Incompatible Chemicals: Explosion at AB Specialty Silicones
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- A CSB safety video about the May 3, 2019, reactive chemistry incident at the AB Specialty Silicones manufacturing facility in Waukegan, Illinois. Two incompatible chemicals were mixed and reacted, producing flammable hydrogen gas that ignited, causing a massive explosion that killed four workers.
A lesson that needs to be beaten into the business world:
"You think safety's expensive? Try an accident."
“You know these two highly reactive chemicals we have? Lets put them next to each other in identical containers” 🤦🏻♂️
“Yeah, but I’ll probably have sold my stock in the company by the time the accident occurs”
@@_zigzak company "we can save $5 a barrel if we just use the same color barrel for everything!"
@@kailoveskitties: "Am I, as a manager, going to spend a large amount of money to deal with some remote risk, that is very unlikely to generate an accident in my year or two on my watch here?"
So many great quotes to take from Anatomy of a Disaster, someone should have made a compilation of them!
@@fetchstixRHD I have seen many once great companys going down the drain after the original founder retired or died and it got either to their children which have grown up rich (and are incompetent and/or lazy, so the likely hire someone, but still interfere) or some industry conglomerate who wants to milk their success until they are dried out dead.
They all went out of business in a matter of years. Have it been for mismanagement and just running out of money, losing customers because the quality dropped significantly or accidents/other scandals.
New USCSB Videos: When "Yay!" and "Oh, no" cross paths.
Through tragedy, we learn. Thanks to the CSB for presenting this information to the public.
@@wildaceds I wonder how the CSB folk actually feel about having genuine Internet fanboys and fangirls?
Still, I'm always going to be grateful to gain this knowledge. It's horrible we have to learn this way, but by God, I hope we DO learn. Even if it's some rando person that watches these vids and sees something similar about to happen and stops it.
actually that's not really true, some companies just refuse to add safety precautions even after disaster and laws are needed to either completely force them out of business or make them comply with regulations regardless of their willingness.
@@ChristopherGray00 ..wut?
I didn't say anything about regulations, I said "learn." As in, the general public learns.
Two CSB videos in a month? Impossible, the air must be contaminated.
I look forward to the CSB report on this contamination in the coming months.
I didn't even realize there was a first recent one!
Perhaps we should evacuate
Is it bad that i want more chemical disasters so they get more funding and make more videos lol
We need to create a process safety management program for handling multiple CSB videos released in a short timespan.
edit: Also make sure the gas detectors are in working condition/weren't disabled by a supervisor because they kept going off
We can never really say "Yay, another CSB video!" because it almost always means somebody died...but yay, another CSB video. Very interesting and educational even for those of us who don't work in heavy industry.
Not necessarily. There was that one story in Wisconsin where a bunch of asphalt leaked at a factory but the first responders had trained with the company and nobody ended up dying. They even stopped the leak and put the fire out in the same day. In fact, it was the best possible outcome given the scenario.
Thanks, this type of accident is all too common.
Had a very minor incident myself when water found its way into a drum containing small amounts of acetic anhydride(which is extremely reactive), the drum had not been completely emptied and was then used for tank washings. Fortunately no one was hurt, but it was scary.
CSB videos are great! Having lived through a much smaller hydrogen explosion, I can testify that having people aware of the possibility of such an event is half the battle...
My daughter went to school with one of the men who were killed. He survived but passed away a short time later. He left behind a wife and children. So, so sad. My heart breaks for them. I grew up in that area. I remember when they built that plant. Such a tragedy.
Thanks to the USCSB for another well presented and very educational safety video. As a taxpayer and consumer of the end items many of these processes support, your highlighting opportunities for industries to improve their practices to save lives and the environment are much appreciated and a great value for the dollars spent. This is free education and information for industry. Preventing accidents and harm to employees costs many, many times less than dealing with the consequences of ignoring dangers inherent in so many day-to-day processes we all take for granted. I wish more companies would apply this logic when it comes to maintaining and operating work place hazard reduction programs.
