A Lesson in Lock Out Tag Out from Phillips 66 Disaster

In A Lesson in Lock Out Tag Out from Phillips 66 Disaster, you'll learn ...

• An overview of the Ethylene Polymerization production process used at the Phillips 66 HHC facility in Pasadena, TX
• What caused the explosion at the settling leg to the Reactor
• How a design flaw contributed to the incident
• How workarounds are actually cornerstones of Normalization of Deviance
• How modern regulations from OSHA may have prevented the incident

Overview

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Credit: 1 PDH

Length: 17 pages

On October 23rd, 1989, a catastrophic process release occurred at the Phillips 66 Houston Chemical Complex (HCC). The plant is located along the Houston Ship Channel in Pasadena, Texas. A reactor was released that was holding more than 85,000 lbs. of the highly flammable process materials, known as high-density polyethylene (HDPE). A flammable vapor cloud of ethylene gas formed as a result, and within minutes, the cloud found an ignition source, exploding shortly after 1:00 PM. The force of the blast was reported to be equivalent to 2.4 tons of TNT, registering as high as a 3.5-magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale. First responders were not able to immediately respond due to a series of explosions occurring after the initial blast. Twenty-three workers lost their lives, and over 300 were injured.

Lock Out Tag Out (LoTo), or Controlling Hazardous Energy, was released on September 1st, 1989, before the disaster, but an extension was granted to require companies like Phillips 66 to be in compliance by January 2nd, 1990. Because this regulation was belated, no one knows if it could have prevented this incident. The incident, however, provided urgency in the Chemical and Refining industries to move faster on adopting the regulation. Further discussions on delaying compliance were dampened as well.

An entire generation has retired from the workforce since the 1989 incident in Pasadena. Further, this incident has been overshadowed by more modern incidents like the BP explosion in 2005 and Deep-Water Horizon in 2010. Professional Engineering societies rarely discuss Pasadena, yet many failures applying LoTo still occur today. The difference is, they are confined to a few persons and do not garner national media attention because the impacts are localized.

Control of hazardous energy ranked in the top five on OSHA’s top ten most violated standards over the last few years. It is estimated that between 150 and 200 fatalities and some 50,000 injuries occur worldwide annually due to failure to control the release of hazardous energy. In the United States annually, over 3,000 injuries occur due to reported LoTo issues, with about a dozen resulting in fatalities. The injuries range from minor shocks and lacerations to severe burns and amputations.

In this course, we’ll review the causes of the explosion at the Phillips 66 HHC HDPE facility in Pasadena, TX, beginning with the design through to the day of the explosion years later. The causes were many, as were the potential opportunities along the way for engineers, operators, managers, and others to prevent it. We’ll review the lessons learned from the incident so that you can apply them in your professional practice on a daily basis.

Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained

This course teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:

• How HDPE was manufactured at the Phillips 66 facility in Pasadena, TX
• How Phillips 66 LoTo standards at this location contributed to the incident
• How Process Safety and Controlling Hazardous Energy regulations of today would have prevented this incident
• The impacts of Improvisation when trying to deal with a design flaw
• Lessons learned from the critical errors made at the Pasadena, TX facility

Certificate of Completion

You will be able to immediately print a certificate of completion after passing a multiple-choice quiz consisting of 15 questions. PDH credits are not awarded until the course is completed and quiz is passed.