Archive for the ‘Incident Investigation’ Category
Friday, January 14th, 2011
NTSB has issued seven safety recommendations following the September, 2010 San Bruno incident in California.
#1. To PHMSA: Inform pipeline operators about circumstances leading up-to and consequences of pipeline rupture at San Bruno and NTSB's recommendations.
#2. To PG&E: Search records to identify all the gas transmission lines (in class 3 & 4 locations, ...
Posted in Fires and explosions, Incident Investigation, Incidents, Natural Gas Pipelines, Pipelines, Process Safety, Risk Management | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 20th, 2010
The 2005 Buncefield incident was a result of gasoline overfill from a tank (#912) at Buncefield oil storage and transfer depot. A contributing cause for this incident was failure of servo level gauge to indicate high level in the tank - on the day of the incident the gauge indicated static level when the level ...
Posted in Incident Investigation, Process Safety, Reliability, Safety Instrumented Systems | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
You may have read about the 2007 incident at T2 laboratories in Florida - the explosion killed four of the company's 12 employees, injured four other workers and 28 community members.
It was the 175th time the T2 personnel were running the reaction to produce methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (MCMT), a gasoline additive.
What was so ...
Posted in Human Factors, Incident Investigation, Process Safety, Reactive Chemicals, Safety Culture, Safety Minute | 4 Comments »
Friday, September 17th, 2010
The following video desribes 2005 fire/explosion in Praxair's gas cylinder filling and distribution center. The incident occurred when gas from a pressurized propylene cylinder was released through the relif valve and got ignited.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_ZLQkn7X-k
This is one of those situation where the risk mitigation measure (i.e. relief valve) is creating a hazard.
In situations where there is demand on the relief valve, ...
Posted in Dispersion, Fires and explosions, Incident Investigation | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
In a number of my previous blog posts, I have emphasized the disturbing trend of fires and explosions in the biodiesel and biofuel industry.
Based on the statistics, the biodiesel industry in the US is experiencing an incident every two-and-a-half months, i.e. approx. 10 weeks.
The last biodiesel incident I wrote about was in Dec. ...
Posted in Biofuels, Fires and explosions, Incident Investigation, Process Safety | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
Generally speaking, 5-6 things have to go wrong for an incident to occur. Furthermore, these events or failures have to occur in a certain sequence.
The characteristics of mega disasters is that 5-6 events with fairly low probabilities of occurrence line up.
Such rare incidents are referred to by many names within the risk management community - ...
Posted in Incident Investigation, Insurance, Process Safety, Risk Analysis | 5 Comments »
Monday, February 1st, 2010
I recently came across a very interesting incident involving foam concrete.
Foam concrete is produced by mechanical mixing of foam prepared in advance with concrete mixture, and not with the help of chemical reactions. At the incident site, two workers were removing steelwork using angle grinders while the foam concrete was ...
Posted in Fires and explosions, Incident Investigation, Reactive Chemicals | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Based on incident data in biodiesel facilities, I had written that the biodiesel industry in the US is experiencing an incident every two-and-a-half months, i.e. approx. 10 weeks.
Here are incidents following my May 2009 blog post on biodiesel incident frequency.
1. 15 July 2009, Chicago: An explosion at a biodiesel plant ...
Posted in Biofuels, Incident Investigation, Process Safety | No Comments »
Monday, January 4th, 2010
Recently, Erik, a reader of this blog directed me to a video his firm has created that explains the role of trees leading to the Buncefield explosion.
Remember the Buncefield incident occurred in oil storage and transport depot. Thus the fuel involved was liquid hydrocarbon. The most probable outcome of a ...
Posted in Fires and explosions, Incident Investigation, Process Safety | No Comments »
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
In December 2005, fire and explosion at Buncefield oil storage depot injured 40 people. Overfilling of a fuel storage tank (Tank 912) led to release of unleaded gasoline (petrol) which formed a cloud of flammable vapor that subsequently ignited.
Puerto Rico Fire
Four years after Buncefield, around midnight on October 23, 2009, a ...
Posted in Chemical Accidents, Fires and explosions, Incident Investigation | 3 Comments »