Wake up babe, new csb video dropped
😂😂 I used this exact joke with the last girl I dated🤣👏🏼👏🏼
Haha
Reminds me of doing consulting work for a company and its surprising how lax some of these places really are. This place just had pallets with drums of all manner of chemicals, some with fairly provocative NFPA placards on them everywhere. And I mean everywhere, with no accounting for them whatsoever. Go into an unused back space. Pallets covered with dusty unopened drums. Unused office? More drums to climb over. It was so bad the company I worked for simply walked away since there was no way they would ever pass any sort of inspection by the local AHJ. They said they found another "consultant" to finish the job, but given that the outside of the installation looks suspiciously just like what I had specified in my design, I suspect they just got 'er done and moved on. I'm no safety Nazi, but you need _something_ at least to ensure what you know you have on-hand at any given time and that people can ID it, not to mention first responders if the place ever has an emergency.
whoa! recently started another csb binge, and these animations are really good! keep up the great work guys! these videos have come a long way! ☆
These videos are always so engrossing, incredible work.
Been following this channel for years, always great stuff (in terms of content made, not tragedies that happen). The animation also seems to have really made improvements recently, kudos to you guys, well done.
i lived for 21 years under the NSTM, and ended my career as a NAVOSH (Naval OSHA) inspector. just watch your management when they get notified the OSHA Man is paying a visit. the resistance against these rules is frightening. i soon had no friends, the selection board ensured my swift retirement, but maybe, just maybe i made a positive difference.
Anytime chemicals are used or present, a MSDS catalog of all chemicals being used is the most valuable tool in a plant.
If people aren't reading labels they aren't reading MSDS sheets.
@@GODDAMNLETMEJOIN that's true but it's there if anyone gets exposed to the chemical and what treatment is needed. Very valuable for EMS.
I've been binge watching these videos. I don't know why. It's just so informative, and interesting.
I lived just a few miles away from this plant when the explosion occurred. It shook the house and the shockwave was felt for miles around. That 3d model is very accurate with just how much debris there was. I've been waiting for the results of this investigation ever since it happened. Thanks to the CSB for helping us understand what happened.
I don't get companies that think ignoring code, having proper safety procedures and neglecting to train their employees properly is going to save them money when their factories blow up.
The narrator reminds me of the classic history channel narrations, like Heavy Metal, sorta like Modern Marvels too (the cadence and style at least, not the voice itself), and it’s really…good, clear and with personality, but firm and blunt in facts.
A worker on a chemical factory once said to me: "If you hear the bang, then you are OK".
This channel may actually have the best video production quality on all of TH-cam.
Incredible that only 4 people were killed in that massive explosion.
"Hmm, there is probably a detector for this"
And of course there is, but nobody uses them. Which is unfortunate, because the bucks saved on not getting those detectors are gonna burn up when the factory explodes, anyways...
If people don't like overly restrictive bureaucratic regulations, we need to collectively keep learning how to identify safety concerns. Even if it's not your responsibility. Never stop learning.
These videos are always very informative and extremely well done. I like watching them but quite often people lose their lives or are seriously injured. I’d be ok to never see another video if it meant nobody was hurt or killed anymore and company’s were following safety standards.
Well, the good news is you're going to get to keep enjoying CSB content.
Another excellent presentation by CSB. Hopefully lessons will be learned from the incident
Another new video? Notification squad where you at
Sup.
I worked for a short time in a Company that made Resin products. We mixed batches of materials in a similar way to this facility. Again, due to industry standards and the fact that there were hundreds of different ingredients to choose from, all of the various ingredients were kept in similar coloured and sized containers or barrels, but were all labelled differently.
It was drummed in to us that we double if not triple checked that what we were adding was correct as per the mixing sheets for each batch. I'm not sure that if we got it wrong we would have caused an explosion, but it definitely helped from quality control and waste management viewpoints.
Your videos serve all of us as a reminder to be aware of good safety methods in all areas of our lives.
I remember this, heard it from like 7 miles away
I have a love/hate relationship with this channel. Love watching the videos because they're really interesting, but hate that things like this happen to cause these videos to be made :( Keep up the good content everyone. Can honestly say this is the only TH-cam channel I look forward to not releasing any more videos in the future.
😮😮😮😮😮 These videos get better and better. Well done, and my condolences to the families of the deceased.
This reminds me of an FDA training video I saw in the 90s where some goofballs at a pharmaceutical company confused barrels of ergotamine with ergometrine.
It reminds me much more of when a local hospital stored similar packages of sodium chloride and potassium chloride adjacent to each other. Despite 5 layers of checking, the resulting IV bag killed a dialysis patient. The packages are now obviously different and stored in different areas, organized by application first, rather than by chemical name.
