US Chemical Safety Board
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YouTube keeps shoving this channel into my recommendations. I'm sure you all will appreciate it as the content is very similar to this site, except involving industrial plants instead of software and, sadly, occasional casualties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tflm9mttAAI
Okay, so our process requires NaClO and H2SO4. To make things convenient, why don't we put the fill lines next to each other?
I like that idea! It's a very efficient use of space.
How will people know which fill line is which?
Well, that's part of the operator's job, to direct filling operations. He'll have the fill lines memorized, so there's no need to label them.
What happens if there's user error?
The great part of this design is that the valves are right next to the fill lines, so the operator or truck driver can easily shut off flow if something goes wrong!
This seems like a pretty solid design! You know, I think we can probably safely lock up the emergency respirators since they'll never be needed.On another note, Miss Lucy here looks like quite the strong, independent, and sophisticated lady. I wonder if she'd be up for some, um... "human factors analysis" over at my place?
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So my design for the plant is almost complete. I just have one remaining issue. We have this open-air storage area for phosgene, a very toxic gas that's a reagent in our process, and I'm trying to decide on what to call it.
How about the "Phosgene Shed?"
Has a nice ring to it, gotta admit.
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Eight inch steel walls are much less reassuring when they are containing a NaOH solution at 29,000psi.
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I don't know if it was posted here or showed up in my YT suggestions a long time ago, but I've seen at least the first of these before.
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Let's bring open buckets of MEK into a penstock, strategically placing them between the work area and the only exit, spray MEK everywhere in a futile attempt to clean equipment, and not bring along any respirators or fire extinguishers. What could possibly go wrong?
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@HardwareGeek said in US Chemical Safety Board:
I don't know if it was posted here or showed up in my YT suggestions a long time ago, but I've seen at least the first of these before.
Supposedly there's a drinking game.
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@Groaner said in US Chemical Safety Board:
@HardwareGeek said in US Chemical Safety Board:
I don't know if it was posted here or showed up in my YT suggestions a long time ago, but I've seen at least the first of these before.
Supposedly there's a drinking game.
Woah, that seems a recipe for Death by alcohol intoxication...
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@Groaner said in US Chemical Safety Board:
This seems like a pretty solid design! You know, I think we can probably safely lock up the emergency respirators since they'll never be needed. Look, if anything bad happens, we'll just sell the plant to this brand new, completely unreleated company MGQI, that I also just coincidentally happen to own, for a buck.@Groaner said in US Chemical Safety Board:
How about the "Phosgene Shed?"
Has a nice ring to it, gotta admit.Could be required by local hazardous materials storage codes.
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@Groaner said in US Chemical Safety Board:
On another note, Miss Lucy here looks like quite the strong, independent, and sophisticated lady. I wonder if she'd be up for some, um... "human factors analysis" over at my place?
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@Groaner
I don't know anything about chemical manufacturing, but it sounds like unlike the first two companies, which were "only" negligent, these guys were willfully and knowingly endangering the public. How can anyone think that absolutely never inspecting large, highly pressurized containers for caustic chemicals would lead to anything else than a major catastrophe? Especially after it was proven that the containers were unsafe by a prior incident? At that point, even a high-school dropout with zero chemistry and physics knowledge should have realized that they were literally sitting on a time bomb.
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@dfdub Is this one of those cases where Sinclair's Law applies?
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair
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@Mason_Wheeler
Ah, right. Just never heard of it being referred to as "Sinclair's Law" before.It probably applies here, but I wouldn't phrase it that way, since that feels way too lenient as a description for what they actually did. They were extremely lucky that they only killed a single person.
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Is it just me, or is the narration irritatingly slow? I had to run the videos at 1.25x speed just to get a reasonable-sounding wpm. In fact, it made all the speech sound more natural (except for that Irish-I-think-he-was bloke).
