Protective equipment - Essay Example

emicals used in their respective industries, and may do not provide enough knowledge to their employees on the ways to handle those chemicals, their corrosive by-products, and importantly reactive hazards. This may result in catastrophic consequences such as environmental hazards, damage to physical property, serious injury, and even death. So, using two case studies of reactive hazards, the discussion will be about the fact that reactive hazards are a serious concern that should be better controlled by the chemical industry with the use of protective equipments and better regulated by regulating bodies.

The first case study focuses on an incident in early 2000s at Philadelphia based chemical manufacturing company, Rohm and Hass, now Dow Chemicals. In the company, the hot acidic vapours of sulphur dioxide (SO2) and sulphur trioxide( SO3) from the steam powered blower were treated and cooled using two absorbers (Ness, 2004). The first one is an acidic absorber and the other is a caustic scrubber containing polypropylene packing. Water from recirculation pumps which was steam powered and backed up electrically was used to cool the absorbers.

In case of high temperature detection in the absorbers, the flow of SO2 vapours was shut down with the help of a safety instrumented function (Ness, 2004). On the day of the incident, the recirculation pumps were tripped off due to electrical power failure. As a result the water flow to the scrubber was interfered. However, the SO2 and SO3 blower continued to feed the system because it was steam powered. This continued for several minutes until a high temperature in the absorbers were noticed by the workers.

Unfortunately the temperature values showed by the absorbers were within the safe range of operation of the system (Ness, 2004). At this time, the acid recirculation pumps were restarted showing abnormal pH values, alarming the workers who then shut down the SO2/ SO3 blowers. Investigations showed that the polypropylene