INDIAN CHEMICAL INDUSTRY ACCIDENT DATABASE – AN EFFORT BY CISRA

INDIAN CHEMICAL INDUSTRY ACCIDENT DATABASE – AN EFFORT BY CISRA

M Surianarayanan* and G Swaminathan

Cell for Industrial Safety and Risk Analysis

Chemical Engineering Department

Chennai 600020

India

Introduction

Accidents in chemical process industries constitute major threat to property and population because of the magnitude. With the rapid development in Science and Technology, several new innovations have come up and process industries deal with thousands of new materials and several processes. Nevertheless, there are innumerable causes that lead to accidents of major or minor in nature. So it would be of great use if we could collate and categorize all the accidents, which occurred in the past, so that the analysis results of these accidents are not only an useful lesson but also is helpful to prevent their recurrence.

In this paper, the results of the analysis of about one hundred case histories of accidents that took place in Indian chemical Industry between 1988 –2000 is presented.

BLAZE – The Indian Chemical Industry Accident Data Base

The Blaze Accident Database developed by CISRA, is specially designed to key-in the Indian Industries accident histories. It covers accidents ranging from near-miss cases to major disasters. The list is varied enough to cover a wide range of possible causes of accidents and nearly a thousand chemicals of different nature. For easy identification and understanding of different possible

* msuri1@vsnl.com

causes, they have been classified into different categories.The various keywords present in the Blaze database have been categorized into five major divisions and each of these five divisions has sub-categories of their own. The five major categories are as follows.

ACTIVITY – The activity, which led to the accident or any hazardous situation CAUSES – The causes responsible for the occurrence of the accident

EQUIPMENT – The equipment in which the hazardous reaction of process took place. This may also refer to the kind of equipment that may have been used when the accident occurred.

CHEMCIALS – The chemicals directly involved in the process / reaction or the chemicals that may have indirectly been responsible for any accident.

CONSEQUENCES – The major consequences of the accident. This category includes damage inflicted to building, equipment, humans as well as the environment.

Though the development of such databases has become very much imperative and increasingly important, the collection of information on the accidents for the development of any such database has been a very tough task.  One of the chief sources of information is the monthly bulletin of The Loss Prevention Association  of India which regularly publishes the various accidents in a tabular form.   Apart from these reports, efforts were also being made to collect accident information from media sources viz. newspapers and magazines. 

STEPS INVOLVED IN DEVELOPING THE BLAZE DATABASE

The development of this database involves the following tasks

·         Analysis of each and every article (reported or not reported) on the particular accident.

·         Collection of specific information and details relevant to the fields existing in the database

·         Complete understanding of all the literature and articles on the accidents

·         Relevant / appropriate selection of keywords, which will be used to do a systematic search and access any record present in the database.

·         Keying in of data, so as to add completeness to the existing sketch of the Blaze database.

Thus the development of the database involves data analysis, relevant selection of keywords and data entry from authentic sources

ACCIDENT SCENARIO IN THE INDIAN CHEMICAL INDUSTRIES

A systematic analysis of the accidents based on the five major divisions of the framework of the database is as follows. This analysis has been made taking into account the information on 100 different accidents, which were entered into the database.

Activity – Of the 100 accidents in the database, nearly 50 % of them have been found to be due to improper storage. As many as 26 accidents have been found to occur when the plant was shutdown and about 21 accidents when the plant was functioning properly. 9 accidents were due to transportation faults and packing, material transfer and heat transfer led to about 7 accidents each and so on. The detailed distribution has been illustrated in the form of a bar graph (Fig.1)

Causes – Electrical causes were the most frequent to lead to any hazardous situations. About 65 cases were due to electrical faults and 55 of them were due to external causes such as frictional sparks, combustible waste, static electricity and so on. Human causes and Process causes led to about 35 accidents each and in 19 cases the causes remained unidentified. The distribution is depicted in the form of a bar chart (Fig.2). The individual distribution of the various sub-categories under the main categories of causes, namely Electrical, External, Human, Process have been illustrated separately in the form of different pie charts. (Fig. 3 – 6)

Equipment – As far as the equipment related accidents was concerned, the electrical equipment were the most frequently involved. Of the 100 analyzed accidents 50 of them were due to electrical equipment and 49 were due to storage equipment like tanks, godowns etc. The other equipment, which were responsible for hazardous situations were the heat transfer equipment and the solid processing equipment like mixers and extruders. These results have been plotted in the form of a bar graph (Fig.7).   Further, the individual contribution of the various electrical equipment like power cables, switches and old wiring have been illustrated in the form of a pie chart (Fig.8).

Chemicals – The chemicals that were found to be involved frequently in accidents were the fibres of polyester and cotton. Accidents involving cotton fibres were about 31 in number as compared to 9 accidents involving the polyester fibres. Hydrogen and related chemicals like Hydrochloric acid contributed to about 9 accidents and petroleum related chemicals caused about 5 accidents. These results are presented as a bar graph (Fig.9).

Consequences – Accidents involving fire and thick smoke were the most frequent. Of the 100 accidents analyzed about 58 of them led to fire and subsequent thick smoke as the consequences. 14 accidents resulted in minor or major explosions and in about 5 cases there was a release of hazardous gas or vapor. Consequences to humans were reported in about 3 of the cases. This analysis is presented as a bar graph (Fig.10).

The results presented in this paper is only a representative study and does not reflect the over all trend of Accidents in Indian Chemical Industry.  

 

Conclusions 

This particular sample analysis ha s been carried out to identify where the hazard lie and how it culminates into an accident.

Some of the obvious and logical causes like electricity, which is the major contributor to any accident. Supporting this, the equipment involved also belong to the electrical supply or carrier.

The location storage figures on the top of the activity, which shows that there are less attention paid by the industries to storage area. In fact storage needs greater care and safety as the quantities are large and the effects would be greater in case of even minor failure.

The only supporting and odd inference is the chemicals where cotton and polyester have figured when there are several chemicals which are highly flammable in nature are employed in the chemical process industry. Probably this indicates that little attention is paid to safety in cotton or polyester industries.

The paper is only indicative based on the 100 chosen cases that the need for such an analysis to understand the trends of accidents with their causes and consequences. It is generally advised to the industries to make use of their incidents/accidents data for analysis. When industries are ready to share the information on this with an organization like CISRA it would be beneficial to the entire chemical industry as these provide valuable guidance to the Risk analysis carried out by CISRA and also for generating Reliability Data base for Indian Industrial conditions.