Hydrogen incidents

Click here for the site. This site is a useful site for incidents connected with hydrogen. For those of you dealing with this dangerous gas, these incidents will help you understand its dangers. Hydrogen is handled in refineries,ammonia plants and chlor alkali industries.

Blowing of natural gas lines

Finally the CSB has released a statement about natural gas blowing of pipelines. A survey has been conducted by CSB. "According to the survey, using natural gas to clean pipes remains the most common single practice in industry, employed by 37% of respondents. The other respondents reported using nitrogen, which is nonflammable, or inherently safer alternatives such as air, steam, or cleaning pigs. On February 25, 2010, eighteen days after the explosion at Kleen Energy, the CSB stated that natural gas blows were “inherently unsafe” and urged industry to seek alternatives".
Even last week, I had warned a natural gas user to prevent the blowing of lines with natural gas itself instead of using nitrogen. Read more of the CSB statement in this link.
Read my earlier post on the topic in this link.

Confined spaces are deadly

Time and again, we realize how deadly a confined space can be but lives continue to be lost. The number of deaths we have read in newspapers involving conservancy workers entering sewers and asphyxiated by hydrogen sulfide are countless. In chemical plants,refineries,food industry, transportation industry, power generation, pulp, paper and other industries, deadly gases can accumulate inside confined spaces. No wonder they are called silent killers. CO, H2S, CO2,CH4, Ammonia, paint,thinners, solvents, nitrogen are all deadly inside a confined space. Reactions that take place inside confined spaces including fermentation can make the confined spaces deadly.
Treat your confined spaces with respect. Have a proper confined space entry permit that is enforced.Read some of the accidents in confined spaces in this link
The CSB video on hazards of nitrogen in confined spaces can be viewed in this link.
Read an interesting article on confined space threats to farmers in this link!

Oleum release incident - CSB findings

The CSB has released its final report on the uncontrolled oleum release from INDSPEC Chemical Corporation in Petrolia, Pennsylvania, which forced the evacuation of three surrounding towns in October 2008.Oleum was released when a tank transfer operation was left unattended during weekend operations and an oleum storage tank overflowed.
The CSB investigation has determined that the normal power supply for the three oleum transfer pumps was equipped with a safety interlock, which would automatically shut off the flow of oleum when the receiving tank was full, thus preventing a dangerous overflow. However, the oleum storage building also had an auxiliary or 'emergency' power supply that had been installed in the late 1970s. It was originally intended as a temporary measure to keep the pumps functioning during interruptions of the normal power supply but eventually the emergency power supply became a permanent fixture. Facility management never installed interlocks for the emergency power and written operating procedures did not address how or when the emergency power supply should be used.
The CSB case study report identifies four key safety lessons for companies:
- In the 1980s, the facility changed the structure of the emergency power supply from temporary wiring to permanent conduit. The facility did not evaluate the significance of this change.
- The facility installed the emergency power supply without the engineering controls that already existed on the normal power supply.
-The facility's storage system design required operators to transfer oleum on the weekend to ensure operations were unaffected during the week. Operators used a work practice developed years earlier to transfer oleum using two pumps concurrently. This work practice was never recorded in written operating procedures.Management must remain vigilant in evaluating how work is actually performed.
- The facility never included information on the emergency power supply in piping and instrumentation diagrams and written operating procedures. Personnel hazard assessment (PHA) teams were therefore unable to evaluate the consequences of emergency power supply use.
Read the report in this link

Importance of Near misses in process safety

A newspaper report (Hindu dated 14.5.10) indicates the following points about the oil spil in the Gulf of Mexico:"Oil executives ignored warning signs in the hours before the Deepwater rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico last month, a congressional hearing heard on Wednesday.
In a second day of hearings, the U.S. House of Representatives' energy and commerce committee said documents and briefings suggested that BP, which owned the well; Transocean, which owned the rig; and Halliburton, which made the cement casing for the well, ignored tests in the hours before the 20 April explosion that indicated faulty safety equipment".
No major incident occurs without warning. Do not ignore your near misses!Read more of the article in this link

