“At this time, we have not located any survivors.” — Chris Davis, Humphreys County Sheriff Not long ago, I was at a plant to facilitate a HazOp and LOPA for one of their processes. As is usually the case, my visit included going out to the process, accompanied by my host—an engineer from one of [...]
“The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” — Carl Jung I’ve been taught, and have taught others, that you can’t take credit for a fire suppression system in a Layer of Protection Analysis (LOPA). Why not? Because a fire suppression system doesn’t kick in until a fire [...]
“I had thought fermentation was controlled death.” — Michelle Zauner I enjoy touring distilleries. I love seeing the process of making whiskey, but I’m usually taken aback when we get to the fermentation step. Occasionally, the fermenters are enclosed and vent to the roof. Most fermenters that I see, however, are open top vats. This [...]
“We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.” — Calvin Coolidge I love a good play on words. “At once” can mean either “simultaneously” or it can mean “immediately”, and Calvin Coolidge managed to pack both meanings into a single sentence. “We cannot do everything simultaneously, but we can do [...]
“More often than not, to blame someone else is to play ‘hot potato’ with something that’s neither hot nor a potato.” — Craig D. Lounsbrough Imagine you work at a plant that makes a polymer. One of the raw materials is the monomer and it is toxic, reactive, and flammable. It contains an inhibitor to [...]
“I have a horror of being in confined spaces.” — Hayley Mills At a craft distillery that is not too far from Bluefield’s offices, the owner spoke about his need to climb into the pot still to clean out the stillage, especially the spent grains. He saw me wince and said, “Yeah, I know. It’s [...]
“Anyone can see a forest fire. Skill lies in sniffing the first smoke.” — Robert A. Heinlein One of my children has a house in The Ville, the neighborhood in north St. Louis that a tornado ripped through in May 2025. Since that tornado, I’ve become adept with a chainsaw, cutting into firewood the felled [...]
“Ventilation is the profound secret of existence.” — Peter Sloterdijk Most people, when hearing about the legal limits of ethanol, will think of Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC). Except for Utah, where the BAC limit for driving is 0.05%, the BAC limit in the United States is 0.08%. That applies to drivers that are 21 years [...]
“Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing.” – Charles Kettering I am the blacksmith at a historic village. I burn coke, coke I make right there on the forge. I start by laying bituminous coal around the coke [...]
“Ignorance is not too dangerous. If you combine it with power, then this is a toxic mix.” — Yuvai Noah Harari Not surprisingly, eighteen of the thirty incidents in Volume 3 of the Chemical Safety Board’s series on incident reports addressed incidents at refineries and large chemical complexes. One incident in Volume 3, though, was [...]
