Hydrogen Sulfide leak at Texas oilfield kills one and injures others
Jan11, Garden City, TX- One worker was killed and three others were injured in a Texas gas processing plant, probably due to a leakage of Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) gas. The accident ocurred at an oilfield site in Glasscock county.
They were all working atop a tank battery when apparently one of them fell down, the result of Hydrogen Sulfide’s feared “knockout effect” . The gas is deadly because it has a bad smell in lower concentrations (smells like rotten eggs), but in higher concentrations, it simply desensitizes the human nose, which can no longer smell it and hence the “knockout effect”.
What is surprising in this case is that all of them were reportedly wearing Hydrogen Sulfide gas monitors, that are supposed to measure the H2S concentration in the ambient air and sound an alarm if dangerous levels are detected. It is not clear if the instruments did not work, or whether the workers simply ignored them.
The workers were rushed via an air ambulance to a hospital, but it was too late for one of them. The rest are still serious, although stable.
The incident once again highlights the safety precautions that need to be taken when dealing with Hydrogen Sulfide gas.
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CO gas leak in Church-Portable Toxic Gas Monitors detect the problem
So now we can have gas leaks in a Church too! If you thought that toxic gas monitors are necessary to be installed only in industrial plants, you’re wrong! You may need them in as safe a place as a Church.
AP reports that the local Authorities in Madison, Wisconsin said that six people — including a toddler — got sick from carbon monoxide poisoning during a Sunday church service in Madison. The first indication that there was a problem came at 11:01 a.m. when paramedics were called to attend to a 2-year-old child who was reported to be groggy . The parents of the child decided to transport the child to the hospital on their own.
Fortunately by the time a second distress call was reported to the local Fire Department, Engine Company 4 responded, bringing along monitors to check air quality at the church. The portable Carbon Monoxide toxic gas monitors showed a CO level of 3000 ppm- more than 100 times the safe limit!
The incident shows the importance of having portable toxic gas monitors handy in all places and not just industrial plants.
Handheld Gas Detectors-which ones are best?
Handheld gas detectors are those portable gas detectors that can be held in your hand. These gas detectors include toxic gas detectors, oxygen meters , explosive gas meters (also known as lel meters, lel being the acronym for lower explosive limit) or PID meters used for workplace monitoring of VOCs and other compounds. This post is to get reader feedback about such instruments, which ones are best? Best technologies? Makes? User friendliness?
I must say that we have come a long way since the early 70s and even 80s, when many of these technologies were not developed and not as reliable as they are today. Workers and professionals working in process plants used to rely more on chemical tubes (also referred to as Drager tubes) and other methods to check for presence of toxic gases, or for workplace monitoring. Now the monitoring has become simpler for the end user with lost of competing technologies, sophisticated instruments and powerful data storage and handling capacities. Today’s handheld gas detectors can sense the gas/ vapor, store the readings over a 8 hour period and record & calculate values such as the Time Weighted Average. This was not possible with the earlier technologies. However these newer gas detection instruments require the users as well as the Instrumentation staff to be trained, as the performance of the instrument is highly dependent on the selection of the sensor or technology (like photoionization versus electrochemical for instance), calibration of the instrument and general maintenance and upkeep. My question to all of you is, do we have a winning model of a handheld gas detector that has excellent performance, is easy on today’s shrinking safety budgets, yet does an exemplary job of sniffing gases? If so, please name it and the reasons why.
You can use the comments form below.
Yet another welding related fire-now in a nuclear plant!
As if we did not have enough of welding related fire accidents in conventional plants (read my last post on the issue here ), now we have a report of a similar accident in a Japanese nuclear plant.
Here is the incident reported by various agencies:
A fire broke out at a nuclear power plant in northern Japan on Thursday, injuring one worker but causing no radiation leak, the operator said.
Firefighters put out the fire about an hour after white smoke was spotted coming out of the reactor, which was already shut for a regular check-up, Tohoku Electric Power said.
“One worker sustained minor burns but was not exposed to radiation,” a company spokesman said, adding there was no leak to the outside environment either. The fire started at around 2:00 p.m. at the plant’s No. 1 reactor, which has been undergoing regular checkups since February, Tohoku Electric said.
Kyodo News Agency which first reported the incident said the worker was in a welding operation inside the building, and the filter in the air conditioning system might have caught sparks from the welding.
The plant is located in Onagawa town, some 350 kilometres (220 miles) north of Tokyo. The plant has two other reactors, which are operating normally.
The nuclear power complex, which suffered extensive damage in an earthquake last year, has been out of service and undergoing repairs.
The incident occurred just days after a Dec. 1-5 inspection by a team from the United Nations nuclear watchdog. The team of 10 experts from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency assessed safety measures designed to deal with the continuing threat of earthquakes.
I hope the investigation is completely impartial and gives us some better ideas to prevent such incidents in future. I know that the nuclear industry is a highly regulated and procedure-driven industry so this incident is shocking. Secondly, this is the second such fire in a Japanese plant (the earlier one was supposed to be because of an earthquake). However as usual, the investigation reports are pretty sketchy and certainly not as detailed as the ones from the chemical /hydrocarbon processing industry (Well, if they are I have not seen many in the public domain). I wonder what kind of combustibles are present in such installations and what kind of gas detection systems are used. Anybody from the nuclear industry who is reading this could be kind enough to throw some more light on this issue.
Comments as usual are welcome.
Not doing a gas test before welding is criminal negligence
I wonder why many plant owners & managers cannot do some simple things to prevent accidents and save innocent workers’ lives? Shockingly, in many of the recent accidents, that have been reported as “welding accidents”, the root cause is not doing a “gas test” before starting the job. As all of you, who are familiar with the oil & gas, petrochemical and related industries know, it is essential to do a “gas test” (in other words, use a gas monitor to check the presence of explosive or flammable gases) before allowing “hot work” in any area in the plant. Apparently, this simple fact is not known or plainly ignored by many owners/operators of such facilities.
The recently released US Chemical Safety Board investigation into the Jackson, Mississippi oilfield accident, clearly indicates that the owner company failed to do this basic test, before allowing workers to do the welding work. The result was a very predictable explosion, with an unfortunate fatality too. This, in a developed country, supposedly industrially advanced, like the US of A; we’re not talking about some Timbuctoo in some remote corner of the world.
The latest such incident is an oilfield explosion in Ohio. Just about three weeks ago there was another similar accident in Honolulu. The US Chemical Safety board has sent a team to the site for an investigation into the Ohio explosion ( the Honolulu investigation is still on) and we will know only later whether this too, was the result of not conducting a “flammable gas test” at the site before allowing such work to start.
I wonder whether the managements are incompetent or plain negligent or ignorant about the hazards of allowing hot work, in areas known to have flammable vapors and gases. This is because explosive gas monitors are not at all expensive , easily available everywhere and are also pretty easy to operate. Training is available in many forms, including an excellent e-learning course on Gas Monitors, as well as from other sources such as vendors.
It is time that the authorities made it loud and clear to all owner/operators that there will be zero tolerance for such negligent acts. I understand that the US Chemical Safety Board can only make recommendations, not issue penalties, so this has to be done by some other federal agency.
As always your comments on this issue are welcome!
