
TX chemical plant owners lobbied for relaxation of safety rules - anigbrowl
http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/texas-republicans-helped-chemical-plant-exploded-lobby-against-safety-rules
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zkms
When flooding was imminent; all operations should have been shut down and all
energetic (they manufacture organic peroxides) materials requiring
refrigeration should have been removed from the site -- either by on-site
destruction or by transport to another site. This is nowhere as challenging as
Fukushima; it's really _not hard_ to quickly transform organic peroxides into
something inert/safe.

If they're fine with all their plant being ruined due to water ingress and
don't care about flood protection, that's up to them, but if they're going to
run away and leave unstable energetic materials, that's unacceptable.

At least their pressure relief systems seem to be somewhat working, per their
spokespeople
([https://twitter.com/keribla/status/903241791264215040](https://twitter.com/keribla/status/903241791264215040)),
it's far better that the relief valves/discs open up and that the peroxides
flare themselves off than they stay unburnt and explode later.

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hourislate
The plant is built on a flat piece of ground. They could and probably should
be required to build a berm around the facility by pushing up dirt and created
a 10ft/3m high wall. If they had a flood bladder they could of put it in front
of the gate and basically kept the entire facility dry with the help of pumps
running.

The couple of 100k it would have cost seems a small price to pay for flood
insurance. I suspect they don't care and probably have the plant and it's
equipment insured for 10 times the value. That's typically how these places
operate. Now they can collect their insurance at 10 times the value of the
loss.

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noddingham
And when the electricity went out, and then their generators were depleted,
leading to the lack of refrigeration which caused the explosion. How would
your solution have mitigated this situation?

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tlb
The generators failed because they were flooded. Running out of fuel should
not be an issue: you can easily have a couple weeks worth in the tanks, and
deliver more by boat as needed.

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sjmulder
There is a datacenter in the Netherlands – I couldn't quickly find out which
one – of which the first floor is waterproof and has provisions for boat
access on an upper floor, exactly for this scenario.

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diogenescynic
This is the result of decades of republican control. You reap what you sow.

