Information Comes Out About Kleen Energy Explosion
February 27th, 2010
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In the past few days, a great deal of information has been coming out regarding the explosion that occurred at the Kleen Energy power plant in Middletown CT. Another worker has died from his injuries sustained during the blast, bringing the death toll to six. The Chemical Safety Review Board has released information from their initial probe into the incident which contained some shocking revelations about the nature of the natural gas “purge” which was being conducted at the time of the explosion.
The “purge” is a fairly common procedure which has been long known to come with some significant dangers. Simply put, the purge refers to part of the gas system being opened to the outside and gas released into the system to blow out the opening. This is done when work has been done on the system, such as new pipes fitted or valves replaced. In these cases, debris such as metal fragments may be left behind in the system. These fragments could damage the turbines if they were not purged from the system. Purging can be done with the natural gas supply or by using a blast of nitrogen, argon or compressed air. In the case of compressed air, however, it may be required that another purge is conducted with gas or nitrogen before the final power-up, in order to assure there is no oxygen in the gas lines. It is also possible to conduct such purges with the gas piped to a flare tower, rather than simply vented. This burns off the excess gas, reducing the danger of an explosion.
There are safety regulations, but most of them are volentary and in the case of the Kleen Energy plant, there does not appear to be any specific violation of the law. It had been previously recommended that purges be conducted with as few workers on site as possible and with the gas piped far away from the structure, but this was a recommendation and not binding. In light of this accident, the Chemical Safety Review Board has urged a moratorium on purges using natural gas.
Natural gas is, of course, a potentially explosive substance. When gas is isolated in a pipeline, it can’t explode, because there is no oxygen to allow combustion. However, once released, the gas mixes with air, creating a potentially dangerous fuel-air explosive. Natural gas can ignite at concentrations as low as 4%. When it is vented, it is critical that the area be thoroughly ventilated to assure that the gas is completely dispersed. Natural gas is primarily methane and therefore is lighter than air, although not as much so as hydrogen or helium. In general, methane will tend to disperse upward, but this property can also be problematic if there is a roof or overhang, which the gas may become trapped under.
The rate of dispersal of methane depends on a number of factors. Gas will disperse much faster in open spaces, and wind will help accelerate the dispersal. Sheltered areas may contain the gas for some time, and while natural gas does tend to disperse upward, if compressed gas is discharged, the drop in temperature will cause an increase in the density of the gas. Cold natural gas may linger near the ground until it warms up enough to be lighter than air.
A photo has come out of a purge conducted at the Kleen Energy plant only a few hours before the deadly explosion. This purge was uneventful, but reportedly the purge which was conducted at the time of the explosion used the same setup. The photo is quite telling, even shocking.
That mist coming out of the pipe indicates the natural gas being expelled. The mist is not the gas, however, it’s only some condensation caused by the cold gas escaping. Methane is invisible, but if it were visible, this photograph would probably show a solid white foreground, with the entire area obscured. The total amount of gas released in one of these purges is upwards of 400,000 cubic feet! The enclosed space where the venting took place was called “inherently unsafe” by the chemical safety review board.
The photo very obviously shows that the gas was not released in an open space at all. It was released right on the premises, in the middle of equipment and structures and only slightly outside of the main building. Reports indicate that the gas release pipe was located in an enclosed area behind one of the combined cycle plant’s heat recovery boilers, with the gas being blown out into a cavernous area between the two boilers. This area, known as the “courtyard” is where the explosion occurred. It’s possible that the gas could have flowed back into the covered structure, given its close proximity. The dispersal would depend largely on wind, but would undoubtedly be impeded by the structures in the area.
Looking at the location of the gas discharge, in a sheltered area with overhangs and near workers and equipment, it appears that this practice was a disaster waiting to happen. However, it gets much much worse:
The gas could have been ignited by one of several ignition sources because welding and grinding were going on during the purge, a diesel fuel heater was near the back wall of the building near where the explosion occurred, and welders’ work tables in the courtyard area might have been charged.Also, radio transmissions or even static electricity could have sparked the blast, sources said.
