Chemical engineering disasters

In contrast, Professor Kletz documented that more people have been killed by the collapse of dams than by any other peacetime artifact. [28] He explains that in August 1979, a dam collapsed in India killing a large number of people. Various reports gave various counts of fatalities, between 1,400 and 25,000. This collapse could be responsible for more deaths than the dreaded Bhopal Tragedy. Kletz asked the question why people were more concerned about chemical engineering disasters than civil engineering disasters. It could be that water is a familiar chemical and pesticides or radioactive menaces are both poorly understood and not detectable by the man on the street. 

Kletz, T.A. (1993) Lessons from Disasters How Organisations Have No Memory and Accidents Recur, Institutional Chemical Engineers, Rugby. 

T. A. Kletz, Lessons From Disaster How Organizations Have No Memory and Accidents Recur, co-published by Institution of Chemical Engineers, Rugby, UK, and Gulf Publishing Co., Houston, Texas, 1993, Sections 2.2 and 8.10. 

Protection of our food and water supplies against terrorist attack presents a major challenge, because the supply chain is so extensive and open. But it is a challenge that chemists and chemical engineers should accept. Moreover, the threats to food and water are not limited to terrorism—a variety of natural disasters could wreak havoc as well. 

As chemical process technology becomes more complex, chemical engineers will need a more detailed and fundamental understanding of safety. H. H. Fawcett said, To know is to survive and to ignore fundamentals is to court disaster. 1 This book sets out the fundamentals of chemical process safety. 

Ronald J. Willey, The Bhopal Disaster (New York American Institute of Chemical Engineers, 1998). 

KIctz 1975, "The Flixborough Cyclohexane Disaster , T. A. Kletz, Loss Prevention, Vol. 8, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, New York, NY, 1975, pp 106-118... 

In addition to the importance of combustion reactors in chemical processes, mcon-troUed combustion reactions create the greatest potential safety hazard in the chemical industry. Therefore, all chemical engineers need to understand the basic principles of combustion reactors to recognize the need for their proper management and to see how improper management of combustion can cause unacceptable disasters. 

Warner, Sir Fredrick, The Flixborough Disaster, Chemical Engineering Progress 71 no. 9, Sept. 1975 pp. 77-84. 

Plant Disasters, Gulf Publishing, Houston, 1994 (b) Loss Prevention, vol. 18, American Institute Chemical Engineers Publ. T-93, New York, 1994 (c) C.R. Nelms, What You Can Learn From Things That Go Wrong, Failsafe Network, P.O. Box 35064, Richmond, Virgina, 1996. 

What do you do when a disaster, such as this obviously was, really strikes You retire to a bar. There was only one topic of conversation. In the middle of it, Howard Nebeck, a most capable chemical engineer, left without finishing his drink and retired to his room to do some sketches on the redesign of the reactor. 

In February 1992, I attended a conference on professional ethics at the University of Florida, Gainesville. On the shuttle bus to the conference hotel, the only other passenger turned out to be a chemical engineer. I asked him whether there was any consensus in the chemical engineering community about what had caused the Bhopal disaster. His response was immediate and succinct sabotage. Union Carbide has given the same explanation for almost three decades and continues to do so on its website. ... 

Chemical engineer Kamal Pareek started working at UCIL s Bhopal plant in 1971, served as senior project engineer during the creation of the MIC plant in the late 1970s, and left the company in December 1983. Speaking of the MIC plant shortly after the disaster, Pareek said,... 

J. Szepvdigyi (2011) A chemical engineer s view of the red mud disaster. Nachrichten aus der Chemie, 59, May, Central Europe special issue, V-Vll. 

Sason The cause of this accident and the Bhopal disaster was human error, which is a whitewashed expression for negligence. The Web is laden with similar industrial accidents, and Figure 10.1 provides a list of some of the chemical accidents that have occurred between the years 1974 and 1993. This list is similar to one that appeared in Chemical Engineering News in 1993. 

The American Society of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) is a technical society devoted to chemical engineering and associated technologies and issues. Many chemical engineers work in the chemical process industry. In 1985, AIChE established the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS). It was an industry response to the Bhopal, India, disaster (Case 24-1). It has become the center of expertise for process safety. It publishes many publications on process safety, and conducts conferences and training to advance process safety practices. 

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