A natural gas processing plant is a facility designed to clean raw natural gas by separating impurities and various non-methane hydrocarbons and fluids to produce dry natural gas. Processing raw natural gas begins at the inlet gas piping or gas stream of a natural gas processing plant. This piping delivers the raw natural gas to…...
The Washington State Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) is proposing updated workplace safety rules for petroleum refineries designed to prevent catastrophic events like the 2010 explosion that killed seven workers at the former Tesoro refinery in Anacortes. The proposed update addresses what’s known as process safety management (PSM), which describes the way workplaces handle…...
To say that accidents are due to human failure is not so much untrue as unhelpful for three reasons: Every accident is due to human error: someone, usually a manager, has to decide what to do; someone, usually a designer, has to decide how to do it; someone, usually an operator, has to do it…....
A federal investigation has found that the operator of a specialty frozen pizza manufacturing plant in Illinois could have prevented the death of a 29-year-old sanitation worker by following proper machine safety procedures. OSHA CSHOs learned the sanitation worker suffered fatal injuries while working on the overnight shift under the supervision of the Pizza Company…...
A 29-year-old worker suffered the amputation of a fingertip while reassembling a pump, an injury the employer could have prevented by ensuring to shutdown and lockout the equipment to prevent it from unexpectedly starting during maintenance. OSHA investigated after the company reported the December 2022 injury and found the employer did not train workers on…...
This posting is a spin-off of information presented in the white paper from the UK’s Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors. That paper focused on concerns with treating human factors in Bowtie’s analysis. I have modified their wording to make their valid points reflect all recognized PHA methodologies. The paper mentions eight (8) concerns…...
That would have been my headline as a safety professional with over 30 years of experience investigating serious accidents. I am always amazed at how society sees failures like organizations do. If the DOJ truly believes what they claim to have found in the 2-year investigation of the MPD, then why did they prosecute the…...
The pandemic is chocked full of LEARNING opportunities that we can translate into our effort to improve safety at our facilities. The one that screams at me the most is one of how our elected leaders (and I use that term loosely) behaved. I said back in the middle of the pandemic that we needed…...
Imagine a room of 100 adults, and I am teaching these adults basic math for the first time. I write on my whiteboard that 2+2 = 4. And I repeat this over and over. Out of these 100 adults, there will be 10% that believe me because I am the teacher, and they understand they…...
The recent release of a report regarding the catastrophic collapse of Champlain Towers South is a “storybook” of how Latent Organizational failures set the stage for an accident. And like all the bad accidents before this one, everyone from the government to the media is looking for someone or some people to blame (i.e., Active…...
PTFE-lined piping, such as the equipment installed in the HCl regeneration unit, requires a retorquing of flange bolts to minimize leakage from bolt relaxation. The retorquing involves bringing the processing unit to operating temperature, allowing it to cool to ambient temperatures, and retorquing to the set value. As the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) describes: A…...
At 1:00 p.m. on December 16, 2022, an employee monitored the start-up and operations of a high-pressure Water Tube Generator Boiler in preparation for an anticipated winter storm. A threaded plug on the boiler wall failed during the boiler’s start-up as system pressure was building, allowing the release of high-temperature and high-pressure steam. The steam…...
