exchangers since 1998, and even then didn't test the most vulnerable areas, Silverstein said. Tesoro had planned to test them in 2008, but never did.
"If they had, we believe, they would have found the cracks that caused this explosion," Silverstein said. "They would have prevented this horrible incident from ever happening."
All seven workers who died had been standing near the exchangers. They were there in part, Silverstein said, because Tesoro had been unable in recent years to stop the equipment from leaking volatile, flammable gases.
So employees were positioned around the machinery in hard hats, gloves and goggles with "steam lances" — long tubes — they used to disperse the vapors. They also had to manually adjust valves during startup to make sure leaks didn't get out of control.
Read the full article in this link
No comments:
Post a Comment