Workplace safety is essential for protecting employees and ensuring smooth operations. This section covers a wide range of safety topics, including hazards, risk management, and preventive measures. Learn how to identify risks, follow safety procedures, and maintain a safe and compliant work environment.
A 200-litre steel drum sits on a scale in the filling bay. A half-conductive hose is lowered through a dip pipe to the bung. When toluene starts moving at four metres per second through thirty metres of pipework, positive and negative charges separate as the fluid shears past the pipe walls. Within seconds the drum’s … Read more
On 17 July 2007, a driver at a solvent distribution terminal opened a fill line to transfer VM&P naphtha into a 15,000-gallon above-ground storage tank. It was routine — the terminal had run the same transfer thousands of times before. Inside the tank, a float on the level-gauge linkage had worked loose over years of … Read more
In January 2011, a stainless-steel autoclave door failed on a 42-year-old UK engineer named Michael Whinfrey. The Health and Safety Executive investigation concluded that safety devices had been removed from the vessel to cut running costs — what the court described as systemic failings attributable to senior management. He had been standing in front of … Read more
The horizon wraps the installation in a clean 360-degree line that never changes. Below the helideck, more than a hundred meters of cold grey water separate the jacket legs from the seabed. Winds across the cantilevered accommodation block average around 35 knots through the autumn months, and the nearest trauma hospital is a two-hour helicopter … Read more
Eleven of 32 worker fatalities reported across International Association of Oil and Gas Producers member companies in 2024 occurred during drilling, workover, and well operations. That is a third of the industry’s reported deaths concentrated in a single activity category, on sites run by operators whose HSE budgets dwarf those of almost every other sector. … Read more
The shell boiler in our Building 4 clean utilities plantroom holds roughly 8,400 litres of saturated steam and water at 10.3 bar g when it’s running at full load. That vessel carries the stored energy of several kilograms of high explosive — not in the chemistry of what’s inside it, but in the pressure itself. … Read more
Put your palm on the steel shell of a 30-metre propane sphere at an olefins plant on a coastal industrial strip, and the metal feels ordinary — cool, slightly gritty under paint. Behind that 40 mm of plate sits roughly 2,000 cubic metres of liquefied hydrocarbon at 17 barg, held there by nothing more than … Read more
On the evening of September 9, 2010, a 30-inch natural gas transmission line running beneath a residential street in San Bruno, California ruptured during a pressure-control operation. Eight people were killed, more than sixty injured, thirty-eight homes destroyed, and roughly seventy others damaged. Eleven months earlier, a six-foot seam failure on a 30-inch crude line … Read more
Third-floor platform of the crude distillation unit, 2 a.m., the atmospheric column running near 650°F at the bottom and the overhead naphtha stream pulling close to its bubble point. Twelve inches of lagging stands between the flange I’m checking and a hydrocarbon stream that would flash to vapor the instant it hit atmospheric pressure. The … Read more
I inherited a mixed lifting fleet when I moved to the distribution and cold-storage campus I now cover — sixteen counterbalance forklifts, four reach trucks, two goods-only platform lifts between the mezzanine and the chilled dispatch floor, and around 140 accessories ranging from polyester round slings to grade 80 chain sets on the yard-side loading … Read more