@@MrSunrise- Gross, a potassium injection is not a good way to go at all
This is like the Bhopal tragedy: methyl isocyanate and water which produced phosgene gas.
That is why PROPER LABELING and differentiation of chemicals by their container is a must.
It's too bad no actual laws were broken leading up to this incident, because someone should have gone to prison for this for a looong time. I hope the victims' families sued the company into oblivion.
Thanks for sharing your investigations and commentary. It is great to learn about this sort of thing. It will always be important until we invent that real-life "undo" button.
Great demonstration!
1:40 wait is that a funny error or do CPUs really have both silicon AND silicone in their manufacturing?
Silicone is a good insulator, it wouldn't surprise me.
Sillycone
CPUs use silicone to glue metal cap and substrate together
silicone heat sink paste - it's been around forever.
Silicone is used to bond the IHS to the substrate. And on Intel
That's why we put everything in identical containers with very small labels that all look the same.
I like these. I want you to do one for the time i snuck out late at night when i was 12 and climbed a radio tower with friends to steal the red lights. I got shocked by static discharge on the tower.
For processes I always like the idea of simple color coding or even physical incompatibility. If the standard 'probe' they use for sucking up the material is physically unable to be inserted into containers with incompatible materials, it is extremely hard to mess things up. Even just having different color tape on different barrels would likely have prevented this.
I am curious, did the company do proper risk analysis, and know that hydrogen gas could form when mixing some of the chemicals on site?
I was thinking the same thing about some sort of labeling or even painting or different colors. The idea of different sized openings for probes is spot on too.
RE color coding: well lets not forget about color blindness, it's pretty common and surprisingly often undiagnosed! big lettering would be a good fallback for visual identification. mechanical incompatibility is a good idea too, although I would expect it would be difficult to implement if you have a large number of different chemicals; how many cheap-to-cut shapes can you make that mutually don't fit through each other? and also visually obvious what's happening to prevent "oh it must just be jammed, lets just force it through"
@GsaUce Rug that would be cool! although remember, this plant had non-functioning gas sensors installed. technology can only fix so much, if the company doesn't care it'll break down and go unused. i'd also be concerned about the opaque nature of RFID compared to visual markings and mechanical interlocks. if the tag rejects, people will be confused about what's wrong. is this the wrong product? is it mis-tagged? is my machine malfunctioning? making the tag a permanent part of the container would probably help avoid uncertainty about mis-tagging, and designing the system to clearly state what exactly the problem is (instead of just locking out and turning on a red light) might help mitigate confusion around cause, i'm not sure. def wouldn't want that to be the only layer of protection though
Bungs on drums are pretty universal usually 2 inch
@@alancomercomer2588 oh what's that do?
Yet another outstanding CSB safety video, thank you for making it.
Babe, wake up, a new CSB video just dropped!
It's always good to know what chemicals could potentially harm innocent people, especially if they are fairly common.
It seems we all have 20/20 vision after the fact. Some of the points made would not seem to be a code violation or be a perticular safety concern at the time. Only in hindsight do we become the wiser. Seems many small failures and oversights all contributed to create a dangerouse sutuation. How the heck do you go about identifying them before any accident, how to convince company management or even OSHA officials it's something that requires attention ?
Such proceses need to be engineered such, as they fail in a safe condition. Such as passive venting to atmosphere.
Prevention can be achieved by using the OSHA Process Safety Management (PSM) framework, including Process Hazard Analyses (PHA). I am in Australia but was a plant Technical Manager for an American company that mandated PSM in its worldwide operations. The PSM framework was really helpful in identifying hazards before they became a problem. It also was effective for dealing with near misses before they became a bigger problem. When implemented properly, there are many layers of protection to reduce the risk of a large scale catastrophe such as this one.
Cheers,
Tim
@@timbanicevich5565 That's actually quite encouraging. I don't work in the continous / chemical process industry. But I professionaly train metal workers to run equipment, that includes safety training. I find the failure analysis process, and identification of the root cause a facsinating lesson.
I don't have first hand experience with the Process Hazard Analysis, although I do understand the concept of it in principle.
Always an interesting challange working with poeple and organizations.
@@trespire Ah, you're a safety person. You are doing very important work and I dip my hat to you! In my experience, chemicals always behave in the same way, once you understand them. People, on the other hand, not so much. That's why they are fascinating and challenging.
