Initial Email Enquiry –

Oil company failures led to refinery blast
Explosion 'could have been catastrophic'

SERIOUS management failures at the oil giant ConocoPhillips led to a "potentially catastrophic" explosion at a North Lincolnshire refinery, a report said yesterday. The blast devastated the plant and could have caused loss of life on a massive scale.

Four years since a fireball tore through the refinery at South Killingholme – and after the company was hit with heavy fines – the Health and Safety Executive has completed its report into the incident. It said it could easily have been on the scale of the 1974 Flixborough disaster, when 28 people died in an explosion at a chemical plant. Nearby homes were damaged in the blast, and debris from the explosion was found between 550 yards and three miles away. The fires raged on for several hours.

The report reveals management failures were such that the incident became "inevitable". Inspectors said: "While the refinery was in principle committed to health and safety management, in practice the company was unable to manage all risks and senior managers failed to appreciate the potential consequences of small non-compliances. Active monitoring of their systems should have flagged up failures across a range of activities. "In practice either the monitoring was not undertaken, so the extent of the problems remained hidden, or the monitoring recommended by the audit was undertaken but no action was taken on the results. Both are serious management failures. "If a pipework inspection regime had been in place at the ConocoPhillips Humber refinery it is very unlikely that an event could have taken place. Without such a regime in place, such a failure became inevitable."

The incident took place on Easter Monday in April 2001. There were only 185 people on site, rather than a normal weekday figure of about 800. Most of the staff were inside buildings preparing for the shift handover. At 2.20pm a section of pipe failed at an elbow just downstream of a water-into-gas injection point. The six-inch diameter pipe ruptured, releasing a huge cloud containing around 90 per cent ethane, propane and butane gases. About 20 to 30 seconds later the gas cloud ignited, causing a huge fireball. A contractor driving along in the crew bus heard a loud hissing sound and saw what looked like a jet of steam. He heard a loud "crack", saw a massive fireball then heard the sound of an explosion. The windscreen of the van cracked and the side window shattered. Three people in buildings 190 yards away from the breach were thrown off their feet by the blast; one banged his head on a glass-reinforced panel in a door, hard enough to fracture the glass. One person in the locker room was thrown across the room and suffered damage to his eyes from dust and to his face and neck from the glass. Contractors working on scaffold platforms were blown over. Around 370 individual reports of off-site damage were made, the damage consisting mainly of broken windows and cracks to ceilings and walls.

Seven ambulances, an air ambulance and more than 50 firefighters were called to the 480-acre refinery. Health and Safety Executive spokesman said: "The fire and explosion was a very serious event and should serve to illustrate the potential for harm that arises from major hazard plant. This incident had the potential to be catastrophic. "The immediate area of the refinery was devastated, many other buildings on site were badly damaged and there was widespread damage to surrounding properties, particularly in the village of South Killingholme.

"The investigation revealed a systematic failure to understand the conditions that pipework was operating under, and to appropriately inspect pipework in the saturate gas pant of the refinery. This confirms the vital requirement for companies who operate high-hazard sites, such as oil refineries and chemical plants, to ensure that they have in place rigid, robust and appropriate systems for inspecting pipework to detect corrosion and other defects." Some 71 civil claims for injury damage from the explosion are being pursued by workers and members of the public. At Hull Crown Court earlier this year, the company was hit with fines and costs totalling more than £1m. In its defence, the company said it had pleaded guilty at the first opportunity, had Europe's best record on safety and had now made changes to its working practices.

1^st Response –

It is another case of where a water injection is made in a gas plant with out sufficient metals inspection on the first piping elbow down stream of the injection point. The exact same thing that caused the Shell FCC unit loss in 1989 resulting in a $400,000,000 PD loss and a 2 year rebuild.

We just keep doing the same things.

View / download PDF document on: Conoco UK Sat Gas Plt Water Injection Fire

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