Yes, that’s right – there was welding equipment in the area that had not been checked to insure it was in a safe condition. There were also a number of “torch” type heaters in the area, which burned propane in an open flame with only minimal protection. The photo to the right shows one of these heaters at the location. Reportedly, welders had been working on the site around this time. If that’s not bad enough, there was an open flamed heater! It appears that the workers were never ordered to avoid the area or stop doing work which might create a spark. Even the open flamed heaters were not shut down for the natural gas purge. While these actions may not violate any regulations directly, there are already lawsuits being filed on the grounds that the purge procedure constituted gross negligence and lack of due concern for safety.
I can’t help but agree. I don’t know whether the company had assigned a safety officer or instituted a procedure for these kind of purges. This purge procedure, whether or not it violated any procedure, seems to have been a violation of common sense and lacked even the most basic safety measures.
It can be easy to look back at something with 20/20 hindsight and criticize the way something was done. However, this incident goes beyond that kind of armchair criticism. I might point out that when I light a gas barbecue grill, if the grill does not ignite after a few seconds of pushing the ignition button, I turn off the gas and open the grill to let it air out before I have another go at it. Workers at natural gas companies are told to get all non-essential persons away from an area at the very smell of gas. (Actually, methane does not have a smell, a chemical is added to give it one.) Furthermore, the dangers of natural gas are well known – in one notorious incident, nearly 300 were killed when a Texas school exploded in 1937.
It’s just too bad that when working with something as potentially dangerous as natural gas, there is not the kind of culture of safety and oversight that such hazardous work requires - the kind of safety culture found in the nuclear industry.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Events, Good Science, History, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 27th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
The lawsuit filed in Hartford Superior Court says workers were not warned that the gas being purged could not be contained. There isn’t a regulation saying one must not vent NG into an area with open-flame heaters.
Seriously, At what point is commonsense supposed to cut in? At least one of the people doing this job must hold a gasfitter’s ticket, and without checking, I am almost sure that Connecticut licensing authority would expect the holder of such a certification to know that it’s not good practice to vent an explosive gas in an area with open sources of ignition.
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February 27th, 2010 at 6:56 pm
DV82XL said:
That is what is astounding to me. You look at the picture and the diagram and wonder did anyone on the site know the first thing about this? I would have thought it would be common sense not to vent the gas right in a contained area where there’s an overhang and open flames.
Do you need to be a gas-fitter to know this? Do you need to be an electrician to know not to stick body parts into electrical sockets? Do you need to be a mechanic to know not to run in traffic?
My grandmother knows better than to do this. I mean that completely literally. My maternal grandmother had an old gas stove where the flame occasionally went out. When it did, she knew enough to open up the windows in the kitchen and tell everyone not to turn on or off any lights, because of the spark that can be created in the switch. Then she told us all to go into the other part of the house until the kitchen aired out a bit.
The guy who fills my gas grill tank at the local garden shop knows better than that. Granted it’s propane, but when I go to fill the tank, he says “is your car off” and adds “just in case we got a leak or something, i want to be sure there’s nothing here that might light it off” Granted, a car would be unlikely to do so unless the spark plug cables were old or it backfired, but still – this guy who’s probably 18 years old and paid slightly above minimum wage knows better than to let gas out around an ignition source.
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February 27th, 2010 at 11:11 pm
::blink:: ::blink::
That is one of the dumbest things I’ve heard supposedly intelligent people doing lately. I’m sure I’ve heard of dumber but that is just … gah…..
I mean it is common sense to treat concentrated natural gas like a source of fire. There is no question of negligence. The only question is if it was limited to the site or was systemic in the company. And yet they will argue that because it wasn’t against the law they are clear. My response is no they aren’t it was a clear and present danger waiting to happen. Gah…. Just gah…..
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February 27th, 2010 at 11:27 pm
TomT said:
There does come a point where we cannot blame a company for criminal negligence on the part of its employees. Granted, if the accident was the result of standard practice, or common practice in the firm, there should be corporate accountability. But if this was a case of a lazy crew taking unauthorized short-cuts, then the blame has to lie with them.
I’m not saying this is the case, I’m just saying it is too easy to make broad accusations of corporate malfeasance over the isolated actions of a bad apple.
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February 28th, 2010 at 12:23 am
That is astounding. I am almost about to pick my jaw up off he floor. I can understand how management would never tell the workers not to let out gas near open flames, because it’s so obvious it would not occur to anyone.
