Pipe rack fire

In 1998, the Esso natural gas plant at Longford, Victoria, Australia experienced a serious fire right under a pipe rack. The pipes rupture and contributed fuel to the fire, which took 48 hours to be totally extinguished. The fire was fierce, but stable.

The extraordinary thing about this is that because this pipe rack was destroyed the entire State of Victoria lost gas supply for two weeks at a cost of two billion dollars to industry.

The fire was fought by allowing inventory to burn, cooling vessels with water and progressively closing off inventory lines through valves and crimping pipes. The fire team experienced much difficulty in identifying the lines supplying fuel to the fire from the available drawings. Cheers,
John.

Yes, I have experience with a pipe rack fire in a refinery. The refinery had to be shutdown for almost 1 month. It was a difficult exercise to identify all the lines from the drawings. we had to physically trace the lines before identifying them so that the connections were made correctly. Some of the lines were idle and had not been used in years.

Hope this helps