OSHA Accident Investigation · Summary #14231955
WORK RULES,CLEANING,FIRE,TOLUENE,EXPLOSION,CHEMICAL REACTION,FLYING OBJECT,TANK,CHEMICAL
Event description
Employee killed, another injured during tank explosion
Investigation abstract
Employee #1, a chemist, Employee #2, and two coworkers were assigned to unplug a sed and within one or two seconds the tank exploded, killing Employee #1. Employ ee #2 was injured by debris and fire. The tank had contained approximately 900 l b of sulfur dichloride and approximately 35 gallons of toluene. feed line to a chemical reactor that was used to form thio-bis as an intermedia te product. The plug had occurred on the night shift; the day shift crew began t he cleanout operation by flushing the line with toluene after nitrogen pressure failed to free the line. The toluene cleared the line, but the sulfur dichloride still would not feed, so the employees added toluene to the feed tank that was used to feed sulfur dichloride into the reactor. After the first of two 55 gallo n drums was added through an air pump Employee #1 went to the tank to feel if it were heating, which would have shown a reaction inside. The blow-out disk relea
Victims (2)
-
#1 Fatality Age 34 M
- Nature of injury
- 6
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 9
- Occupation code
- 73
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 9
- Hazardous substance
- 2460
- Task assigned
- 1
-
#2 Hospitalized Age 39 M
- Nature of injury
- 4
- Part of body
- 19
- Event type
- 1
- Source
- 9
- Occupation code
- 224
- Human factor
- 1
- Environmental factor
- 5
- Hazardous substance
- 2460
- Task assigned
- 1
Codes shown verbatim from OSHA's accident-investigation database. A human-readable decoder is coming in a future release once the accident_lookup2 dictionary is loaded.