However, what I want to know is how was there no foreman or safety officer or something on the scene to stop this from happening? You don’t do something like vent gas without some kind of assigned safety person or persons there to approve the venting! That’s just basic common sense. When working with gas there needs to be someone there who knows how to deal with gas and do the right thing.
Yeah, even if this was not directly against the law, it’s still an example of complete gross negligence because you’re not supposed to do things that are this clear a danger. I’m almost not surprised it was one of these new gas plants in a way, given the current drive for them and the “clean” thing that’s being pushed. It’s such as sham.
If this is common practice then I wonder how we don’t have more explosions like this.
BTW: The photograph of the gas being vented makes my skin crawl! It’s just shooting off gas right in the middle of all a big mess of catwalks and beams and equipment! You don’t do that in the middle of that stuff where there’s god knows how many places for the gas to get trapped or ignited! In a “Courtyard” between turbines. With heaters burning no less! GAAA!
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February 28th, 2010 at 3:05 am
TomT said:
Agreed. Without a supervisor or someone to approve a job I’ve seen noobies and greenhorns do some pretty stupid things, but never this stupid. Did it not occur to anyone to run the pipe away from the building and not have it shoot out the gas in the middle of the equipment? Did it even occur to them to put out open flames?
If the workers who died in this were actually in any way responsible for the procedure or could have stopped it, then they deserve the Darwin Award.
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February 28th, 2010 at 6:05 am
Well, we are talking about a company that can’t even spell the word “clean” right, here…
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February 28th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
It reminds me of the Tomsk-7 nuclear reprocessing complex in Russia. They also had very interesting ideas like dumping actinide waste into a small lake. Before that, they dumped it directly into a river that was used for drinking water. (Note that it’s rather hard to find reliable information about this site because most of it is anti-nuclear propaganda, but this paper looks reasonable.)
http://phys4.harvard.edu/~wilson/publications/pp747/techa_cor.htm
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February 28th, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Tweenk said:
One of the things I have found is that no matter how hard some try to exaggerate the sins of the Soviet nuclear apparatus during the Cold War, the truth (if it ever comes out) turns out to be much worse.
It is the one area that reality outstrips even the fevered imaginations of the antinuclear propagandists.
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February 28th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Tweenk said:
That does not surprise me terribly, although these kind of things were not confined to the nuclear sector in the Soviet Union and even within the nuclear sector, many of the things that happened were not even radiation-related. In the case of Tomsk-7, they were not only dumping actinides waste into bodies of water, but also dumping various solvents, binding agents and other chemicals from the reprocessing system.
Many of these soviet industrial and military sites, you’ll find that over the years ungodly amounts of things like PCB’s, dioxins, benzene, chromium and so on were released without much concern for safety.
The Soviet Union also experimented with mercury cooled fast breeders and based on some of the things I’ve read, the way it was done it’s just sheer luck that nothing went wrong and caused a huge mercury spill. Obviously, when dealing with hot liquid mercury flowing around, you need to be very careful and in general they were not as careful as you’d probably want to be.
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March 4th, 2010 at 2:06 am
Very good info, but the implications and the actual events are fairly shocking. Anyone should know that natural gas is highly explosive when it is mixed with air. If this happens near a source of ignition BOOM. It’s amazing that they would let out that much gas with no concern for the fact that it could ignite.
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March 5th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
DV82XL said:
That’s the silliest thing I’ve ‘heard’ you say. The corporation is responsible for everything that occurs on their site. If the company doesn’t know how to run a construction site safely they shouldn’t be doing it. If the company hires people who don’t know what they are doing, they must hire other people who do know – to run the site.
The corporation holds the site permits and operating licenses and the corporation is the entity that will get the money when the plant sells it’s power output. The operating permits, discharge permits, etc. issued by the state of Ct should be revoked, such that this corporation never operates the plant. The operation of a plant like this is literally ‘playing with fire’ and we (as a society) do not have to allow idiots and incompetents to do so in search of profits. I think the company should lose it’s shirt on this – everything they’ve put into it so far should be a loss, this is the only language corporations understand.
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March 5th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
gman said:
I think you misunderstood what I wrote.