Cheers,
Tim
This is why everything needs to be clearly labeled, have alarms, have good practices, and there needs to be an independent, isolated AI to help the people present and in control rooms.
There's no such thing as an accident!
It's either an error, or series of errors/mistakes causing an 'incident' or 'disaster', or they are 'collisions' in the case of vehicles!
My suspicion is that either a spark in the switch for the ventilation-fan, or in the fan-motor itself ignited the hydrogen gas!
These videos are always excellent and incredibly informative and easy to remember. Is CSB going to cover the liquid nitrogen incident that happened in Gainesville, GA?
I want this voiceover guy to narrate a video of my life. "At 12:01 pm, a worker turned a valve and he was born"
I moved into a place down the road from here shortly after this all went down. Scary stuff. Heard the explosion almost 15 miles away
I am curious as to what the positioning of the label and the font of the label look like. Are not companies required to have proper positioning of labels? I am also curious if the containers did not have a label with the chemical name instead of a barcode or number.
LOL keep hiring people based on who they know this will keep happening...........
0:23 is it just me, but whenever you guys animate factory workers they look like shaddy cat burglars who've just heard the immortal words "Come out with your hands up!"
It's just you. These simulations are great.
This video lacks the exquisite detail of previous animations. Did you switch CGI contractors?
Your cg recreations are amazing. I wish this was the standard
The fact that basic safety plans are not law speaks so badly to so many levels.
OSHA should have the power to impose temporary tariffs on goods manufactured in unsafe factories. That would solve the problem of globalization making these sorts of safety regulations unpractical.
We are required to lable all containers and keep such in locations based on stages of operation as we cannot afford to have empty colored containers on hand and I put up a fuss when we run out of pens . I will notify my managment that have a dead vent fan as it will only be a matter of time before a reactive chemical accident occurs .
Helpful video .
CSB keeping me insecure for 20 years
Guy: Got this good job at a chemical plant
Me: Nah I'm cool
These are a great lesson in the dangers of being untrained and complacent. The company I work at takes making widgets more seriously than industrial sites take safety.
Changing regulations to cover these types of hazards is a noble cause, but the fact remains that company execs and owners who profit from these operations aren't afraid of losing their own life or freedom if they are found negligent in their duty to protect their human resources. One has to wonder how these companies can get insurance to operate.
"But what could go wrong?"
"Oh. Nothing. Don't worry about it..."
#1 there should have been a automated software and a little handheld scanner to prevent any mismatch
#2 improper training, all the people should have ran away and shut the power as soon as it happened
#3 no detectors and no vents
Props to the animators, very well done.
Thank you for covering these videos. I'm sorry these videos have to be made and for the lives lost.
Will you cover the paper mill deaths that have bit in part a reason the usa has had paper shortage.
I heard 3 people died but can't comfirm and i just wondered if you had been called in
I hope the people who make these videos know how much people like them.
Thank god the day has come. Another USCSB video.
weird how these stopped getting made and published for a few years
Your animation team is amazing. I love all the details.
*ALWAYS* store incompatible chemicals in identical containers that are not labeled.
Different colored drums would have helped. But even something as simple as putting a colored band of tape on the barrel and lid would have helped.
Its what we do, granted mixing stuff up is a mild inconvenience at my job nothing more, but it helps with identification and it's cheap.
Actually, come to think of it, I install garage floors and have better safety equipment than they do. I have a working air quality sensor.
I can't believe that they didn't do anything so simple as to ask their suppliers to supply chemicals in different coloured drums or very clearly stickered drums on receipt. Crazy.
Chemical companies generally only stock one or two kinds of drums. Plastic drums in particular only come in blue, black and white as far as I've ever seen. There are a few different structural styles, but the whole point of drums is to be interchangeable, so there's not too much difference from one to another.
From my experience working in the chemical business the vast majority of materials do come in well labelled. In particular chemicals as different as polymer dispersions and alkalis will be made by different companies with obviously different label styles, but a rushed, complacent, confused or undertained worker can mistake containers no matter how well labelled they are. I'd know, having (non dangerously fortunately!) added incorrect materials at work when I briefly convinced myself the container I needed to use was "this one right here!"
The most effective preventative measure here would probably have been better industrial hygiene practices to keep chemicals put away between uses. Make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing as they said.
