Technological risk : chemical releases

2018

Chemical accident disasters are unplanned events involving hazardous substances, causing harm to human health, the environment, or economic loss or social disruption. While there is a long history of chemical accidents, with events recorded even more than 100 years ago, the study and implementation of technologies and approaches to preventing, preparing and responding to chemical accidents, only gained widespread attention in the last 40 years. There have been significant advancements in understanding accident phenomena, and in development of technology and management systems to control risks. Nonetheless, beyond a certain level of prevention, meaningful gains in prevention seem to elude our grasp. Indeed, in developed countries, such as European Union (EU) Member States and the USA, that have by far the most sophisticated understanding and oversight of chemical accident prevention, there are still a high frequency of serious chemical accidents each year, resulting in severe human, environmental and economic consequences. Moreover, there is an increasing presence of hazardous industries and of volumes of hazardous substances in commercial use in many developing countries where experience with industrial processing hazards and risks is relatively recent and where social and political infrastructures for dealing with the plethora of externalities accompanying industrial production are inadequate. Most experts do not believe that chemical accidents occur today because our understanding of engineering possibilities runs ahead of our understanding and predictive powers regarding their downsides. Rather, our challenges today stem from a myriad of inputs whose influence on chemical process risks is broadly known and understood, but that go largely unrecognized and unmanaged in organizations and on sites where the risks are actually present. Hence, it is not our lack of knowledge and understanding of how the technology works, but in many cases a lack of access to such knowledge, and in other cases, a failure to prioritize and use it wisely to prevent serious loss. Chemical accidents will continue to happen in the foreseeable future as long as chemicals and chemical processing are important for society. In particular, the usage and applications of chemicals is spreading and not decreasing. Moreover, production, transport and storage of dangerous substances are happening in places where these risks were never a problem before. In the meantime, there is evidence from the repetition of accidents from previous generations within industrialized economies that lessons of the past have been forgotten or ignored. This paper outlines the trends that threaten to increase chemical accident risks and proposes some recommendations to address them.

American-Eurasian Journal of Toxicological Sciences, 2014

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the worst industrial disaster in world's history in which almost four thousand people were killed and tens of thousands were seriously injured by a gas leak from a fertiliser plant. Neither the managers nor the toxicologists knew how poisonous the gas methyl isocynate was; and no one knew the antidote. Over the years there has been change in views and practices relating to handling of toxic substances in chemical industry. Research in inherently safe designs has accelerated. There have been advances in the field of Organisational theory and management of high reliability organisations. Evolution of CSR in the industry has been rapid though it seems more like greenwashing than a substantial change in business practices.

Chemical Engineering Transactions, 2019

NaTech events (Natural Hazard Triggering Technological Disasters) are becoming an increasing concern in the Chemical and Process Industry (CPI). From a risk management standpoint, a better understanding of such events is of paramount importance. In this perspective, the analysis of past accidents is crucial, being almost the only source of information on the possible interactions between natural threats and CPI. To this aim, the present work collected 438 past NaTechs that affected CPI, analysing the trends of accidents with respect to the trend of natural disasters, the geographical localization, the type of natural hazard triggering the accident, the final scenarios (e.g. fire, explosion,…) and the consequences on human and assets. For each type of NaTech, significant accidents have been reported and discussed.

Voices of doom presaged devastation for Europe’s chemical industry. Six years since the REACH Regulation on the trade and use of chemicals in the European Union (EU) came onto the books, Europe’s chemical industry is still thriving. After a slight dip due to the crisis between 2007 and 2009, both production and exports are back on the up. Most ironic of all, some of the EU’s main rival countries are following suit by introducing draft laws modelled to varying degrees on REACH. But what about the non-commercial objectives of the reform? Is Europe’s chemicals market now kinder to health and the environment? HesaMag lets various involved professionals – mainly from the trade unions, NGOs and labour inspectorates – have their say. Knowing that the benefits of REACH to workers’ health cannot be gauged for years – not to say decades – they mostly give it a cautious but critical thumbs up. One thing seems already certain, however: REACH is gradually changing attitudes, including among the most traditional industrial sectors.

