Friday, October 1st, 2010
The third edition of API 752, "Management of Hazards Associated with Permanent Buidlings" came out in late 2009 and there are a few major revisions to consider.
Building Occupancy: If a building is occupied, clearly it has to be evaluated. However, according to the new standard if a building is "intended for occupancy", it ...
Posted in Fires and explosions, Process Safety, Siting | 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 »
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
I had been away from writing blog posts for last 3 months or so...mainly because of my travel to S. Korea. I have also been kept busy working on adding advanced features to Risk and Safety site. I will unveil them in the coming few months.
I hope to get back ...
Posted in Chemical Accidents, Process Safety, Risk Analysis | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
How would you answer the following question:
Is refinery A safer than refinery B?
I know a few of you would recommend quantifying risks in each refinery. This will enable us to estimate how many fatalities (on-site and off-site) can occur in the two refineries. We can thus use the predicted ...
Posted in Consequence Modeling, Failure Data, Risk Analysis | 9 Comments »
Sunday, May 10th, 2009
I recently came across a report from European Gas Pipeline Incident Data Group (EGIG) titled "Safety Performance Determines The Acceptability of Cross Country Gas Transmission Systems". The paper presents incident data contributed by six European gas transmission operators over a 30-year period of 1970-2001.
An incident within this failure database implies ...
Posted in Failure Data, Fires and explosions, Natural Gas Pipelines | 1 Comment »
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
In an earlier post, I talked about safety in biofuel plants. Today, I would like to share couple of Google Maps (Source: John Astad of Combustible Dust Policy Institute) that graphically display incidents in biodiesel and ethanol plants.
Biodiesel Fires and Explosions Map (click to view)
According to the map, there were ...
Posted in Biofuels, Fires and explosions | No Comments »
Sunday, March 1st, 2009
While performing consequence modeling we are often required to evaluate damage to population and property from a fire.
Thermal radiation impact to humans from a fire should be based on the dosage – i.e. the intensity of exposure and the duration of exposure. Furthermore, such an impact from thermal radiation on ...
Posted in Consequence Modeling, Fires and explosions, Process Safety, Thermal Radiation | 6 Comments »
