Lessons from Buncefield
18 Dec 2008
COMMENT
Lessons from Buncefield
Drivers filling up their cars with petrol instinctively keep a watchful eye on the procedure even though they know the pump will automatically shut off when the tank is full. Instinctively again, they will have a greater degree of attentiveness to the process if it is late at night, to compensate for any tiredness they may be experiencing.
However, when at 7.00pm on 10 Dec, 2005, a 14-inch pipeline began pumping aviation fuel at a rate of 550m3/hr into a massive oil storage tank at the Buncefield Oil Storage Terminal, such common sense had apparently long before gone walkabout. The result was a chain of events - including the overfilling of the tanks due to the failure of tank level shutoff and monitoring systems - that caused to the biggest ever explosion in peacetime Europe, at 3am the next morning.
Over the last three years, the Buncefield investigation team has painstakingly investigated every aspect of the incident and produced a series of heavy-weight reports into issues such as safety management at storage sites for fuels and other hazardous substances, environmental impact and planning around industrial sites.
However, the basic causes of the accident were a lack of appreciation of the risks associated with handling such huge quantities of fuel and an over-reliance on dated equipment and systems for preventing loss of containment. The common denominator here seems to be human error at various levels of the oil storage operation.
The key lessons from Buncefield, therefore, are that, at site level, process safety must be secured by independent and automatic systems without reliance on human intervention, and that senior management are responsible for delivering and maintaining their site safety regimes, based on such systems.
Please send your comments on this issue, or any other aspect of Process Engineering to patrick.raleigh@centaur.co.uk
Wishing you a Merry Christmas, and Happy (and safe) New Year!
Patrick Raleigh
Editor
