What happen in Sunray at Valero Refinery? 1

From a quick search- "Fire broke out in the 158,000 barrel-a-day plant's propane deasphalting unit Friday afternoon and spurred a plantwide evacuation of personnel because of the close proximity of propane tanks near the fire. All pipelines in and out of the refinery were shut. The event was serious, sending 14 workers to the hospital, three with serious burns and shutting down the entire refinery on an emergency basis for the first time in at least 25 years."

Go to type in "valero refinery", click the news tab, and it pulls up several articles.

I never believe what I see in the media. I usually wait until the post mortems (technically speaking of course) are done and they appear in a trade journal or technical review type publication.

Or alternatively, an industry insider offering some insight.

rmw

I absolutely back rmw on his statement. At the time of the event the media circus is clamoring for immediate explainations of what went wrong. Someone will speculate while the steel is still hot and the media will print it up as the definitive "what went wrong". Chances are that the Valero investigation team has a 65% understanding at this point and it will take weeks to get to a 90% understanding and months to get to a 98% understanding. The remaining 2% will never be known. Been there, done that, many times. One time I was investigating a failure of a pipe anchor which resulted in the loss of containment of product. It got written up in the papers as an expansion joint failure. Anchor, expansion joint, what's the difference? Another, more recent incident was also covered by the media blaming a particular component when in fact the failure involved a completely different component.

With the CSB involved, you can rest assured that a formal report will be issued which will give you well qualified information. Keep an eye on their site at for updates, but be aware that based on past history, that it will be many months.

jt

This is sadly common. We had a fire on a high pressure gas oil line several years ago. We deliberately let the fire burn, while we shut the unit down in a controlled manner. Three local television stations reported the story. One said it was a gasoline fire (since they didn't know what gas oil was). Another said it was a crude oil fire (closer, but not quite). Only one of them actually mentioned gas oil. And all three said we fought the fire for 4 hours trying to put it out. All we did during that 4 hours was keep water on the surrounding equipment and let it burn. The last thing we wanted to do was put it out. If they don't like the facts, they change them. If they don't know the facts, they make something up that sounds interesting.

Johnny Pellin

JJPellin is unfortunately right about this. In every story in recent memory that I have read in my local paper, seen on the evening news, or read about on-line, that I have had some background information on (ie my company, or a friends) there has been at least one error and often its not a small one. Sometimes its very obvious that they have been filling in the blanks where they don't have answers.

This Valero incident is a good example. One of the google links mentioned by JStephen has the headline "Explosion Levels Valero Refinery, Injures 19 Workers". Now google define: level and you get "tear down so as to make flat with the ground; "The building was levelled" ". Its interesting that only 19 people were injured when the refinery was 'levelled' and that other articles speak about restarting the refinery later in the week.

Now here is the kicker! The website that published this is called Occupational Hazards and under the name it says "The Authority on Safety, Health and Loss Prevention".

Everytime I see this kind of stuff it makes me want to cancel my newspaper subscription...but alas my memory is short and I like to read the funnies on Saturday morning with my coffee.