Phill

It's a chilling reminder of two things for those looking at nice graphs showing a reduction in the number of eg. Lost Time injuries over time.

It doesn't matter what sector you look at or where in the World. Almost invariably there has been a statistically significant downward trend dating back to about the end of the Second World War, if you look at all injuries including those with RELATIVELY minor consequence.

1. That graph could be suddenly brought into stark relief when a "low probability, high consequence" event occurs.

....but if the organisation is big enough a single incident of such type may not impact the overall trend. So if a multinational counts LTIs in the thousands per year, one incident with say 10 deaths and 100 other injuries may not be easily recognised on the graph. This HAS happened!

2. That graph does not take account of the "COSHH" etc issues where the victims may not suffer this week, this month or even this year.

https://www.hse.gov.uk/explosives/ammonium/comah.htm

Storage of amminium nitrate can make a site need to register under comah in uk. I once new of a group of agricultural suppliers cought out because of the volume of "fertilier" they had on site.

But yes tragic that these kind of events keep happening.

the human health impact from this will be felt for years not to mention mental health...I think when Peter was talking about COSHH he actual meant the issues surrounding lung damage from blast and other comorbidities related to the blast toxic release etc...

The impact of Toulouse had ~21 deaths but more than 2000 people's health was impacted by the event...

The following means absolutely nothing when you are a foreign port with a seized shipment of fertiliser sat in a warehouse but within the UK:

In order to ensure uniformity for economic operators a regulation was issued to regulate the marketing and use of explosives precursors published as EC 98/2013.

The UK adopted the regulation as Statutory Instrument  S.I. 2014 No. 1942 and then in 2015 merged the instruments on Explosive Precursors with those designed to control poisons in the supply chain

The Control of Poisons and Explosive Precursors Regulations were published as S.I. 2015 No. 966

and not a mention of COSHH.

Originally Posted by: Roundtuit

and not a mention of COSHH.

Why are you still banging on that it isn't COSHH....You clearly don't work in the high hazard industries we are all used to looking at the human effects of major explosions and releases....look up OGP 434-14 Risk To Humans and The Green Book calculation on the effects on humans...before you continue....

This is a serious major incident and people have lost thier lives and lots will have health issues for years to come as a result...

Assembling the pieces of information to date it appears to be a series of unfortunate events - the ship becoming unseaworthy, the courts ordering the fertiliser to be stored, a ship carrying fireworks moored in close proximity to the warehouse and welding being conducted close to those fireworks.

The initial smoke in the footage is from the firework blaze the pressure wave from the ammonium nitrate.

The video footage shows a very significant fire before the explosion. I don't think ammonium nitrate burns so it was something else that caught fire. I presume that was the fireworks being mentioned, but it looked to me like the fire was in a building not on a ship.

There seems to be a lot of focus on the storage of the ammonium nitrate. That may (and I emphasise may) have been OK and actually the main problem may be the storage of flammable materials next door.

We store lots of ammonium nitrate and it is transported in multiple tonne quantities around the country almost continuously.

I find it a bit strange that the incident at West, Texas in 2015 that killed 15 people is not being mentioned in news reports listing previous incidents with ammonium nitrate. Also, Toulouse of 2001 that killed 31 deaths is often being overlooked.

As we all know the IRA used AN to make some of their home made explosives. To be used as a viable source it needs to be of a certain % . I'll not disclose that figure but AN based fertiliser sold in NI had to be below this amount by law. We had bits of kit that could scan/sample it and give a reading that would either prove or disprove it's % concentration.

To make it more effective the IRA used to mix it with other elements, all open source so no secrets here, they used diesel, sugar, aluminium powder and nitro benzine. But in all cases they had to use a kicker charge to start the detonation pathway. THis was usually a small semtex charge.

Just for reference, for those that can remember AN based devices going off, they were in the area of up to 500kg. And we can all remember the devastation we saw. To have this amount detonate is unthinkable, and I'm really shocked at the current low death rate.

My thoughts go out to all involved and I think they have a monumental task of getting back to some normality. But I'm sure with outside help they'll get there.

It also reminds me of the explosion in Cypress afew years ago