@@GODDAMNLETMEJOIN Agreed. Thanks for the insight. So chemical companies who buy thousands of drums can't spec a production run of drums with certain fast dyes in them for identification purposes? I thought "Lean" manufacturing would kind of demand that?
Having done this exact type of work with some of these exact chemicals. This is largely the employees fault that was doing the batch on the second shift. When you start your blend, rule number 1 is ALWAYS CHECK THE LABELS ON THE DRUMS after that DOUBLE CHECK. 99% of the time poly drums are blue or white, so they always look the same. You NEED to make sure you have the right chemicals when you start. You could make an argument for keeping them separate but at a small site like this it's not always practical. There are often multiple blends going on at once, so if you move a drum somewhere else you could be dropping it where it's in someone else's way. Also the first shift probably left it there thinking that the second would need it as well to adjust the PH for their blend since they use the same chemicals. Potassium Hydroxide can be very dangerous and corrosive, even at 10% like in the video. It also heats up VERY quickly when mixed with water. I always hated using it and we made sure to use full-bodied suits and full face respirators when handling it. Thank you guys for the awesome video, I can't stop watching these
How many pounds of hydrogen did this kind of damage?
what a shame. Always comes down to human error. There are literally no standards for anything here in the states.
This is so sad for the families of the people killed. It sounds like a simple and easily made mistake which had little to prevent it aside from "being careful" and then nothing there to inform the people of the unseen danger.
I love these videos...Rest easy to the 4 that died...very informative
This is why gas cylinders are color-coded. Bigger/redundant labels would have helped too. And of course educating employees about the danger of mixing these chemicals! We know not to mix ammonia and bleach because we are educated - employees regularly working with these chemicals must also be trained in what happens in the event of accidental mixture so that they are extra careful to double-check which chemical they are using. It goes without saying that they should always be double-checking, but being educated about the danger would improve the salience in their minds and make them take compliance more seriously.
Safety measures are expensive, time consuming and tedious to continuously implement day in, day out. Accidents are often few and far between and workers lives are cheap (in the eyes of profit focused businesses). For the company it makes sense to minimise safety costs and accept that the occasional accident will happen and pay off injured workers or the families of deceased workers.
It takes CEO's losing millions of Dollars bonusses and maybe doing a few months jail time, to change their attitudes.
I notice that all the barrels look pretty much the same. What happened to logos, placarding, clear, legible writing on the bbl in several places id’ing the contents. Oh, by the way, worker education!
All that money goes to the Executive bonuses
When people don't follow procedures is hard to prevent accidents.....
Dynamic...truer words have never been spoken...thanks
Literally the day before my birthday, I was playing fallout 4 in my room. I lived like a two blocks away not that far from the factory
The stupidest thing is that the two chemicals are both in blue drums.
The production company is 90% at fault, the dangers were not prevented but the workers could have been more proactive
I was listening to the bit about how they shouldn't have identical barrels close to each other. I'm thinking to myself who would be stupid enough to not read the label when mixing chemicals, then i realised why i was watching this in the first place lol.
The narrators voice ties up the video nicely, USCBS showing us what not to do 🔥
Im sure the CSB CEO has lots of experience working in plants and definitely knows what to look for
As a 3D artist myself I must say that the quality of these animations is ridiculously good for the purpose they serve.
Someone over there really loves his or her job.
They probably 3d model industrial sites and do accident re-enactments as a side job.
dude. i am watching this from the netherlands. learning how to stay safe
Federal gov probably wasted million dollars making this video
@@J12345cats : Saving lives through education is something you can't agree with, I see.
@@J12345cats hur dur gubmint bad
I was about 10 minutes away from this building when it exploded. Never heard anything like it before in my life, the entire house shook and felt like an earthquake. I've been eagerly awaiting the results of this investigation. Great job guys.
I live about 25 hours away and I heard it on TH-cam.
Were you around for the propane explosion down the street, a few years earlier?
You're miles away and it shook your house, yet a guy who was working there survived the explosion.
Pretty lucky for him, I guess.
I live a few blocks away and it shook my building
@@jimmydesouza4375 4 people died
I almost feel guilty thinking, "awesome, a new USCSB video!" because in a perfect world, these videos wouldn't even need to exist. As a layperson I've learned so much about how chemical plants etc operate thanks to these videos- I live close to where the Imperial Sugar explosion happened and remember how chaotic that day was.
