About yesterday's explosion at the power plant in Connecticut

[hedgehog]

Typically the accident makes the front page, but the accident report gets buried in the back pages six months later.

My experience is in plant engineering and maintenance supervision. My son installs and starts up major equipment.

Based on our differing experiences, my bet is that it will turn out that someone was so focused on the Super bowl they weren't paying attention to what they were doing or got into a hurry to finish up on time. My son is speculating that with a lot of power plants in the region off-line due to the storm, someone in corporate saw an opportunity to make a buck selling power at a premium, and pushed to get the plant on-line ahead of schedule.

We might both be correct. Typically, it's not one mistake that causes a disaster, it's a series of wrong decisions that happen to line up just right.

[havocmom]

1. Greed is the usual suspect

one way or another, greed is too often what kills.

edited for typo

[RKP5637]

3. +1, n/t

[PVnRT]

2. It happened well before the Super Bowl, so I doubt that was much of an issue

More likely, some manager thought they could push the schedule, and no one thought to tell him he was full of shit.

It makes me glad I work for a company whose standard safety practice is that anyone can stop work at any time for any safety concern, and management actually takes it seriously. Benefit of working on government projects, I suppose.

[Mopar151]

4. There was a huge train wreck on Super Bowl sunday

Which is often given as a justification for drug testing - as 2 of the trainmen admitted smoking a joint earlier in the day. Curiously, they also confessed throwing a portable TV out of the locomotive afterward - which seemed to escape notice in the rush to blame the demon weed.
FWIW , I'd look at a mix-up in purge gases - I've seen it happen in a controlled atmosphere tank - some amazing things happen when you substitute oxygen for argon.

[hedgehog]

6. That's my husband's bet - someone grabbed an oxygen tank

instead of a nitrogen tank.

I'm also going for a wild card - someone mixed metric and Imperial standard parts somewhere along the way - say metric bolts in a hole tapped for imperial threads. You can jam the bolt in, but the threads don't really engage.


Do you have more info about the train wreck? It sounds like a classic.

[Tesha]

10. I was wondering if they tried to cheap-out or rush the job by skipping the nitrogen purge entirely.

Maybe they wanted to save the cost of the Nitrogen step. Maybe the
Dewar didn't show up in time or showed up empty or some such, and
they still wanted to get this done before Sunday night.

Whatever the cause, I'll bet there's an engineer or construction
foreman or project manager who's wishing this morning that
he hadn't cut *THAT* corner quite so close!

Tesha

[ThomWV]

5. If someone farts at a Nuclear plant it stays on the front page here for 6 months

but let a massive explosion kill people at a fossil fueled plant and not so much as a word.

[hedgehog]

7. That's because when someone farts in a nuke plant -

everyone around glows for 6 months!

:evilgrin:


Seriously - I live 15 miles from 3 nuke plants. The operators are under the same financial pressures as every other business, so the push is always on to cut costs. I am ambivalent about nuclear power - it's great as long as no one ever makes a mistake or cuts a corner, nothing unanticipated happens (radiation embrittlement, anyone?) and someone figures out how to dispose of the wastes.

[SidDithers]

8. +1...

guess an explosion isn't as interesting as a dripping pipe, or a completely unrelated electrical fire.

Sid

[Brickbat]

9. When I heard the report on this on NPR this morning, that's the first thing I thought. And I thought

about a specific poster on DU!

[Mopar151]

11. maybe it concerns us because the same guys are involved

Construction, design, and management.

[Hubert Flottz]

14. "Construction, design, and management"

I think they have been drug testing the wrong people...

[Mopar151]

15. And for the wrong drugs n/t

[supernova]

12. It's the same explosion type that happened here in NC last year

at the ConAgra Slim Jim plant (No, seriously)

Evidently, it is within safety codes to purge gas lines inside? It's ridiculous. If you wouldn't do it in a private home, why do it in a work place? Regs need to be updated.

CSB investigators determined that it was common practice for Energy Systems Analysts to vent natural gas inside buildings. On the day of the explosion, contractors were having difficulty lighting the water heater, so they purged the 120-foot gas line several times over a 2½-hour period, allowing gas to build up inside a boiler room, investigators determined.

"If I had a burner on my stove, I certainly wouldn't open the burner and let the gases build up," CSB Chairman John Bresland said. "It struck me as being very unsafe."

The contractor and ConAgra workers didn't use electronic detectors to determine whether a gas build-up had occurred and instead relied solely on their sense of smell, investigators said.

http://www.wral.com/news/state/story/6959190/

[hedgehog]

13. "Purging"refers to pushing out or cleaning the pipes of one material

by pushing another through the system. In this case, they may have been using nitrogen to replace oxygen or natural gas to replace what the thought was nitrogen.

Lots of industrial buildings are very large and very drafty. In those cases, natural gas might not build up. Still, I'd run a temp line to the roof myself.

[Jennicut]

16. It was all over my local news but then I live in Connecticut. It was hard to watch

some of the guys who had lost their friends. :cry: These were blue collar, hard working guys. My husband works for a gas company in CT too and I know guys like this well. Besides, in CT most people are die hard Patriots fans and are not as hyped up about the Superbowl when they are not in it.