Bhopal Gas disaster and the recent BP oil spill

A newspaper report indicates that the verdict on the Bhopal Gas Disaster court case will be delivered on June 7th,2010 in a Bhopal Court in India. During the trial, 178 prosecution witnesses and 3008 documents were examined. The disaster happened in 1984 and the wheels of Justice move slowly! Cut to the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last month. Already the US house of representatives has begun an inquiry to pinpoint responsibility and accountability. In the Bhopal gas disaster, the entire liability was settled for 470 million US dollars. In 1989 a oil tanker called Exxon Valdez spilled oil in Alaska and the damages reportedly paid by Exxon was US dollar 5 billion. Exxon reportedly paid US dollar 940 each for every penguin that was contaminated with oil and had to be cleaned. In contrast, the Bhopal gas victims damaged for life received US Dollar 500 each!(Source: Greenpeace report).
Lets us wait for the verdict in the Bhopal Gas Disaster!!

Crisis management and the media

The BP oil spill and the media coverage about it throws up the powerful role of the internet in disseminating information. Companies must be fully prepared to handle such crisis. BP is also using twitter to keep the public updated on the oil spill containment efforts. In India, most of the the media coverage of any incident borders on the paranoid and is aimed at getting high viewership ratings at that instant. The Jaipur oil depot fire is a classic example of this. Companies must have a crisis management plan ready and test it periodically.

BP oil spill videos from youtube

Please see these videos for info on the BP oil leak.
1.Oil spill
2.Containment

Process Safety and Leadership

After the BP Texas disaster in 2005, the then CEO of BP Lord John Browne resigned and Mr Tony Hayward took over. An article mentions the following: 'When Mr. Hayward took over BP's leadership from John Browne three years ago this week, the company was at one of the lowest points in its history: badly run, accident-prone and accused in the aftermath of a deadly explosion at its Texas City refinery of putting profits before safety. Mr. Hayward turned BP around, boosting production, cutting costs and significantly reducing on-the-job injuries. Mr.Hayward set about radically simplifying the company and cutting costs. Senior executives were cut by a quarter. In all, 6,500 people, or just under 10% of its work force, lost their jobs. Last month, he was confident enough to talk of an irreversible "change of culture" at BP.None of that seems to matter now, as BP heads into the crisis grinder that has chewed up big names like Toyota and Goldman Sachs. And with about 5,000 barrels of oil leaking from the damaged well each day, Mr. Hayward knows it".
Read more about this interesting article in this link.
Read about the mitigation efforts in this link

Process safety information and BP incident

A number of articles are going around on the BP oil spill incident. In one of them, a whistleblower is supposed to have raised safety concerns about BP Atlantis, the world’s largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platform. In this article it mentions the following "It was then that the whistle-blower, who was hired to oversee the company’s databases that housed documents related to its Atlantis project, discovered that the drilling platform had been operating without a majority of the engineer-approved documents it needed to run safely, leaving the platform vulnerable to a catastrophic disaster that would far surpass the massive oil spill that began last week following a deadly explosion on a BP-operated drilling rig.
BP’s own internal communications show that company officials were made aware of the issue and feared that the document shortfalls related to Atlantis “could lead to catastrophic operator error” and must be addressed.“The risk in turning over drawings that are not complete are: 1) The Operator will assume the drawings are accurate and up to date,” the email said. “This could lead to catastrophic Operator errors due to their assuming the drawing is correct,” said Duff’s email to BP officials Bill Naseman and William Broman. “Turning over incomplete drawings to the Operator for their use is a fundamental violation of basic Document control, [internal standards] and Process Safety Regulations.” Read more of this article in this link.

BP Oil Spill

The latest BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico could turn out to be bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill. The President of the US himself has flown to Louisana for a first hand look. One would have thought that after the BP Texas Disaster in 2005, many checks and balances would have been put to prevent another disaster. We will have to wait and see the results of the investigation...
See photos of the spill in this link

Process safety in batch operations

What goes around comes around! As far as process safety incidents in batch process go, I sometimes despair whether we will ever learn from previous incidents. Last year I had investigated some batch process incidents, the causes of which are very very familiar - incompatibility,scale up issues, heat removal issues, MSDS issues and raw material storage issues. For those of you working in the batch process industry, the UK Chemical Reaction Hazards Forum is a good place to get information on batch incidents. Share these incidents with your operating personnel and check whether it could happen in your organization. For further details go to this link.