I thought the same lol 😢
Go have a look at what the requirements for the label on those drums is from OSHA and what a MSDS (material safety data sheet) contains.
(Edit:. This label is what makes the drums different from one another.)
Ask ANY Chemistry Teacher what the FIRST day of Class is Always about. Possibly the first WEEK because not one soul may be left behind. If someone doesn't understand the dangers involved, the rest of the class has a duty to help them.
If we move to a full-time work environment from the couple hours a day lab time a student might get, this process doesn't carry over because only certain personnel at the plant NEED to be Certified by OSHA to give Safety Classes, not for the classes to be effective. Verification of lessons learned is not required.
In other countries these things don't happen over and over again without regulations changing. In the US this stuff happens all the time and literally noting changes. Industry just gets recommendations and no agency can even act on it. Libertarian wet dream and employees are the ones paying the ultimate cost.
@@SpencerDonahue ...Dude, go look up what is included on those labels, required by OSHA, that makes them different than each other.
The phrase "nearly identical," in this video, is misleading.
Not only are there English words that detail what is inside, as well as the reactions they might have with other substances, but then they go on to include colors, numbers, AND Pictures to convey those same ideas.
This happened because ignorant laborers didn't put things away when they were done with them. Noone needs reform to KNOW BETTER.
I say "ignorant" because if they had any idea of the dangers of mixing chemicals, they wouldn't be slobs on the job.
The company hired people who hadn't had ANY classes in Chemistry to do Chemistry and supervisors who failed to correct any concerns about that.
Chicagoland has some of the strictest building codes anywhere, because of it's experience with livestock, winter heating, nuclear testing, and a cow.
This company didn't follow local codes to provide a safe work environment. Why?
It probably has more to do with the parent company being owned by a hedge fund and Accountants are squeezing every last dime out of Waukegan, and their gas detectors.
Companies don't want educated employees, and this is the outcome.
I love these videos and dearly hope that they get made about less and less severe incidents over time because that's what's left to handle.
As a consumer of bulk silicone that was affected by the shortage this caused, I am thankful for videos like this to explain what exactly happened. These videos also act as an important reminder for us to review our safety protocols. Thank you for publishing these videos!
This. It’s actually been a very good way to explain and inform people. Wish this channel was a bit larger.
@@aandyherr817 help spread awareness of this channel and improve safety and their popularity in one go :)
4 died at the accident. unsure if we should thank this.
:( I hope you had something to eat during the shortage
Do you use bulk silicone for your dildo collection?
I was employed in a chemical plant when I graduated high school. We received absolutely no training. Fortunately I was a "geek" and understood a lot of the hazards of the materials we worked with and we only had one minor accident while I worked there. It was caused by the careless action of a co-worker who wouldn't listen to instructions. Fortunately no one was injured as a result. We worked with many substances that could have easily resulted in the deaths of one or more of us.
There's cases where just forgetting to add a chemical can be dangerous. An old chemical book I found described a method for making potassium prussate. If you forget to add the iron filings, you will have some hot, solid crystalline cyanide where you don't expect it. Given this, I'm sure there's more than the two ways I know of to accidentally make a chlorine bomb out of a vat.
Working in a chemical plant is a terrible place for people who can’t listen to instructions. Hopefully they switched to a career track where one mistake can’t kill a roomful of people
@@oron61 Noting to myself not to get on your bad side. Nah jk lolz
fume hood ftw doing any reaction in a closed space openly filling the room with any type of gas should be a red flag
@@oron61 does it give off fumes on contact in air?
Amazing how detailed the 3d model of the destroyed factory is. Almost missed the switch to real pictures.
Dude driving by it looked unreal. Twisted metal is a sight to behold
Their animations are really excellent
This was your take
investigators are really into 3d scene scanning lately, have seen a lot of these in late NTSB reports so I bet it was done using these scanned sceneries
@@ShitHappensRLY much easier to do now we have these tasty little drones.
@USCSB Thank you for such top notch safety productions! Question, do you have the Georgia poultry plant nitrogen leak in the works? I believe it happened in Jan 2021.
Thank you for the question. Yes, the CSB's investigation into the January 28, 2021, liquid nitrogen release at the Foundation Food Group’s Prepared Foods Division in Gainesville, GA, is currently underway.
