Channel Tunnel electrical failure-weather blamed as possible cause

Sun, Dec 20, 2009- Today’s industrial safety incident is not really “industrial” but serves as a good case study for doing HAZOP and other scenario analyses in industries.

In what has been termed the biggest failure of the electrical systems in a major facility like the England-France channel tunnel (chunnel for short),  bad weather is being blamed. However the explanation offered is not very convincing. It seems when the Eurostar trains left a cold France and entered the warmer chunnel, going towards England, moisture condensation kocked out several electrical systems in the trains, leading to complete breakdown.

The reason given seems hardly believable, especially to us who have spent years in factories and industries that run electrical equipment in hot or cold weather 24/7 all around the year. It is difficult for even a gullible lay person to accept this as a valid reason. Are the authorities hiding something? If it is a case of bad engineering design or maintenance, only an independent enquiry will reveal. Overall it is just a sad symptom of how little attention is paid nowadays to good engineering amd maintenance all over the world in recent years.

Meanwhile the public at large continues to suffer as seen below.

CSB issues urgent recommendations to CITGO regarding last years refinery fire and Hydrogen Fluoride release incident

The CSB released the following information regarding last years fire and explosion at CITGO refinery in Texas. Apparently there was a large vapor cloud release of Hydrogen Fluoride too, it now emerges. The following is the text of the release (in italics)

Houston, Texas, December 9, 2009 - The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) today issued urgent safety recommendations calling on CITGO to immediately improve its emergency water mitigation system in the event of another release of potentially deadly hydrogen fluoride (HF) vapor, as occurred following an explosion and fire July 19, 2009, at CITGO’s Corpus Christi refinery. The Board also called on CITGO to perform third-party audits to ensure the safety of its hydrogen fluoride units at its Corpus Christi, Texas, and Lemont, Illinois, refineries.

The CSB issues urgent recommendations before completion of final investigation reports in cases where CSB Board Members determine an imminent hazard may be present and has the potential to cause serious harm unless rectified in a short timeframe.

On the day of the accident last July, hydrocarbons and hydrogen fluoride were suddenly released from the refinery’s HF alkylation unit. The hydrocarbons ignited, leading to a fire that burned for several days. The fire critically injured one employee and another was treated for possible hydrogen fluoride exposure.

CSB investigators determined that a blockage of liquid caused by the sudden failure of a control valve led to violent shaking within the process recycle piping. The shaking broke threaded pipe connections resulting in the release of hydrocarbons. The cloud of hydrocarbons reached an adjacent unit and ignited. The ensuing fire caused multiple additional fires and the release of approximately 42,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride from equipment and piping within the unit.

The refinery used a water spray system to absorb the released HF, but the CSB cited scientific literature to conclude that at least 4,000 pounds of HF likely escaped from the unit into the atmosphere and left the facility. Investigators determined that during the first day of response efforts CITGO nearly exhausted the stored water supply for the water mitigation system. Approximately eleven-and-a-half hours after the initial release, before the water supply was completely exhausted, the refinery began pumping salt water from the ship channel into the refinery fire water supply. Multiple failures occurred during the salt water transfer including ruptures of the barge-to-shore transfer hoses and water pump engine failures.

CSB Chairman John Bresland said, “It is imperative that refineries have the proper emergency response resources available to control a release of hazardous materials and protect against impact on the surrounding community.”

The CSB’s urgent recommendations call on CITGO to develop and initiate plans within thirty days to ensure an adequate water supply to the refinery’s HF mitigation system. The company should also report planned or completed actions to the Refinery Terminal Fire Company and the Local Emergency Planning Committee every thirty days until all planned activities are fully implemented.

Investigations Supervisor Robert Hall, P.E., said, “Our investigation closely examined emergency response actions related to this accident. Investigators found that the CITGO water mitigation system serves as the last line of defense to protect the community from an HF release. The CSB’s urgent recommendation aims to improve the reliability of CITGO’s Corpus Christi, Texas, HF water mitigation system.”

A second urgent recommendation called on CITGO to commission independent, third-party audits of the safety of its two HF alkylation units at refineries in Corpus Christi and Lemont, Illinois. The audits should compare safety practices at the alkylation units to those recommended by the American Petroleum Institute (API). Investigators said that CITGO had never conducted such an audit of the units, despite an existing industry recommendation for audits every three years.

The CSB also released video of the initial pipe failure, release, ignition, and fire as captured by two refinery surveillance cameras. Chairman Bresland noted, “The camera footage shows the release and spread of the flammable vapor cloud and the moment when the flammable vapor was ignited. It shows just how severe the release and fire were during this incident.”

Chairman Bresland said, however, that the company had raised objections to the CSB’s release of the video, saying that doing so would “raise substantial issues of national security” and would “only sensationalize this unfortunate accident.” The CSB subsequently received affirmation from the Department of Homeland Security that the video did not fall under certain classifications requiring protection from disclosure.

Chairman Bresland said, “We found this claim disturbing and believe that it is contrary to the intent of a recent law passed by Congress, following similar secrecy claims by Bayer CropScience in Institute, West Virginia. This law, the American Communities’ Right to Public Information Act, states that national security classifications may not be used to conceal corporate errors, prevent embarrassment, or improperly delay the release of information to the public. An important part of this CSB investigation is to ensure all relevant information and visual materials regarding this accident are made available to the residents of Corpus Christi.”

25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster-has anything changed?

Very soon, we will have the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster-one of the worst industrial accidents in the world.  For the chemical industry worldwide, Bhopal is said to be the wake-up call and turning point that forever changed attitudes towards safety.
For those of you who are too young to remember the incident, here is a small recap. At night 25 years ago at the Bhopal factory of the then multinational company Union Carbide, a toxic gas cloud of Methyl Isocyanate (MIC)  leaked and killed thousands of people outside the factory in the surrounding areas, permanently disabled many and polluted the ground water and fields for miles around. Even today, if you visit the area, you will find hundreds of people suffering from the ill effects of the disaster.

So what has changed between then and now? A lot it seems, but also not as much as many would have wished. Union Carbide as a company was shamed and got destroyed eventually. Suddenly top managements of major chemical multinationals woke up to the fact that a single incident in a remote place in a far corner of the world could destroy their billion dollar enterprises. Plant people suddenly began to listen to safety experts and no longer treated safety as being “less macho” than being unsafe. HAZOPs and HAZANs, alarms and trips started being taken seriously. Governments everywhere woke up to the fact that the chemical industry could maim and kill large numbers of citzens who had no connection at all to the industry. They drafted new laws and established offices to ensure that safety standards in plants were improved dramatically. In short safety got its due importance. This stage lasted for a couple of decades during which incidents and near misses got reduced considerably.

Now what is happening? In the last five years,  Safety seems to be fading back into the background. What is in vogue is outsourcing to third party manufacturers in thirld world countries (having very poor standards of safety), Cost cutting,  stripping down of engineering and technical services departments , large scale shifting of chemical plants with strong environmental and safety laws to countries that couldn’t care less and so on. So we are back on a downhill path. This itself has resulted in an increase of accidents-I do not have statistics to back up my data, but I see a drastic rise in the number of such events.

The lessons seem to have been faded from memory of company managements if not outright forgotten. I will be glad if you think otherwise, please respond via the comments section.

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