In the early hours of Sunday 11th December 2005, a number of explosions occurred at Buncefield Oil Storage Depot. One of the initial explosions was of massive proportions and resulted in a large fire. Over 40 people were injured; fortunately there were no fatalities.
Significant damage occurred to both commercial and residential properties in the vicinity and a large area around the site was evacuated on emergency service advice. The fire burned for several days, destroying most of the site and emitting large clouds of black smoke into the atmosphere.Another major accident is the explosion at BP’s Texas City oil refinery resulted in 15 fatalities and more than 170 injuries. This explosion became a key driver in the assessment of the validity of API RP 752 for the management of hazards associated with location of process plant buildings, and the subsequent development of API RP 753 for the management of hazards associated with the location of process plant portable buildings.
As a result of the major accidents mentioned above, and the need to continuously improve safety performance and reduce risk, the location and design of occupied buildings on or around hazardous facilities have been a recurring theme. In 2010 the Dutch Arbeidsinspectie launched a campaign to make companies aware of the potential risk of people located in existing and temporary buildings on site.
New developmentsDet Norske Veritas (DNV) developed a new version of the PhastRisk software which enables the possibility of a facility sitting study without the use of expensive Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) packages. The main advantage of the new software tool is the ability to account for specific geometrics on the industrial site, by setting up three dimensional “congested” areas. The ability to draw this map of the industrial site simulates the plant layout in more detail.
In case a loss of containment (LOC) occurs the software predicts the movement of the released vapour clouds and his interaction with pre-defined congested areas. After ignition the Multi Energy Method (MEM) is used to predict the overpressure and impulse on people in the vicinity of the explosion, both indoors and outside.
DNV Rotterdam is currently using the latest version of this software tool to perform a facility sitting study for a Dutch refinery. From this study DNV is able to provide valuable information to the company to select the optimal location for a new building and to provide input for the building engineering, on a probabilistic basis.This example shows that facility site studies for new or temporary buildings can now be preformed for reasonable prices. If requested this assessment can be extended to all buildings present on a site.
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Datum: maandag 27 juni 2011