June 2016 Safety and Health News Summer 2016

Abstract

Amy E. Theis, Chair of the AIChE Safety and Health Division My mom tells me that I decided to become an engineer when I was in junior high school. I came home from school one day and quite matter-of-factly told her that I wanted to be an engineer when I grew up. She asked me why and I told her that is just what I had decided. Two of my uncles were engineers, so I had some role models in my life. I knew that engineers solved problems, that they had challenging jobs and that they could make the world a “better” place – I wanted to be a part of that. At the time, I did not realize quite what discipline I wanted to pursue; however, I knew that I wanted to help people. When I started college, I decided to pursue chemical engineering because I thought that it gave me the most diverse job opportunities after graduation. This was one of the best choices that I made in my undergraduate career. Now as a safety professional, I still value helping people and view that as one of the most rewarding experiences of being in this field. It is a gratifying feeling to help people understand technical safety concepts and how they can be used to protect their equipment, people and the environment. One of my favorite aspects of my job is helping people identify what test data or process safety information they need to evaluate the hazards at their facility. After all, data should be the driving force for making risk-based safety decisions for a process. Not all hazards are created equal and they should be treated as such. Data indicate the hazards associated with the materials and equipment used in the process, and is the foundation for an organized approach to hazard identification. Just as data helps us evaluate a process, it also helps us evaluate our safety and health (S&H) division mission and how we are serving our members. As the S&H division evaluates how we can better serve our members, we have recently sent a survey to them asking several key questions that will help us direct our efforts. We hope that you participated in this survey and shared your experiences so that we can develop programming and communications that meet your needs. The membership is changing and we want to understand ways that the division can serve you, our members. The Global Congress on Process Safety (GCPS) is the main foundation of our programming content, as the S&H division supports multiple aspects of this conference. I am excited that the Loss Prevention Symposium (LPS) is celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, which is a monumental milestone from my perspective since the LPS is older than me. The GCPS is wonderful and meets many needs including professional development and networking. However, with current technology, we feel there are opportunities for us to do more. Stay tuned as we roll out new ideas for interacting and serving our membership, as well as reaching out to the next generation of process safety professionals. We will be evaluating how we communicate with our membership and what methods of communications they prefer. Should we focus on social media or use traditional email? Perhaps we will use a combination of both depending on the content we are sharing. If you have ideas or suggestions on activities, services or functions that you would like to see organized by the S&H division, please contact me at Theis@Fauske.com. We welcome your feedback and look forward to reviewing the survey results so that we can improve the S&D division. Ron Willey, Chair GCPS The 12th GCPS was held in Houston Texas April 11–13, 2016 at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Over 1,000 process safety professionals, attending any one of up to six concurrent sessions, shared knowledge and the latest advances in area of process safety. The key presentation in the Case Histories Session was given by Johnnie Banks, CSB Lead Investigator, on the West Texas Ammonium Nitrate Explosion. Beforehand, Vanessa Sutherland, Chairperson of the CSB, spoke to the audience, emphasizing the desire of the CSB to work as a partner in incident investigation. Several award winners from the 11th GCPS and the Safety and Health Division winners were honored. The Process Plant Safety Symposium track presented their best paper award to Dan Rathgeber for his paper entitled “Praxair's Process Safety Metric Program and Use of Large Data.” The LPS Bill Doyle award for 2015 was presented to Chris R. Buchwald, Exxon-Mobil for his paper entitled “Suppression of Over-Pressure during a Vapor Cloud Explosion: a New Approach,” The Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) track honored their first best paper with the 2015 Chemical Process Safety International Conference Award. It was awarded to Mathy Stanislaus of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). Mathy also provided the Tuesday night Safety and Health Division Dinner speech. Ron Willey, Chair GCPS The Safety and Health Division at its Tuesday night dinner on April 12, 2016 presented Pete Lodal with the 