All the best incident reports in English now come from America, and the CSB has just issued a report on the Gallatin facility of Hoeganaes Corp. They managed 3 explosion incidents involving iron dust in a 6 month period in 2011, killing 5 people and injuring 3 more.

Testing showed the dust had a notably low KST value, older company data reported a value of just 15, while CSB data gave a value of 19 bar.m/s. A slow explosion is not a safe one if you are standing in the fireball. If you leave your fuel lying all over the premises, expect the worst.

Regrettably Hoeganaes has been a subsidiary of the UK firm GKN since 1999. Shame on you!

Posted 20 Dec 2011
This warning might now be too late for Christmas 2011, and I’ve never seen a domestic fryer big enough to take a complete turkey, but evidently you can buy these in America.
……John Elwood, Assistant Fire Chief for Sarasota County, Florida , is concerned about burns as well as fire. Enter the turkey fryer. Combine several gallons of boiling oil with a frozen-solid turkey and you get … an explosion of scalding oil. And a trip to the Tampa General Hospital’s Regional Burn Center.
Defrost the turkey. Before you fire up the burner, put the defrosted turkey in the kettle and add the appropriate amount of oil. Remove the turkey, then heat the oil and slide the bird back in for cooking. Otherwise it’s cooking with hand grenades.

The industrial equivalent is the explosive consequences of accidently adding water into molten metal.

Posted 4 Dec 2011

Sometimes American standards of precautions to control fire and explosion hazards leave me just amazed: ‘how could they do this?’ Two examples from the www.csb.gov website are worth highlighting.

The most recent comes from a csb report released in Oct 2011. This has an analysis of incidents at small oil production sites. These often have above ground storage tanks for oil products together with a nodding donkey. These isolated wells are unmanned but pump away slowly, until the surface tank is full and a tanker takes the product way. Evidently many are unfenced, and have no signs to indicate that they contain highly flammable oil or gas. Even more alarmingly, they often seem to have unlocked tanker hatches, with no flame arrestor. A match or cigarette nearby can then literally cause the tank to explode. Evidently California legislated to control the risks back in 1983, but other states did not follow and 44 members of the public have been killed since then.

An explosion which killed 6 people and injured 50 others occurred during planned work to clear debris from new assembled large diameter pipework at a gas fired power plant nearing the completion of construction. Natural gas at 45 bar was deliberately released from a vent just 6m above ground level in a congested area. Controls over ignition sources were minimal. 56,000 m3 of gas were released in 15 such gas blows during a single morning. 7000m3 of this gas was released in  10 minutes leading up to  the explosion.This was evidently common industry practice, not a rogue set of installers. A similar event had killed 4 and injured 67 just 8 months earlier.

‘Elf and Safety has an image problem in the UK, but someone has to provide an independent view of safe working practice, or we will kill workers and the public for lack of the simplest of safety precautions.

Posted 15 Aug

Some companies choose unfortunate names

Some people never read or follow instructions

Some products invite misuse

So when a company calls itself Bird Brain Inc, and sells a liquid fuel thickened so it forms a gel, perhaps we should fear the worst. At least it has not called its product napalm, but it might as well have done. It is based on isopropanol, and is probably easier to ignite than napalm, which is formulated to make it relatively safe to handle. See www.explodingfirepot.com/birdbrain-lawsuit/ to read what can happen when people don’t understand the dangers, and then ask what would happen if this got into the hands of those who wanted to cause danger and injury to others.

Do we need this stuff?

The explosion and fireball on the 13th July at a small industrial unit in Boston Lincolnshire has been widely reported to be the result of an illegal plant distilling alcohol for sale as vodka. 5 people were killed immediately.
The details of the process are not available at this time, but we do have an estimate of the size of the industrial unit where the plant was located. This has been reported as having a floor area around 50 m2, so perhaps has an internal volume of 200 m3. With a LEL of 60g/m3, a release of just 12kg of alcohol as vapour could entirely fill this unit with an explosive mixture. Loss of cooling to the still or fracture of a hot part of the equipment are the most obvious possible causes.

19 July 2011

Powder coating plants do not appear often in the records of dust explosions, but the hazards are real, and much work was needed to ensure the equipment works safely. The original version of standard EN 50177 dating from 1997 contained an odd mixture of requirements for the equipment suppliers, requirements which depended completely on the user, and some statements that seemed just like wishful thinking. It has just been updated and republished as BS EN 50177_2009. Flock processes also present explosion hazards, though the materials are difficult to test in the way that dusts are evaluated. The recent publication BS EN 50223:2010 is an product standard that covers the hazards of electrostatic flock processing equipment