Good to see ICIS news making use of video in its coverage of the fire at INEOS' Cologne site.

Looking through the ICIS.com news archive for just the past few months brings up plenty of stories of fires and explosions at plants all around the world. I know it's a pretty dangerous industry but with these kind of incidents so commonplace is there more that can be done to prevent them??? This is even more important where towns have grown to surround chemical plants - just look at the Grande Paroisse disaster in Toulouse, France a few years ago...

Anything on the results of an investigation?

The root cause is always a good start.

HI, Its a bit soon for an invesgtigation to report, the German government only called for a meeting on chemical accidents in mid April.( You'll need a subscription to view that story.)  I think that Ineos and the authorities will want to get to the bottom of it. Not least beacuse that kind of outage will cost a company a great deal of money. That it won't want to lose.

  Have you tried tagging your entries? It will help you find them later. The best way to tag is to put the word you want into the Tags box below and follow it with this symbol ; If you want to use two or more words as tags then put them both between like this: 

chemical; chemical industry; explosion  

Its never too soon for an investigation

Always a chance you repeat the original mistake

Ill get round to tagging.

 Re prevention, Carolyn Merritt, former CEO/Chair of the Chemical Safety Board, did a piece for us a couple weeks ago in which she argued that an important part of the problem is widespread misunderstanding of risk indicators. Plant managers look at safety in terms of lost time accidents, and if they have none, they think the plant is safe. In fact, they should be looking at process deviations and minor mishaps that now go unreported.

I guess it is not always easy to find what the original mistake was, and if the problem is really in the heads of managers and systems are badly designed, then it will need something more than an investigation. There'll be a need to change the way that people think about thier jobs on the site. If you've ever tried that, you'll know how hard it is.

 Are sites that are clean and tidy, safter than sites which are untidy and badly organised? Is there any research on this?

We have been into Process Safety Leading Indicators (PSLI) for some time Probably took off after Texas City (March 05) and the BP fracas.

 Dont underestimate to a) Develop them. b) Measure them and most importantly C) keep them under control.

Every organisation within a chemical plant will have a part to play

Even Purchasing, HRT and IT.

It always seems to me that it seems to take a lot of effort to develop systems, an it can be hard to get people to buy in to them. This is especially true if the "reward" for developing a solution that works is the absense of any kind of event. That difficulty aside there needs to be buy-in across the organisation and it has to come from the top down.

What about if it doesn't come from the top?

Its not a given, as it wasn't with Browne and BP.