Industrial accidents Texas City Disaster

The Texas City Disaster is generally considered to be one of the most significant industrial accidents in US history. The following provides a brief summary of the event. 

Ammonium nitrate is the most important fertilizer in the world (see p. 96). It ranked fifteenth among the industrial chemicals produced in the United States in 1995 (8 million tons). Unfortunately, it is also a powerful explosive. In 1 947 an explosion occurred aboard a ship being loaded with the fertilizer in Texas. The fertilizer was in paper bags and apparently blew up after sailors tried to stop a fire in the ship s hold by closing a hatch, thereby creating the compression and heat necessary for an explosion. More than six hundred people died as a result of the accident. More recent disasters involving ammonium nitrate took place at the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993 and at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. 

One of the very best all-around CSB videos is titled An Anatomy of Disaster Explosion at BP Texas City Refinery, March 28,2005 [13]. It tells the story of one of the worst industrial accidents in recent US history in words, animation and site footage. This refinery explosion arrd fire killed 15 workers, injured 180 others and resrrlted in billions of dollars in econorrtic losses. This video is nearly 56 rrrin long, but is divided into chapters. So, you can select chapters to show to certain audiences. 

Sharing of past major incidents with other oil and gas industries provides useful input data for similar process industries in order to identify the most critical barriers and improve their safety processes. One poignant example highlights this matter. In 1998 there was an accident in the gas compression stage of a Middle East oil and gas plant which caused 7 dead as a result of fuel accumulation and vapor cloud explosion which was very similar to the Texas City Refinery disaster on March 23, 2005 in which a distillation tower was overfilled and an uncontrolled release of hydrocarbons led to a major explosion and fires. Fifteen people were killed and 180 were injured in the worst disaster in the United States in a decade. In both incidents, excess hydrocarbons were diverted into a pressure relief system that included a blowdown stack. In the Iranian case, it was equipped with a flare, but one which the operator didn t ignite in Texas City the blowdown stack was not equipped with a flare to burn off hydrocarbons as they were released. As a result, the flammable overflow from the tower entered the atmosphere. Ignition of the escaped hydrocarbons was enabled by startup of a nearby vehicle resulted in the explosion and subsequent fires (Hopkins, 2008). This example shows the repetitive patterns of accidents, and root causes of events all over the world in this sector. The lesson of this paper is that accidents in one country, where the scenarios are very similar, can and should serve as lessons to prevent the same scenario being actualized in other countries. 

Past experiences indicate that industries such as petroleum and chemical that handle hazardous substances are more prone to major accidents. Maintenance can play a major role in the occurrence of such accidents. Some examples of the major accidents in the area of oil and gas industrial sector in which maintenance, directly or indirectly, has played a major role are Piper Alpha Disaster, Texas City Refinery Explosion, Sodegaura Refinery Disaster, and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy [1]. 

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