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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The CSB urges that all states and localities should adopt this code and related boiler standards; lives will be saved as a result.

It is high time that the CSB be given powers similar to OSHA to ensure compliance of basic standards in chemical manufacturing plants.

Surprisingly, amongst the places that have not yet made the ASME code mandatory is the city of Houston! Shocking, to say the least!!

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The NY times report  further says that Federal officials have begun a criminal inquiry of the peanut company after learning that it knowingly shipped products that had tested positive for salmonella. The outbreak has caused more than 500 illnesses and eight deaths. More than 1,000 products have been recalled, including pet food, ice cream and brownies.

Wow! Is this not eerily similar to all the A++ and AA++ ratings, given by the ratings agencies to the junk financial instruments, floated and traded by various banks at the heart of the financial crisis? Taking a wider worldview of the situation, it is now apparent that self-regulation cannot be the answer. This is equally applicable to financial institutions or to industrial/food/aviation companies.  Private audits, inspections and investigations are fine, BUT they have to be complemented by government agencies and inspectors, else, the consumer will get shafted. It does not matter, whether you are a consumer of financial instruments, peanut butter or anything else. You as a consumer (and voter), should insist that the apparently cozy relationships between these perpetrators and inspectors, should come under the harsh glare of the government.

It is high time that consumers upped the ante-else be prepared to lose your savings, get sick or be exposed to other as yet unknown hazards. Wake up!

Another point-until now, it was always though that only those faraway plants in China or other countries ship these defective/toxic/dangerous products (remember the melamine, toys and other scandals). Plants in the US of A were supposed to be better and safer. What now? Nothing seems so sacred or obvious anymore.

Either consumers should band together and pressurize their legislators to implement stricter norms for government supervised inspections, or they should themselves insist on inspections by say, consumer associations.

It is the only way.

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.

Running an industrial manufacturing plant in these days is tough.  First, you have to meet all the production and cost targets, whereas you are not allowed to hire more hands (due to the slowing economy), or to have any safety violations or incidents, nor any environmental issues. With shrinking budgets and an equally shrinking manpower, do you find it challenging to meet safety standards and norms and other safety procedures, that are applicable to your plants?

The buzz is yes, most plant managers do find it tough and the reason is not just that the norms are becoming more tougher and stringent by the day-it is also because there are so many of them-just count how many safety procedures a typical industrial plant has to follow and adhere to. Simply put, a typical manufacturing plant is subject to many many more safety norms & safety procedures than your run- of-the- mill -mall or office or other commercial building.  And I have not even started discussing chemical or other hazardous material processing plants. Even a small discrete parts manufacturing plant, has to meet several of these safety regulations. To start with, the plants have to conform to basic work safety, conduct hse safety training (it’s not just displaying a couple of safety training videos to the workmen with some safety posters thrown in for good measure-but carry out practical safety training like firefighting and emergency preparedness training), do safety audits and assessments and so on. Then there are the environmental norms, even for something like disposing waste lubricants and oils. Add on the standards for adequate industrial grade lighting and ventilation, safe distances, speed limits, testing of various equipment like hoses and hoists, machine safety and interlocks and so on. These are to meet the safety norms of the establishment/equipment.

Then there are the human factors safety norms. In addition to PPE and HSE norms, the increasing age of the average industrial worker means that the plants now have to do more often a combination of both health & safety training programs like back safety and preventing workplace injury, due to poor postures and movements.

And if you run a chemical manufacturing plant, then you have to additionally meet safety norms for storage of hazardous materials, explosive atmospheres, static discharges, safety alarms and interlock checking, fire and gas monitoring, boiler safety, burner management systems, emergency shutdown systems and and…….

I wonder if anybody has any figures of the total costs incurred on these. It’s not just the direct dollars and cents spent on safety videos and posters, but also the indirect costs for having special equipment and installations. It would be interesting to know what these percentages are and what these figures are for factories around the world (say in China).

I am of course not at all saying, that these norms should not be met, in fact these SHOULD be strictly adhered to, to protect workers, other stakeholders and society at large, BUT there should also be enough publicity given by the industrial plants themselves, to all this money being spent for a good cause.  At present, the image in the Mainstream media is somewhat rather different; the MSM thinks that these plants are rusty uncompetitive dinosaurs (being no doubt fed by the Wall Street bean counters-we all know how they used to mislead everybody) ; which is not the case at all. If a tycoon donating a few millions to a college can make the headlines, why not an industrial plant spending millions on meeting safety standards?

The figures would bear it out for sure and show these plants in good light to the average Joe. After all a strong economy is built by strong manufacturing plants too, not just MBAs trading pieces of paper (or bits and bytes) in their surreal worlds : )

As usual, comments are welcome!