Fail safe or Fail unsafe?

The blowout preventer that failed in the BP oil rig disaster was meant to be fail safe. But why did it fail? There is an excellent video from the NY Times explaining what could have gone wrong. Layers of protection analysis is supposed to find these weak links, but in my experience, LOPA depends heavily on the time available for the team to do it, the experience of the team and finally what is done with the recommendations. Watch the NY times video in this link.

Vacuum hazards - Another one bites the dust!

I came to know yesterday of an incident in India where a pressure vessel collapsed due to vacuum. The hazards of vacuum in vessels that are not designed for them is great. Please see my earlier post on the subject.

Dangers of Solvents inside confined spaces

The CSB has released an excellent video of 5 deaths occurring in a confined space in a hydroelectric plant in USA. The workers were using MEK (Methyl Ethyl Ketone) , a highly flammable solvent inside a confined space when it caught fire most likely due to static electricity. The CSB report has raised three points:
1.The contractor selected for the job was selected based on the lowest quotation even though his safety record was poor.
2.The current OSHA standard for confined spaces (CFR 1910.146) does not specify what additional precautions must be taken for working in a permit-required confined space with a potential flammable atmosphere, nor does it limit entry based upon measurable criteria such as a specific maximum percentage of the LFL, even though OSHA defines an atmosphere as hazardous when it exceeds 10 percent of the LFL.
3.There was no proper emergency plan for the work conducted
In India, the problems with contractors are numerous. Public sector units are required to go for three quotations and submit the job to the contractor with the lowest quote. This is also followed in some private players. Contractors are not trained adequately on the hazards of confined spaces. I know of at least three similar incidents in India where contractor employees died when flammable solvents caught fire inside a confined space.
See the video and report in this link.

Water and reactive chemicals = fire

A warehouse with old stored toxic chemicals has reportedly caught fire in Ukraine. The cause of the fire is due to rain water entering the warehouse and reacting with the chemicals stored and causing fire.
How well are your chemical warehouses protected from the elements?
Read the full article in this link.

Process Safety - Bhopal and BP- I Don't know!

It is eerie. 25 years ago after the Bhopal gas leak occurred, the then police chief met the security chief of Union Carbide and asked him what had leaked and what was the antidote. The answer was "I don't know". Cut to 2010. A news article mentions that "BP executives told U.S. investigators they didn’t know who was in charge of the doomed Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico or who made key decisions before the vessel exploded in April, killing 11 workers and spewing millions of barrels of crude into the sea". The testimony from Wells, the highest-ranking BP executive to appear before the joint U.S. Coast Guard-Interior Department panel probing the catastrophe, frustrated Hung Nguyen, co- chairman of the panel, who said no one from BP has accepted responsibility for actions that led to the disaster.

“We’ve had so many vice presidents of drilling come before us, I can’t even keep track,” said Nguyen, a Coast Guard captain. “A lot of them answered ‘I don’t know, I’m not responsible’ for this or that. If everybody’s in charge, nobody’s in charge, is that correct?”
One interesting point mentioned by a manager was that he could not read the well cementing procedure in his blackberry due to its small size! Now did a blackberry cause the disaster?!!!!
Read the news article in this link.