“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky This week at the 22nd Global Congress on Process Safety, my colleague Michael Smith presented a poster on “Getting Safer: The Future of Shipping Hazardous Materials”. His premise was that of all the modes [...]
“Ambivalence is like carbon monoxide – undetectable yet deadly.” — Cherie Carter-Scott World Fertilizer published an article in its March 2026 issue on “An Overlooked Process Hazard” in the production of ammonia fertilizers. It seems to me that this hazard has broader implications, beyond fertilizer production. Flammable liquids and flammable gases are all covered by [...]
“The faintly lit hatchway lay in the dark…like a grave yawning at judgement day in some old apocalyptic painting.” — Cormac McCarthy One of the appeals of craft distilleries and microbreweries is that they produce small batches, so a lot of care goes into each batch. Small batches, by their very nature, require small additions [...]
“By becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect.” — Dale Carnegie I love the English language, even though I make a hash of it on occasions. I love its complexity and irregularity. I especially love the words. There are so many words that mean almost the same thing that [...]
“What a pure blessing it was to have a bath in a tub alone in a room where all you had to do was pump the water, not tote buckets.” — Nancy E. Turner Somewhere in every process facility, liquids flow through pipes. Sometimes that flow is pulled by gravity. Some facilities push the liquid [...]
“We sometimes freeze the specimen with liquid nitrogen, which is extremely cold, you know. This is another technique we use now – but the specimens are not alive.” — Lennart Nilsson I recently facilitated a HazOp where the process required both very hot heat transfer media (steam and hot oil) and very cold heat transfer [...]
“Don’t be misled by History, or any other unreliable source.” — Will Rogers I remember when I lost faith in safety data sheets – SDSs. Well, they were called Material Safety Data Sheets – MSDSs – then. I was a young engineer, and the only engineer, at a start-up. My boss, the owner, assigned me [...]
“To be beyond any existing classification has always pleased me.” — Boyd Rice Every distiller understands that they are working with extremely explosive hazards. There is ethanol, a flammable liquid. And there is milled grain, a source of combustible dust. Despite this, when I visit distilleries, I often see areas that should be electrically classified [...]
“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 [...]