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@dfdub said in US Chemical Safety Board:
@Groaner
I don't know anything about chemical manufacturing, but it sounds like unlike the first two companies, which were "only" negligent, these guys were willfully and knowingly endangering the public. How can anyone think that absolutely never inspecting large, highly pressurized containers for caustic chemicals would lead to anything else than a major catastrophe? Especially after it was proven that the containers were unsafe by a prior incident? At that point, even a high-school dropout with zero chemistry and physics knowledge should have realized that they were literally sitting on a time bomb.There was some known dice-rolling in at least the case of the Phosgene Shed, company officials were concerned that if they invested a couple million on a safer design, it would set a precedent that they would have to make that kind of investment anytime there were toxic chemicals involved. This video goes into more detail on that around the 10 minute mark (and a couple other unrelated incidents at the plant in a short period). It also has Sexy Miss Lucy, which is another plus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISNGimMXL7M
But yes, if your apparatus is capable of accelerating shards of an 8-inch-thick steel tank to the point where they become deadly projectiles, and you're aware of the possibility, that's a problem.
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@Watson said in US Chemical Safety Board:
Is it just me, or is the narration irritatingly slow? I had to run the videos at 1.25x speed just to get a reasonable-sounding wpm. In fact, it made all the speech sound more natural (except for that Irish-I-think-he-was bloke).
As these are government publications, there may be some accessibility concerns which demand the admittedly slow rate.
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"I lived in Torrance for 30 years that refinery blows up every couple of years."
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A friend of mine recently told me a safety story that went the other way into ridiculous territory. He and a colleague had to install a pipe that was something like a metre and a half long (I think) at some chemical plant. When they got there in the morning, they were first required to watch a safety instruction film and were given a folder that explained all the possible warning signals that could sound, so it was about an hour after getting there before they even got to where the pipe had to be fitted. After beginning to drill the eight holes in a concrete slab to fit the mounts for the pipe, an alert sounded; they didn’t bother trying to work out what the alert meant using the folder they had been given, but just followed the factory’s personnel to a safety shelter where they spent the next hour or so.
Once back, they drilled the rest of the holes and found that two of them hit rebar meaning that the lengths of threaded rod they had, wouldn’t go in all the way. “No problem,” says my friend’s colleague, “I’ll just cut them to length with the angle grinder.” The safety man almost went ballistic at that point. They had to apply for a permit to use the grinder, which took a good while, then once they had that they had to wait for a fire crew and a medical crew to show up. Once those all had, my friend held up a fire blanket around his colleague who spent all of about two minutes cutting a bit off two pieces of steel. This on a large slab of concrete tens of metres away from anything.
By the time they went home in the afternoon, all they had done was put in the eight lengths of threaded rod.
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@Gurth
Nuclear power plants are fun in that way too. I was acting as backup for a colleague doing an install in the administrative building of a nuclear plant. It involved pre-checks both security and a safty guide. You better reviewed it because you had to pass an exam before being admitted past the gate building.
Come to think of it ... going into the NATO Evere building usually took more time then the required actual work time. NATO SHAPE was even worse. Only plus side was the small cool factor for being in an underground bunker and you had a whole day of project work. After delivering we never knew where and how it was actually used.
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@Gurth said in US Chemical Safety Board:
They had to apply for a permit to use the grinder, which took a good while, then once they had that they had to wait for a fire crew and a medical crew to show up
Jeez. Just go out in the parking lot and do that bit.
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@Luhmann said in US Chemical Safety Board:
Nuclear power plants are fun in that way too. I was acting as backup for a colleague doing an install in the administrative building of a nuclear plant. It involved pre-checks both security and a safty guide. You better reviewed it because you had to pass an exam before being admitted past the gate building.
And yet, nuclear power plants in B•••••m occasionally get sabotaged …
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@boomzilla said in US Chemical Safety Board:
@Gurth said in US Chemical Safety Board:
They had to apply for a permit to use the grinder, which took a good while, then once they had that they had to wait for a fire crew and a medical crew to show up
Jeez. Just go out in the parking lot and do that bit.
If they would have gone out to the parking lot, they would have had to wait until the next day to re-enter the facility, after watching the safety training video again
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Found another really infuriating one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZHpeBubb_M
The worst part: You'd think that after 3 preventable accidents and doing jack shit to improve the safety for months, they'd have been forced to shut down or at least have been fined a significant amount of money, but according to the newspaper article I found the only fine was $80,000.
