“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 [...]
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina I once worked with a facility that discharged process equipment cleaning water to the city sewer. They had a tough time staying below the discharge limits for copper. In turned out that the city water [...]
“Tastes like heaven, burns like hell.” — Fireball slogan Tequila is a far cry from the cloying cinnamon-flavored spirit called Fireball. But they both have one thing in common: they burn like hell. Literally. As do all spirits. For reference, the flash point of 80 proof (40% ABV) spirits, is 26 C (79°F), meaning [...]
“You have to be prepared to take a spill.” — Shaun White Not long ago, a friend and I were watching a movie where one of the characters, despondent and bereft, stumbled down the street while clutching a bottle of spirits. As the character unlocked the door to his home, the bottle slipped from his [...]
“Quantity and persistence will get you the outcomes you need.” — James Altucher One of the challenges of process hazard analysis is risk assessment. To determine whether additional risk reduction is required, the team must quantify the risk and compare it to risk tolerance criteria. For the risk tolerance criteria to be useful to the [...]
“It doesn’t take many observations to think you’ve spotted a trend, and it’s probably not a trend at all.” — Daniel Kahneman In a December 2022 press release, CSB Chairperson Steve Owens alerted us all to a worrisome spike in CSB-reportable incidents at chemical facilities and the need to focus on winterization to prevent major [...]
“Whisky making is an act of cooperation between the blessings of nature and the wisdom of man.” — Masataka Taketsura While on a tour of a craft distillery, the distiller (and owner) and I got to talking about the safety aspects of distilling whiskey. The question of whether whiskey needed an SDS came up. It [...]
“Pressure comes from within and so must be mastered from within.” — Ed Jacoby Ten years ago, on Friday morning, April 24, 2015, a catastrophic still failure at the Silver Trail Distillery in Hardin, Kentucky seriously injured two workers, one who died 17 days later from his injuries. They were about four gallons into a [...]
“Science explorers are like an ideal gas. They can expand to fill any volume, but they can only do work under pressure…and the pressure’s on.” — Robert Ballard Every time that someone at a process facility tells me that they use compressed gas to transfer liquids from one tank to another, I wince. It’s not [...]
“Devils drinking devils and the flames are getting higher. All of Bardstown’s crying tonight, Heaven Hill’s on fire.” — Shannon Lawson, The Galoots Chris Schmidt and I recently returned from a week-long trip to Kentucky to enjoy the countryside and to sample bourbons from some of the 46 distilleries on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. As [...]
