Presentations from the Austin Powder Red Diamond PETN Workshop February 2023 – continued

By Andy Begg

In this issue of the Newsletter, we recall another 2 presentations from the PETN workshop.

The first is an incident review by Fabian Vanetz of SSE entitled “Fatal investigation, root cause and learning”. The incident reviewed did not occur in an explosives plant but there are lessons for all plant operations. In this case the incident happened in a phosgene plant that had been out of operation for more than a year. The incident investigation revealed many contributory factors to the fatality of one person who died from suffocation – not from phosgene poisoning as might have been first suspected.

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The second presentation by Andy Begg is a review of the recorded incidents in PETN plants. The review notes that of the 122 incidents reported in our database only one was positively attributed to being in the nitrator during the nitration process. The most common cause of incident was failure to adequately decontaminate equipment from the PETN process prior to carrying out maintenance or other physical work. The presentation also gives a brief summary of those incidents where we have reports available.

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The authors are available should any reader with to discuss the presentations.