Flixborough event

Ever since the inception of the petroleum industry the level of fires, explosions and environmental pollution that have precipitated from it, has generally paralleled its growth. As the industry has grown so has the magnitude of its accidental events. Relatively recent events such as the Flixborough incident (1974), Occidental s Piper Alpha disaster (1988), and Exxon s Valdez oil spill (1989) have all amply demonstrated the extreme financial impact these accidents can produce. 

Safety system development in the process (mainly chemical) industry is somewhat similar where a number of TMI-Chernobyl-type of events have occurred, for example Flixborough, Seveso, Bhopal, and others. 

The Flixborough nylon plant accident in the UK (1974) was caused by an open-air explosion of a flammable gas released into the air. It killed the 28 plant employees present and caused extensive property damage in the surrounding area. The failure to perform a full technical assessment of a modification was given as the main cause of the event. The Seveso pesticide plant accident in Italy (1976) is well known for the dangerous release of dioxin due to poor plant safety features and to the underestimation of the possibility of a runaway reaction. The Bhopal incident in India (1984), at another pesticide plant, killed an estimated 4000 (although the total number is still unknown). This disaster was attributed to too large an inventory of toxic substances and to very poor staff attention to the operability of safety features. 

Finite-element and computational fluid dynamics analyses of the accident at the NYPRO Works at Flixborough have been conducted. The results suggest that the cause of the catastrophe was flow-induced fatigue of one of the bellows forming the bypass assembiy that resulted in the initiation of a complex sequence of events that released only 10 to 16 tons of cyclohexane to form an unconfined vapor cloud that was detonated. 

This event and Flixborough led the EU to pass a directive in 1986 on the control of major industrial hazards. This embodied a performance standard and safety report concept. This was updated in 1999 as the Seveso 2 Directive embodying risk assessment ideas and adding environmental impacts. 

At onshore facilities, the people who are not at work go home. Therefore, in the event of a serious accident the number of affected people is limited to those who are on duty. For example, the explosion at the chemical plant in Flixborough, England, in the year 1974 was very bad 28 men died. But the accident occurred on a weekend had it occurred... 

The Flixborough event is one of the three incidents in this chapter that occurred onshore. However, this event is extremely important to all types of process industry because it led to the creation of process safety management (PSM) systems—which in turn provided the foundation for many other similar systems, including safety and environmental management program (SEMP) and SEMS. 

The topic of MOC became so closely identified with the Flixborough event that, at a process safety conference some years later, one session was called, Management of Change—excluding FUxborough. ... 

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