“It was not uncommon; it’s what they do. But there was something going on that was different.” — C.W.Sigman, Director of Kanawha County Emergency Management At about 9:30 am on Wednesday morning, April 22, 2026, two chemicals reacted to form hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas, at the small Catalyst Refiners facility in Institute, West Virginia. [...]
“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” — Malcolm Gladwell Facilities in the chemical process industries were required to report accidental release events to the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) beginning back in March 2020. These included incidents [...]
“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 [...]
“Always lists to be made, as if writing items in neat vertical rows might stave off randomness and chaos.” — Dani Shapiro People love lists. Top Ten Lists. Top Twelve Lists. Casey Kasem’s American Top Forty. And for those with short attention spans, Top Three Lists. I recently received an email asking if I agreed [...]
“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 [...]
“It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. OSHA requires incident reports. For recordable injuries or illnesses, OSHA requires that a 301 Form, Injury and Illness Incident Report, be completed, per 29 CFR 1904.29(a). For workplaces with PSM-covered [...]
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” — Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride (1987) I, like many older Americans, worry about my blood pressure enough to check it regularly. And like most people who check their blood pressure regularly, I know what [...]
“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 [...]
“I have so much paperwork. I’m afraid my paperwork has paperwork.” — Gabrielle Zevin One of the key differences between OSHA’s Process Safety Management (PSM) standard and the EPA’s Risk Management Planning (RMP) rule is the RMP rule’s requirement to submit documentation to the EPA. OSHA has no similar requirement for submission. If OSHA wants [...]