2016 Walton/Miller Award, the highest award in the AIChE Process Safety domain. The Norton H. Walton/Russell L. Miller Award is presented in recognition of outstanding chemical engineering contributions and achievements in the areas of Loss Prevention, Safety and Health. Pete, who is seldom humbled, delivered an outstanding acceptance speech, explaining how perseverance and mentors including his grandfather and father provided him the guiding light to excellence, and the acceptance of challenges that we all meet. Finally, Pete told us that winning the award was a team effort. He thanked many of his fellow process safety employees at Eastman for their support in creating a safe environment at Eastman, as well as collectively working with him on the sharing of process safety knowledge. Pete closed out his acceptance speech by putting a Chicago Cub's cap on and announcing his plans to be celebrating in Chicago when the Cubs win the World Series this coming October. Pete is currently Technical Fellow, responsible for the Technical Services Section of Plant Protection at Tennessee Eastman Division, Eastman Chemical Company. He has 38 years of service with Eastman that includes work in engineering as well as Plant Protection Services. Pete's role at Eastman extends far beyond the Tennessee Eastman operations in Kingsport. Pete has supported most, if not all, Eastman locations through technical consulting, assessments or acquisition integration. His influence across Eastman stretches from the control room to the board room, as he is known and respected across all levels of Eastman's operations. Pete has volunteered in many different roles through his career. As Eastman's representative to the CCPS Technical Steering Committee he has served in many capacities. We are proud to acknowledge Pete with the Walton-Miller award to acknowledge his accomplishments, dedication and commitment to loss prevention, safety and health. Ron Willey, Chair GCPS Lamese Bader, CCPSEurope We have performed our 1st CCPS Europe TSC Regional Meeting successfully on March 15, 2016 in Zwijndrecht, Belgium at the site of our member 3M. This event was attended by 30 people from 25 different companies. Comments were due on May 13, 2016. Yun-Ting Tsai and Chi-Min Shu,Center for Process Safety and Industrial Disaster Prevention, School of Engineering, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology (YunTech), Yunlin 64002, Taiwan, ROC On February 1, 2016 at 05:50 AM, a serious fire and explosion occurred at a chemical and pharmaceutical company in Taichung, Taiwan, resulting in one person killed (Mr. T. H. Yang) and one injured (Mr. M. C. Huang). The fire brigade pitched in eight fire fighters and three fire trucks. This huge explosion caused the outside wall of buildings to become deformed and bounced out, and a 7-ton vessel exploded to debris. Before the explosion, there were four employees in shift in the plant at 3:30 AM. Among them, Mr. L. W. Chen was watching stirring tank data on a monitor, and Mr. Yang was conducting string work for O,O-dimethyl phosphoramidothionate (DMPAT). Suddenly, an explosive sound was heard and extensive smoke and flame climbed into the sky. One minute later, a second explosion occurred. Nearby residents smelled a pungent odor and felt the explosion's power and one said. “I thought that it was an earthquake!” The cause of this accident is because DMPAT–an important intermediate of the pesticide industry for making methamidophos and acetyl methamidophos–incurred a runaway reaction that generated high temperature and pressure during the stirring process, and then ignited other chemical substances. DMPAT is a colorless liquid that is stable at room temperature. However, when the temperature reaches 140°C, DMPAT can generate a violent thermal decomposition reaction, even explosion. In addition, the decomposition products of DMPAT are CO, CO2, NOx, and POx. Specifically, POx could easily produce a severe exothermic reaction when contacted with water (particularly hot water). Therefore, the potential thermal runaway hazard of DMPAT should be of concern during application, storage, transportation, and discard. Byron Sun, CCPS Project Manager February 5th, 6 months after the Tianjin explosion, a State Council designated accident investigation team released the final investigation report of the tragedy last fall. The 107-page report provided great details of the accident and uncovered the underlying causes of the accident. Unlike reports of other few tragic events in the past years, the accident report exhibits data, laboratory testing results, sketches and photos, which are very helpful to the general public. This article summarizes what happened at that night, how it happened and recommendations made for improving hazardous chemical management. The fire started at 10:51 PM on August 12, 2015, in “Arrival Area” of Ruihai dangerous goods warehouse (latitude 39° 02′22.98,″, longitude 117° 44′11.64″) where designated for arriving container customs check. Followed by two violent explosions, six major fires