The Anonymous Widower

Panorama on the Gulf Oil Spill

A fascinating program, which probably asked more questions than it answered.

I’ve worked on some fairly dangerous chemical plants and you always put safety first,  last and at every place in between.  You might be lucky taking a short cut, but can you live at peace with yourself, if that short-cut proves to be fatal for others?  I couldn’t!

So when doubts are raised about the working state of the blow-out protector by an engineer and it would seem these warning are ignored by BP and Transocean, I raise my engineer’s head in despair.

But then other engineers and managers have ignored such calls.  I worked on a plant at ICI Mond in the late 1960s, where one of my colleagues installed an instrument, that said under some operating conditions, the plant could explode.  The plant operation was immediately modified to avoid this condition. However the non-ICI designers of the plant saidthat no instrument could measure what we had found and refused to shut a similar plant in continental Europe.

They were wrong, not to do something which may have been important for safety.

June 21, 2010 - Posted by AnonW | World | Engineering, Safety