I was talking to a friend of mine who's a plumber for a small local contractor who's changing an acid line in a small plant. He's got little scabs speckling his fingers from this job, because the plant people didn't flush the line before turning the contractor lose. The contractor didn't know any better - he's a plumber with the low bid - not an industrial piping outfit. I'm familiar with the plant he's working in, and told him he's lucky they managed to organize getting the line drained - let alone flushed - before the work started.
The only incidents that really draw any attention are the spectacular ones like BP last spring. People getting killed and hurt in one's and two's doesn't make much of an impact - except on them and their families. Most plants make an impressive display about their extensive safety procedures. However, the lack of enforcement of these procedures in many (if not most plants) is nothing short of disgraceful.
Operations didn't inert the tank, or check that it was inerted, or check that someone had checked, because management didn't make safety a priority.
It smells like they may even have subcontracted the job solely because their own crew would obey their own rules, check and double check, and take more time, whereas a subcontractor working for a fixed fee would be in a hurry, possibly unaware of the hazard, or naive enough to accept verbal assurance that the hazard had been mitigated before their arrival. Go ahead; tell me that never happens.
After the fact, management sent out a PR person to say that safety always was, is now, and always will be, a priority.
Right now, it's cheaper to SAY that, than to DO it. I'm sure the company will send some real nice flowers, and that's pretty much all it will cost them.
I don't get it. OSHA regs, as written, make it sound like there will be serious consequences, but there never are.
;---
In a way, I admire the Chinese solution ... Send in the Army, drag the entire management crew out into the parking lot, and shoot them to death. And that was just for making shoddy refrigerators.
Behavior modification is not that difficult, given the right incentives...
a similar incident happened where i used to work and resulted in a fatality. a contractor was welding on a bracket for the handrail for the tank. it was connected to the tank about 1" away.
the area was sniffed around the work area but the contents inside the tank was never checked. but...enough heat conducted through the metal to the tank and ignited it.
the tank was not nitrogen blanketed to start with because... who knows?
procedure changes that resulted were treating any welding within a foot as being welding on the vessel itself and adding nitrogen blanketing to more tankage.
this happened just 2 months after taking the first job out of college. welcome to the real world! emergency response 101 was not any class offered where i went to college.
That's a good point. Colleges may feel that first aid classes can be handled better by the Red Cross or the Boy Scouts or anyone else, and that's probably true.
But I've never understood why they don't cover, mention, or even hint at, industrial hygiene and safety.
Most workplaces where a newbie engineer might land provide at least a thousand ways to die, and few of them go out of their way to enlighten a kid.
I took a safety engineering class as an elective- it was offered by the Industrial Engineering department. It dealt more with OSHA regs and whatnot than actual safety.
As to what went wrong in the quoted story- who knows. They could have dotted their i's and crossed their t's and then had some welder go start in on the wrong tank. Lots of things that could have been involved.
Several years back, we bid a job in a refinery, new tank adjacent to existing "slop oil" tank. One of the safety procedures was to stop hot work if the wind shifted the wrong way. That just looked like an accident waiting to happen, and we no-bid the job. But I suppose somebody got it and did it.
With bean counters trying to run production plants these kind of things will happen. If the first thing they look in the morning is the stock value (see Enron) instead of accident free days, the disasters will not stop.
If management is not commited to safety, someone will take a short cut (even if this is giving a job/bomb to a not-qualified, not trained, ignorant "slave")
From a different report:
"Two contract workers were on the roof working on the tank when it exploded about 10:30 a.m., said Lt. Shea Smith, spokesman for the Greenville County Sheriff's Office."
So much is said and written about the mandatory Permit to Work system.
The reason of such a system is to Prevent that incompatible activities take place at the same time.
That is why there are Hot Work Certificates, Lock-Out Tag-Out (LOTO) procedures, Confined Space Entry procedures, Escavating Permits among others.
Any company can claim that Safety is their major concern, but if no rudimentar (Work permit) system is in place, where there is a chain of authorization that ensures that nothing is ovelooked, Safety Concern is a hollow statement.