It's not that I look eagerly forward to seeing a notification from this channel, not exactly, because something awful had to happen for a video to be made... but I always look forward to watching these videos once a new one arrives. It's always as fascinating as it is sobering.
yay a new video!
oh no, a new video
cringe
It's like attending a good history class. Sure, the Battle of Hastings was horrible, but that teacher is fun and does nice animations with good narration.
@@X786BBF I can't and won't deny it, but life's too short to try to be cool forever. (Kind of gets to be a farce once you've got gray hair coming in, anyway.)
@@leewilder2896 You stealing the comment that is literally the top voted comment on all videos by csb is not you pretending to be cool and original?
When the CSB says, “Reiterate” you know someone messed up.
These are always so well-presented.
Bot
Not
Dot
Pot 💚
Fought
I run a chemical mfg group and these videos get presented to the team throughout the year. Invaluable for training and discussion.
I wish the company I work for would sit us down and make us learn from these.
As a firefighter, I also learn from every firefighter death.
As a non-American, I am quite surprised that the results of the investigations are "recommendations" rather than laws. I know that Americans are regulations adverse but people died.
@@YanickaQuiltit’s sort of complicated. The EPA and OSHA are some of the other agencies whose regulatory functions carry the force of law. There are state agencies too. Industry trade groups set the best practices standards for methods and safety. Both sets of groups can be pressured and influenced for the worse. Through their funding and who they end up hiring and firing for instance.
The CSB is supposed to be outside of those pressures. They tell us what happened and what should and should not have happened. They leave it to everyone else to go from there.
There are overlapping jurisdictions, duties, and responsibilities in the US regulatory system. Some of those things are at cross purposes or even contradictory. The CSB is the best bet to sort it out by showing what is wrong , without having to argue about everything else.
I love the fan base for the United States Chemical Safety Board is made up of excited, yet somber viewers. Like, I work in real estate and failed chemistry, but I got my notifications on for new updates! 🧑🔬
Registered nurse, and daughter of a firefighter and EMT here 🙋
Software engineer. Only chemical I've come in contact with professionally would be CPU thermal paste.
There are great lessons to learn in all of these reports that can apply to non-industry contexts. It's all about preventative problem solving, learning to look at a situation and automatically think, "Ok, before I get too deep into this, what could go wrong here?" Most of the CSB reports point out things that seem painfully obvious in retrospect. It is totally worth taking that extra bit of thought at the beginning, instead of beating yourself up for having missed the obvious after it's too late.
Admin for the NHS here... yep fascinated by stuff like this. At work for example we have different coloured bags for different levels of hazardous waste (from bog standard black domestic bags, to red for infectious stuff), different colours of mops and cloths for cleaning different types of spills. Different coloured medical bins for sharps or medication destruction etc.
First thing I saw in this was 'how do you tell the difference of which chemical is in which drum?' Even before they got into the explanation of what happened in detail.
Former chemical engineer and changed to real estate. I still watch though since they are great lessons in human behavior.
I feel like there might be a serious issue in the qualifications of any worker who sees ANYTHING unexpected spilling out of a tank while handling large volumes of chemicals and doesn’t by default assume that the spillage is hazardous. The fact that multiple workers reacted the same way suggests they were never trained at all beyond the basic steps required to mix the chemicals.
I mean, I doubt they thought it was harmless or safe. But recognising that its hazardous isn't the same as knowing what's wrong or how to fix it. The right answer in this case was 'run for your lives', but that's not always the proper thing to do.
A few behavioral safeguards could have helped to prevent this.
1. Product staging hygiene. This is done for inventory control as well as product identification and use. Unused product needs to be returned to the raw material warehouse area from where the product was sourced, and the quantity of remaining product documented.
2. Double verification of product. At the start of any production, the materials should be staged by one operator, and verified by another validated operator.
I don't think of this sort of hazard at all when it comes to silicones, they're generally very "friendly" chemicals with low toxicity and low flammability, prized for their stability and inertness. All the more reason these workers needed specific training to recognize it wasn't just a polymer goo cleanup they had to deal with.
If you don't think to run then its your time
Though great notice many times this process is shorthanded by companies looking to cut corners. So that secondary validation check by another worker might get the axe. A better process would be ensuring all chemicals are stored in separate color or shaped containers if not both. That way they can be quickly identified removing the chance of error and making the labeling of the container easier to read from a distance.