Explosion work-place accidents

These process safety management systems help ensure that facilities are designed, constructed, operated, and maintained with appropriate controls in place to prevent serious accidents. However, despite these precautions, buildings close to hazardous process plants have presented serious risks to the people who work in them. This observation is prompted by the fact that some buildings, because of their design and construction, have collapsed when subjected to comparatively moderate accidental explosions, with serious injury or fatality to the occupants. Conversely, experience indicates that personnel located outdoors and away from such buildings, if subjected to the same blast, may have a lower likelihood of serious injury or fatality. 

Quaternary ammonium azides will displace halogens in a synthesis of alkyl azides. Dichloromethane has been used as a solvent, although this can slowly form diazido-methane which may be concentrated by distillation dining work-up, thereafter easily exploding [1]. An accident attributed to this cause is described, and acetonitrile recommended as a preferable solvent, supported polymeric azides, excess of which can be removed by filtration are also preferred in place of the tetrabutylam-monium salt [2]. A similar explosion was previously recorded when the quaternary azide was generated in situ from sodium azide and a phase transfer catalyst in a part aqueous system [3,4],... 

It is common for crash investigators to undertake reconstruction of the aircraft wreckage, and this can be exceptionaUy useful in estabhshing the seat of an explosion, if that is what in fact took place. The National Transportation Safety Board in the United States and the United Kingdom Air Accident Investigation Branch have both done some exceptionaUy fine work of this type. 

More than 44 million Americans live or work near places that pose risks from the storage or use of dangerous industrial chemicals.154 The cost of accidents may be more than just a monetary one to the company. A fire and explosion occurred on July 4, 1993, in a Sumitomo Chemical plant in Niihama, Japan, that made over half of all the epoxy-encapsulation resin for semiconductor chips used in the entire world. Cutting off the supply would have been a serious inconvenience to the customers. The company took the unusual step of letting other companies use its technology until it could rebuild its own plant, so that a supply crisis never developed. The company still supplied 50% of the world s requirements for that resin in 1999.155... 

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