This is a study done by Commission of the European Communities which looked at the causes and consequences of Ammonia Accidents in the-the EU. It is a nice breakdown of the accidents and their contributing factors that we may be able to learn from.
Due to its massive use, ammonia is often involved in accidents. Ammonia is one of the single substance that has been rather often involved in accidents notified to the Commission of the European Communities under the requirements of the SEVESO-Directive. An ammonia storage installation has been also selected for the Benchmark Exercise on Major Hazard Analysis. This does not necessarily imply that ammonia is more dangerous than other hazardous substance covered by the SEVESO-Directive but merely reflects its extended use. In the course of this work, it has been established that the number of accidents common in these two databases was rather small. A more systematic comparison has been performed for accidents involving chlorine [4] using interrogations of FACTS, MHIDAS and SONATA (accidents databases available to public [5] and the Handbook Störfälle. This comparison leads to some interesting observations for the reliability of the accident data available. Therefore, a similar work has been undertaken for accidents involving ammonia and is presented here. Comparison of the accidents involving ammonia from these sources gave results similar to the review of accidents involving chlorine [4]. This comparison reveals the difficulties in collecting complete and reliable accident data and indicates the limitations of using data from accident databases. This underlines the importance of a structured accident reporting system such as MARS [1,11] that has been, established within the domain of the SEVESO-Directive. Finally, lessons to be learned from the accidents involving ammonia collected in these sources are extracted and presents extracted and presented.