Washington D.C., April 28, 2022 – Today, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) released a new safety video on its investigation into a massive explosion and fire that occurred in May of 2019 at the AB Specialty Silicones facility in Waukegan, IL. The incident...
A company decided to stop making a chemical product. One of the input materials was toxic and corrosive phosphorus trichloride (PCl3). The lines to the storage tank and the process area were cleared of PCl3 . A few years later, an operator found a leak outdoors. The...
On May 3, 2019, operators at a plant in Waukegan, Illinois were performing a batch operation, manually adding and mixing chemicals in a tank inside a building. An operator pumped an incorrect chemical into the tank. That chemical was incompatible with a chemical...
On July 12, 2020, a fire broke out on the US Navy ship USS Bonhomme Richard while it was docked in San Diego, California. The fire burned for 5 days and spread to 11 of the 15 decks of the ship. Temperatures from the fire exceeded 1400 F (760 C). The financial loss...
On September 21, 2020, a fire (Fig. 2) was ignited in a bucket of flammable resin being used to reline a Fiberglass Reinforced Plastic (FRP) tower at a papermill. Smoke and fumes from the fire killed two contractors. There are many lessons to be learned from this...
At a refining site, an x-ray examination was done on a 2” drain line connected to a 12” crude line. The x-ray showed deep pits beneath deposits of process material in a horizontal section of the drain line. Further inspection of other locations identified more areas...