Indeed if there is a culture of indifference, or if management is pushing for shortcuts, and similar abuses of responsibility, you are right; they cannot hide behind whatever their stated processes are. However if it is a clear case of a criminal act of negligence by this crew, particularly if they were under a certified gasfitter, then I do not subscribe to the view the company should be punished.
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March 5th, 2010 at 7:56 pm
DV82XL said:
There will need to be an investigation. My own view on this is that a company is responsible for safety on the workplace, and even if there were individuals who acted improperly, it’s the responsibility of the company to assure that does not happen by having the proper safety officers, inspectors, supervisors, procedures and paperwork to make sure that a bunch of unionized workers don’t act like idiots and blow the place up.
Unfortunately, you can’t count on the good judgment of workers. You have to make sure there are checks and supervision involved to stop idiots from causing an accident. I’ve worked in places where it was annoying the procedures you had to do to stop accidents that seem obvious, but the thing is that people do end up being stupid enough for that to be necessary.
I do, however, think that the company could be absolved under certain circumstances. For example, if they hired an outside contractor to do their safety review work and that contractor had given them a reasonable assurance that they would provide the proper oversight and procedures and did not, then you could argue that it was out of their hands and that they did everything right, but their contractor was at fault for not providing the services promised.
That said, there is more than one party who failed here, and of that I have no doubt. The company, Kleen Energy LLC, should have made sure that the work site was safe. However, whoever financed the project or any brokers or banks involved should have done more to audit the company and make sure that they had their act together before committing so much money to it. Their insurance company should have also taken a close look at their safety standards before issuing them any major insurance coverage.
In addition to the finance companies and the insurance companies where was the union? Granted that labor unions usually do everything they can to make quality low and operating costs high and I’d generally never trust a union to get anything right, but still, one of the major arguments for having a union is to keep workers from being placed in unsafe environments. Why the **** didn’t they bother noticing something as serious as their union “brothers” being employed next to a pipe spewing gas????
There is more than one organization that failed here.
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March 5th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Keeping in mind that this is a hypothetical, since we do not know the details, I respectfully disagree that a organization is always resposible for the actions of their employees.
Licensing and certification of individuals, at least as it is practised in aviation, transfers certain responsibilities onto the holder and empowers them with certain rights. A licensed technician, working as the employee of an airline can ground an aircraft with a signature, and unless it can be proven that it was done so capriciously, there can be no disciplinary action taken. At the same time when this same person releases an aircraft as flightworthy, they accept unlimited criminal liability for that action. This must be, because to have any system like this work, the buck has to stop somewhere, and at the feet of some individual that will make the final decision.
I don’t know how things work in the situation under discussion now. I presume, based on my limited experience in dealing with this trade, that it is similar in the States as it is up here.
To become a certified gasfitter, you must first pass the Apprentice Acceptance Exam, then put in 4,500 hours and 36 months of trade work experience as gasfitters apprentice, after which you can write for a Journeyman Certificate, …er excuse me Journeypersons Certificate, then put in another 6,750 hours and 54 months of trade work experience before becoming eligible to apply to write the exam for full certification.
This isn’t some dummy with a wrench, which is reflected in the $24 – $36/hr they get paid.
Now if Kleen Energy wasn’t using someone like this as the lead on this job, they should hang, but what I am saying IF they did have a qualified in-change, and this was a clear case of criminal negligence on the part of that person, the weight of the law should fall there.
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March 5th, 2010 at 9:02 pm
DV82XL said:
No, Journeyman is correct — at least in terms of proper English usage.
I suppose that the PC police will disagree, but they’re a bunch of illiterate fools, who have no business telling anyone how English is supposed to be used. This kind of nonsense might appeal to government bureaucrats, who have nothing better to do than to change the name of something because of some popular whim, but the rest of us should retain some respect for the language that we speak.
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March 5th, 2010 at 9:06 pm
DV82XL said:
You’re right. It depends on the circumstances. In any case, somebody did something wrong. In fact, I’d bet more than one party did something wrong and needs to be held responsible.
This was not one of those “act of god” or “freak accidents” that occasionally happen where there’s really nobody to blame because it was an unforeseen and unforeseeable event. I believe as information comes out it will become more apparent how the blame is distributed.
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March 10th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
no one know what they are doing managment or electrictions or theworkers or the goverment everyone pointing fingers its your job to keep me secure its your job, human race is failing again.
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