developed at the accident scene. The fires lasted almost two days, and then were extinguished at 4:40 PM on August 14. The second explosion blew into a 97-meter diameter and 2.7-meter deep crater in the arrival area. From the center of the crater, buildings within 150 meters radius were destroyed; a large number of containers and tank containers were overturned, broken up or blown away; 30 fire engines involved in the response and 7,641 new cars in the adjacent product warehouse were completely destroyed; another 4,787 cars in the vicinity to the intense blast regions were damaged. From the center of the blast site, buildings within three kilometer radius were severely damaged, which no longer meet the conditions for safe use; building curtain walls, doors and windows were deformed or broken five kilometers away from the explosion. The blast damage survey found as far as 8–13 kilometers away, there were door and window glasses shattered. The accident killed 165 people (including 24 Tianjin City Police firefighters, 75 Tianjin Port firefighters, 11 police officers, and other 55 victims who are warehouse employees and surrounding residents). 8 were missing and 798 hospitalized. Laboratory test determined at least 129 different chemicals exploded, burned, leaked or dispersed during the accident, wherein sodium hydroxide, potassium nitrate, ammonium nitrate, sodium cyanide, metal magnesium and sodium sulfide accounted for 50% of the total weight. At the same time, the explosion and fire ignited the surrounding buildings and a large number of cars, coke and other general cargo. As a result, more than 100 residual chemicals and secondary pollutants caused different degrees of atmospheric, water and soil pollution at local area. The explosions damaged 304 buildings, 12,428 vehicles and 7,533 containers. The investigation team has approved a direct economic loss of 6.866 billion Yuan (over 1 billion USD) according to relevant standards. At 10:52 PM, August 12, both the Tianjin Security Response Commend Center “110” and Fire Response Command Center “119” received calls reporting fire at the Ruihai Company. Both commend centers dispatched nearby firefighting forces to the accident scene. When arrived, the fire commander asked a Ruihai employee for what specific materials involved in the accident, but he did not have an answer. Because the fierce fire generated tremendous heat at the arrival area, the commander ordered immediate withdrawal of all personnel and fire trucks but use water to control the fire. At 11:34:06 PM, the first explosion occurred without warning when 200 fire fighters were working hard to control the fire. The second explosion occurred at 11:34:37 PM, which was even much more violent. Based on a field operator interview, surveillance camera, physical evidence and laboratory tests, the investigation team concluded the fire started in a container through autoignition of nitrocellulose, because of vaporization of the wetting agent due to hot weather, a poor quality package and inappropriate loading and unloading activities. After the autoignition of nitrocellulose in the container, the fire spread to adjacent containers with nitrocellulose and other hazardous chemicals inside. The long-time fire exposure resulting stacked ammonium nitrate and other dangerous chemicals exploded. After the first explosion, due to the impacts of spread fire and the first explosion, the second explosion occurred. There were numbers of explosion took place during the accident, but the two major ones caused most of the damages. According to consequence analysis done by a national explosion science and technology laboratory, the energy of the first explosion is the equivalent of 15 tons TNT, and energy of the second explosion is the equivalent of 430 tons TNT. Including all small-scale explosions which occurred during the accident, the total energy released from the explosions is the equivalent of 450 tons of TNT. The accident investigation team does not mince their words, pointing out the faults of government departments and significant gaps in hazardous chemical management regulations and processes. The report list 14 major faults that different levels government departments should account for. As usual, the accident investigation team listed the names and parties who should be disposed. 21 Ruihai Company employees, 11 technical service agency employees, and 12 government officers were arrested for prosecution according to Criminal Law. It is recommended that additional administrative penalty applies to Ruihai Company and five related technical service agencies. It appears there were obvious improvements in the thoroughness and openness of safety accident investigation and reporting. However, even China has made great success in occupational safety in the past 10 years (number of fatality in 2004 is almost 80% lower than that of 2014 in the industry sector), the Tianjin explosion accident is a sharp warning to China society and government that our country is facing critical challenges in chemical process safety.