The US Chemical Safety Board has released an excellent educational video, that shows the hazards that are present in many manufacturing plants, due to accumulated dust. When we think about explosions and fires, we never think that such incidents could be caused solely by dusts. We normally tend to think that such incidents are caused … Read more
Modern chemical and hydrocarbon processing plants, oil & gas production facilities, power plants and other similar process plants all have some instrumented systems that ensure functional safety. These are known as Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS for short). This post is about SIS and how you can avoid certain pitfalls while designing them. To those of … Read more
In Aug 2008, there was an explosion in a propane storage facility, located in the midst of a residential area in Toronto. There were two fatalities including that of a firefighter. The explosion was so huge it was very frightening and the subsequent fire was deadlier. Here’s a link to the video on YouTube http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=XCsNcwpYjUs … Read more
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 … Read more
Is it possible that if we use gas detectors to continuosly monitor the explosive limits in a classified (hazardous) location, we could manage it better? Of course! If you recall, the area classification concept itself is based on the amount of time in a year, an explosive gas mixture (or a combustible dust-air mixture) is … Read more