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One time I worked in part of a laboratory area, so there were a lot of pipes running through the ceiling: hot potable water, cold potable water, non-potable water, liquid nitrogen. You know, the standards.
This was also a building where we had to watch a "Being Safe in the Electronics Factory" video every year. Remember kids: no loose clothing, wear eye protection, and don't stick your hand in the wave soldering machine!
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@Parody said in US Chemical Safety Board:
One time I worked in part of a laboratory area, so there were a lot of pipes running through the ceiling: hot potable water, cold potable water, non-potable water, liquid nitrogen. You know, the standards.
This was also a building where we had to watch a "Being Safe in the Electronics Factory" video every year. Remember kids: no loose clothing, wear eye protection, and don't stick your hand in the wave soldering machine!
Not a factory, but when I was an undergraduate I was doing my research with a linear accelerator. Only a little baby one (2 MeV Van de Graaf), but enough to put out some serious x-rays (both intentionally when the protons slammed into targets and as a byproduct of acceleration). This meant we had to watch radiation training videos. The only things I learned were:
- tobacco concentrates radioactive elements, including polonium and astatine, both alpha emitters. So smoking/chewing tobacco gets nice quantities of heavy alpha emitters stuck right against the sensitive tissue of the brachii and mouth. Fun times. Don't smoke, kids.
- Don't stick your hand in x-ray beams. One idiot bypassed the safeties on an XRF machine and stuck his hand in there while it was on. The next few pictures, taken several days apart, were gruesome. It basically flash-sterilized the palm of his hand. Just little surface burns at first, but then it turned black and gangrenous and had to be amputated.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in US Chemical Safety Board:
- Don't stick your hand in x-ray beams. One idiot bypassed the safeties on an XRF machine and stuck his hand in there while it was on. The next few pictures, taken several days apart, were gruesome. It basically flash-sterilized the palm of his hand. Just little surface burns at first, but then it turned black and gangrenous and had to be amputated.
Meanwhile, you'd think this guy would have had it a whole lot worse, but the end result of his experience was actually nowhere near that bad:
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@Mason_Wheeler each particle has tons of energy for a subatomic particle, but there just aren't that many in a beam and the total energy isn't that high. The synchrotron radiation is something else, however.
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Meanwhile, in Russia
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@hungrier Very sensationalist headline when there’s nothing particularly dangerous about touching molten metal.
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Fun trick: "wanna watch me hold a 400-degree piece of metal in my hand?"
- Open the oven.
- Remove the pastry you've been cooking at 400 degrees.
- Remove the strip of tinfoil you put around the edge so it won't burn.
- Wad the foil up in your hand and close your fist around it.
- Tiny little mass of aluminum (specific heat of 0.9) equalizes temperature with a much larger mass of flesh which is mostly water (specific heat of 4.184), causing a negligible and harmless increase in temperature for the flesh side of the equation.
- But it looks really cool to people not familiar with the science.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in US Chemical Safety Board:
400-degree
I don’t speak retard.
(specific heat of 0.9)
(specific heat of 4.184)
And, evidently, neither do you.Look, it’s okay to use a coherent system of units. You don’t have to pretend those are dimensionless quantities to act as though you don’t.
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@kazitor
I left off the units because they're big and long and bulky in any unit system, and would distract from the point being made.
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@Mason_Wheeler
and right back at ya. The values you wrote are those for kJ kg⁻¹ K⁻¹, and not Btu lb⁻¹ ℉⁻¹ (seriously? I’m getting a headache just looking at that) as would be practical for degrees Fahrenshite.Pray tell, how many British thermal units are required to raise the temperature of one pound of aluminium by one degree Fahrenheit? It’s not 0.9 Btu.
aside addendum: if you think specifying units is a “distraction”, you’ve clearly never done any calculations of relevance. Too bad if I were a retard, didn’t recognise those values, and used them as Btu lb⁻¹ ℉⁻¹ in calculations. Everything would come out wrong, and then there’d be another Mars Climate Orbiter.
