Chlorine Gas leak reported from pipe

A news item reports that chlorine gas leaked from one of the pipes crossing a road in a factory in Chennai. From the picture that is accompanying the article it appears that the leak occurred near a culvert. Read the full article in this link.
While I am not commenting on the cause of the leak, if you have pipes carrying hazardous chemicals crossing roads through culverts, ensure that they are inspected for corrosion and thickness reduction. Especially vulnerable are the drain and vent points. Your mechanical integrity program must cover this.

Natural gas pipelines - emergency isolation valves

The recent natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, USA has raised an important point. It appears that the company employees had to drive through rush hour traffic for more than an hour to close manual valves to isolate the leaky pipeline.
In any pipeline transporting hazardous material, remotely operated emergency isolation valves must be provided to immediately isolate the supply of the hazardous material safely. Also, test them to ensure they are in operating condition.
Read the full article in this link

Control systems - do not complicate things!

The last decade has seen a huge change in the control systems of process plants with advanced DCS systems and other new technologies being deployed. I personally feel that the onus lies on the customer to implement only what he requires and will be useful to operators during an emergency / for trouble shooting and not to implement the complete solutions that come along with the package. I have seen in many incidents that the cause of the incident was caused by too much information coming to the operator from the system thus overloading him and diminishing his capabilities to act correctly.
I strongly believe in the principle that WE HAVE TO KEEP IT SIMPLE YET FUNCTIONAL!
Why do we have to complicate things and then work on uncomplicating them?
Read an article on the dangers that are brought on by newer technologies and control systems in this link

Run to failure or run to safety?

The Vice President of the USW, a body representing workers has mentions that "the oil industry's run to failure mentality concerning equipment gets worse every day. He also said that the union will not give up its campaign to have enforceable health and safety language.He added that "It's all about money. The refiners run the units longer to sell as much product as possible."
Mr Rafael Moure Eraso chair of the US Chemical Safety Board said that "We see a growing crisis of safety in the oil sector." He cited the Gulf rig disaster as well as recent explosions and fires at onshore production, processing, and refining facilities.
Mr Beevers said that the industry needs to bring back shorter periods between turnovers, which are times when a refinery is shut down for maintenance.
Mr Moure Eraso said that operators have told him that turnarounds that normally occur every two to three years are happening now every four to five years. They have said that broken equipment is not immediately addressed and workers are told to work around the problem".
This is a classical production Vs Safety question. How do you decide the intervals between planned shutdowns for maintenance? Of late, due to market pressures, many organisations are increasing the duration between shutdowns.In the interest of process safety, this decision has to be made very carefully after weighing all options, including ageing of the plant,process incidents and maintenance data.
Read the full article in this link.

Oil fire in pipeline in China

Thanks to NP Rao for sharing this powerpoint show of the firefighters in China fighting the fire and subsequent oil spill in the oil pipeline in China.