26 years ago, on the night on December 2nd/3rd, 1984, on a wintry night in Bhopal, thousands of men, women and children died an excruciating death when MIC leaked from the Union Carbide factory. The survivors and the next generation children born to those exposed to the gas still are suffering from the effects of the gas. Bhopal is an ongoing tragedy and should never be forgotten. The lessons from the Bhopal Disaster are very relevant even after 26 years:
1. Do not cut costs without looking at the effects on process safety
2. Maintain all your layers of defense.
3. Continually ensure that competency of personnel operating and maintaining plants are updated and current
4. Be prepared for the worst case scenario.
5. Understand the risks and measures to eliminate / reduce or control them
6. Learn from your past incidents. Those who do not learn are condemned to repeat the incidents.
7. Pay heed to your process safety management system audit reports
Read my older post comparing the Bhopal and the BP incident of 2005 in this link
"Those who do not learn are condemned to repeat the incidents."
ReplyDeleteYes indeed, ignorance is dangerous. Recently I came across two papers claiming to determine thermal runaway and thermal safety criteria for processes to manufacture two explosives, which I read with horror and disbelief: Lu et al. (2005) J. Loss Prevent. Proc. Ind. 18, 1, and Lu et al. (2008) Process Saf. Environ. Protect. 86, 37.
Lu et al. prescribed operating criteria that they claimed are "safe" from thermal runaway, without carrying out ANY stability analysis. But there is a vicious oscillatory thermal instability in these systems. Oscillatory thermal instability is endemic to these systems. It is real, it is not an artifact, it may occur with violent abruptness, it is DANGEROUS. Plant operators using the guidelines of Lu et al. would be in for a nasty surprise - that is, if they survived.
This widespread ignorance of stability analysis has to be put right before (more?) lives are lost. Chemical engineers were well aware of oscillatory instability during the 1950s to the 70s, but educational standards have fallen and many people who deal with thermal runaway criteria evidently never learned stability theory and analysis.
I have to say too that this business does not reflect well on the journals that published the two papers of Lu et al. cited above. Why was their failure to carry out stability analyses not picked up by referees?
We have written a short communication on this matter urgently, in the interests of process safety; it can be downloaded from http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5550v1. Our paper is quite readable, we deliberately wrote it simply, bluntly and to the point.