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@Mason_Wheeler BTW. Not a nitpick, just an observation - here in Poland, and I presume the rest of Europe, we usually write down specific heat in joules, not kilojoules. I'm so accustomed to 4200 that it took me a while to realize what you mean (I'm not familiar with English names for physical properties).
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@Mason_Wheeler said in US Chemical Safety Board:
Fun trick: "wanna watch me hold a 400-degree piece of metal in my hand?"
My great-grandfather (and some of his sons after him, but not my grand-father) was a blacksmith -- mostly farrier, but doing all sorts of other metal works as well. I didn't witness it, but apparently a common game/trick in the forge was to grab a piece of iron out of the fire and run around the forge (or maybe just walk to the other side, or do anything with it really, just grabbing it was the impressive part).
The trick was the same as in the video, not to hold it for any length of time, so they managed it by juggling it between hands. I guess having thick callused hands did help as well.
The story goes that one day a cocky apprentice was dared to do it -- without having been shown how, of course. Apparently he just went and grabbed the piece of iron in his hand and tried to walked away. It didn't end well for him...
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@Gąska said in US Chemical Safety Board:
here in Poland, and I presume the rest of Europe, we usually write down specific heat in joules, not kilojoules. I'm so accustomed to 4200
Nerd.
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@boomzilla I've rounded to 2 significant digits and you call me a nerd?
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@Gąska significant nerd.
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@boomzilla said in US Chemical Safety Board:
@Gąska significant nerd.
I think his point was that he's a barely significant nerd.
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@jinpa said in US Chemical Safety Board:
@boomzilla said in US Chemical Safety Board:
@Gąska significant nerd.
I think his point was that he's a barely significant nerd.
Figures you'd say that.
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@Benjamin-Hall Nerdy jokes thread is
.
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@Groaner said in US Chemical Safety Board:
On another note, Miss Lucy here looks like quite the strong, independent, and sophisticated lady. I wonder if she'd be up for some, um... "human factors analysis" over at my place?
You've been drinking, haven't you?
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@dfdub said in US Chemical Safety Board:
Found another really infuriating one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZHpeBubb_M
The worst part: You'd think that after 3 preventable accidents and doing jack shit to improve the safety for months, they'd have been forced to shut down or at least have been fined a significant amount of money, but according to the newspaper article I found the only fine was $80,000.
A mere shutdown? Naw. Throw the whole upper management brigade into jail and charge them with murder after the 2nd incident. The 1st incident alone should have resulted in something like negligent manslaughter - it has been known for centuries (maybe even millenia) that dust is an ignition source.
There's a reason why flour mills burned down or exploded spectacularly in a regular fashion throughout history.
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@Luhmann said in US Chemical Safety Board:
NATO SHAPE
This is the ugliest, most military-looking building I can imagine. That sign would look cheap for a high school, much less the Supreme Headquarters of anything.
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@anonymous234 said in US Chemical Safety Board:
This is the ugliest, most military-looking building I can imagine. That sign would look cheap for a high school, much less the Supreme Headquarters of anything.
It was build and put into operation in one winter (september '66 - march '67) after the French left NATO and kicked them out.
Funny thing is I don't remember ever coming closing to that specific building but everything else was easily as dull. Except for the fact that it literally was a bunker and that there where many more basement levels then above ground. But that effect wore off after 15 minutes.
The old NATO HQ in Brussels was also very 60ties and unimpressive. The only redeeming features was a big driveway flanked by all NATO countries flags. The overall dread feeling didn't get better as you went further in the building as it was a maze of extensions and annex buildings.
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@anonymous234 said in US Chemical Safety Board:
@Luhmann said in US Chemical Safety Board:
NATO SHAPE
So the official shape of NATO is cuboid?
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@Luhmann said in US Chemical Safety Board:
NATO SHAPE
I have a business card around somewhere from a guy at SHAPE. I saved it because SHAPE is such a cool acronym:
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe
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@boomzilla
Such a good acronym they didn't drop the E when they scaled it beyond Europe
Doel Nuclear Power Station - Wikipedia
