The treatment of hazardous waste poses some unique chemical reactivity hazard management challenges. Hazardous waste in the United States is regulated by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, typically due to potential environmental and health hazards. However, hazardous waste can also have chemical reactivity hazards associated with storage, handling, or mixing with other materials. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been active in communicating chemical reactivity hazards to the regulated community and has identified numerous sources for additional information. The Center for Chemical Process Safety has also been very active in providing advisory materials and monographs on the safe management of chemical reactivity hazards. Other federal government agencies, such as the Chemical Safety Board and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, have also taken up the call for increased awareness of the hazards of unintentional chemical reactions. Despite these efforts, history of incidents indicates that reactive chemical hazards associated with hazardous waste still go overlooked. In this article, we review hazardous waste incidents through case studies and public sector reports through the lens of chemical reactivity hazard management. In each incident, inadvertent heating resulted in an unintended chemical reaction, and sufficient information existed or could have been obtained to identify the hazards. © 2014 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 33: 395–398, 2014
In this article, causal factors and corrective actions surrounding improperly inerted vessel incidents are developed and compared based on several case studies of flash fires or explosions involving these process vessels. In industry, vessels that contain or have contained flammable vapors are commonly inerted for many reasons, but one of the most common is explosion prevention. Common inerting gases are carbon dioxide, nitrogen, steam, and air, depending upon the specific application. Incident causes ranged from procedures to design issues, but a general set has been produced for application to the problem of explosion prevention in process vessels. Each case study is compared to safety standards to show how safe work practices could have prevented the accidents. However, rigid adherence to safety standards may not be sufficient to prevent an accident. The application of a safety standard should be tempered by situation‐specific circumstances. Some specific recommendations for preventing explosions include methods for improved mixing of the inert gas, the use of blinds, filling the vessel with water, improved work procedures and improved monitoring procedures. A suggested design strategy for engineering an inerted system is presented.
Six case studies of fires or explosions involving air pollution control (APC) systems are reviewed in this paper. These case studies have been generalized from actual accident investigations performed by the authors. The case studies cover the APC technologies of thermal oxidation, catalytic oxidation, gas scrubbers, adsorption, and condensation. Each of the technologies was used to control emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The accidents encompass a broad range of industries, ignition sources, and circumstances. The causal factors for these accidents are compared with applicable safety guidelines and standards to show how safeguards could have prevented or mitigated these accidents. The common theme that emerges from these accident investigations is that APC systems should not be specified and installed strictly by intuition or experience, but rather through careful engineering design. The key findings of this study are: Characterize the waste stream to be treated. Conduct a process hazard analysis for each APC system, with particular emphasis on fire and explosion hazards. Design the APC system using good engineering practices. Operate the APC system within its design specifications. Periodically verify that the APC system performance satisfies its technical and regulatory objectives. Perform maintenance activities in accordance with manufacturer's recommendations. Each of the accidents was the direct result of the omission of one or more of these basic tenets. © 2005 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog, 2005
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