Lesson sharing release

Question 5 Is the controller/switcher IC at fault (by design) This is actually a fairly common occurrence. No semiconductor product is released without its fair share of shortcomings. These are usually known to the company at the time of release, with the internal understanding that there were some lessons learned, and these will be resolved when the time comes for the next Rev, or the next product. Fair enough But there are several variations to this theme, some that you may need to be aware of as you seek answers to a particularly stubborn problem. The three main variations are that the company knows about the problem the company knows about the problem but does not want to admit it or the company does not know about the problem. 

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. 

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