Process Safety and Environmental Protection, 2007

The objective of this paper is to present the results of the analysis performed on a selection of accidents included in the MARS database. This is a database of past accidents that occurred in Europe maintained by the European Commission, in order to help the Member States to meet the requirements of the Seveso and Seveso II directives. The study is focused on those accidents that involve reactions between chemical substances, whether wanted or unwanted, that generated a hazardous situation by loss of control of such reactions. Runaway reactions are known to be especially dangerous, given that many times they are unexpected, or their possible consequences underestimated, so sometimes chemical industries are not ready to cope with the effects of loss of control of reactive processes. The aim of the analysis is to obtain lessons learned from past accidents in order to prevent similar situations in the future, or to reduce their consequences. Understanding the causes of past accidents, including equipment failures, deviations in the expected course of a reaction, or deficiencies in process operations performed, can help to a better understanding of similar processes. Industries working with potentially dangerous chemicals should consider introducing lessons learned into their safety management systems.

Chemical Engineering Transactions, 2019

Accident investigation reports from the Dutch Labour Inspectorate are used by the Dutch National Institute for Public Health & Environment (RIVM) to analyse major hazard chemical accidents in a structured way. The purpose of the analyses is to improve understanding of accident causes and of ways to improve detection of major accident precursors. A bow-tie framework was developed in a collaborative process of engineers, psychologists and inspectors over many years. The nature of the model is that it combines technical, human and management components while preserving the temporal sequence of events of each accident scenario. Six lines of defence define the causal pathway from initiating events to accident and impact on man and environment. Different safety barriers in these lines of defence represent the different ways in which the lines of defence can fail or be successful. Sets of underlying human, management and organisational factors are provided at barrier level to better unders...

Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 1995

A survey of accidents involving hazardous materials has been performed. A total of 5325 accidents taken from the database MHIDAS, covering from the beginning of this century up to July 1992, were used to study the contribution of different situations, activities, equipment, etc to the risks associated with hazardous materials. The data show the percentages of accidents involving transport (39%), process plants (24.5%) and storage (17.4%), as well as the frequency of occurrence of accidents in highly populated areas (66%), low-populated areas (12%) and rural areas (22%). The different types of accidents were also analysed, as well as their origin and causes. The consequences of the accidents, both with regard to people and economic losses, were assessed. The accumulated frequency-fatality curve has been plotted: the line follows approximately a straight line, with a slope of-0.84. Finally, several conclusions were derived about the effort which should be devoted to decreasing the risk in the future.

Journal of Hazardous Materials, 1995

Based on accident case histories extracted from the data bases Mhidas (SRD) and Facts (TNO) an analysis was performed to identify relevant natural events causing accidents involving hazardous materials. A natural event is defined as an event originating from nature which initiates accidents with hazardous materials. In the analysis, the accidents from the two sources were pooled and the analysis concerns a total of 232 accidents, which were analysed with regard to specific natural cause, geographical distribution and time trend. The analysis indicates that between 1% and 5% of accidents in industrial activities have natural events as a causative factor. Further for specific industries certain types of natural events seem to be dominating. The most often reported natural cause of accidents is 'atmospheric phenomena' which account for 80% of the natural events found, lightning being the most common cause. Looking specifically at storage and processing activities lightning accounts for 61% of the accidents initiated by natural events.

Process safety …, 2007

Major incidents in chemical process plants such as Bhopal have raised the questions of facility, safety, and security by stakeholders and interest groups. How will the facility be perceived as safe given the possible consequences? No one denies that there have been ...

Chemical Engineering Transactions, 2016

Major accidents unfortunately occur with a certain frequency in industry. Sometimes these accidents are of truly catastrophic proportions. There naturally come to mind events such as the leak and subsequent release of a toxic cloud of methyl isocyanate in the Indian city of Bhopal on 12 March 1984, resulting in 3787 fatalities (although some sources calculate the total as being up to 20.000, including ensuing fatalities over the years) . These occurrences are frequently categorised as being unpredictable and perhaps beyond human control (in Anglo-Saxon legal terminology, 'acts of God'). Quite the opposite, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that catastrophic occurrences over the last one hundred years have conformed to a well-known statistical distribution and, as a consequence, were entirely foreseeable. Demonstrating this will open the way to the following issues:Are events with consequences even exceeding those observed to date (for simplicity, referred to as trans- ...