On March 4, 2005, Employee #1 (leadman) performed a hydrostatic pressure test on a large stainless steel pressure vessel at a plant manufacturing pressure vessels. The tank was cylindrical, about 14 in. diameter and 24 in. long. The tank was pressurized to 150 number for the test. Upon completing the test, he was draining the […]
A soft drink manufacturer had a 3-ton capacity carbon dioxide (CO2) receiver tank at the plant. The tank contained 2000 pounds on the day of the explosion. The establishment was evacuated due to flooding river waters in the area. The plant was secured and evacuated. No employees were at the workplace. Suddenly, the storage tank
On September 19, 2002, Employee #1 was painting one (1) of six (6) tanks containing carbon dioxide when three (3) of them suddenly exploded. He was killed. The tanks were originally built as railroad tank cars for liquefied petroleum gas and they were not designed to store carbon dioxide.
“Why did they have a Rupture Disc and a Relief Valve together?” As I alluded to in my post regarding CBS’s update, this arrangement is fairly common but comes with some very SPECIFIC requirements. These requirements can be found in: But the top four (4) requirements, we as safety engineers should be looking for in
The CSB has released an UPDATE into its ongoing investigation into the fatal November 12, 2024, explosion in Louisville, Kentucky. The incident killed two employees and seriously injured three others. The explosion caused significant property damage to the facility and nearby homes and businesses. Debris was ejected outside the facility’s fence line, flying up to
I have upload my REVISED Car Seal Program and the PowerPoint that goes with it to the Document Library – Chemical Process Safety folder.
With the recent catastrophic and fatal pressure vessel (PV) failure in KY, I have to speak up and point out a very dangerous and unfortunately common failure we see in our work. Far too often we visit a facility under the guise of doing process safety work and we typically find the PSM covered PVs
I have these debates on a regular basis: ” We can not put an isolation valve before or after a Pressure Relief Device (PRD).” And that would be an incorrect statement. Yes, placing an “intervening valve” in a PRD path (before or after the PRD) can be risky; however, in some situations, these valves are
I first wrote about this API 510 requirement in July 2019, and now OSHA appears to have caught up with this requirement; this year, they issued their first citation related to this requirement. Of course, the citation was associated with a process covered by PSM. Here is the API 510 requirement for newly installed pressure
Last week, we saw the devastation of a catastrophic failure of a pressure vessel (PV) in Louisville, KY. We still do not know the cause of this failure, just that it was a “cook vessel #6. SAFTENG members can see my breakdown of the photographic evidence available from the Courrier Journal (local Louisville newspaper). But
ATF Louisville said it has definitively identified the origin of last week’s deadly plant explosion. The investigation led them to the origin of the explosion: Cooking Vessel No. 6 on the South side of the facility. They can say that the vessel failed definitively… it was likely an issue with overpressurization. Some of that vessel
