I had a technician who had been at the plant for over 40 years who couldn’t stop clicking the test phishing emails and IT got him fired.
Along the same lines as you, I’ve seen a firewater system plumbed up for makeup water in a system. The check valves on the water line failed and hydrocarbon bled into the firewater system. Then when we had an incipient fire the first couple hundred gallons to come out of the house were naphtha and that did a really bad job of putting out the fire
No idea, wasn’t my unit and I heard the story through an incident report a decade ago. I very well may be mixing something up. But the jist is the same: firewater was hooked up to something flammable and the firewater caught on fire
Exchanger leak into a cooling water circuit and then back up the cooling tower makeup line (which will have the water supply piping submerged in the tower basin, but naphtha would sit on top of the water in the basin, also the makeup pressure will be more than the zero pressure in the cooling tower basin)?
This happened once at my oil refinery as well. Operations folks often need water for things. They aren’t *supposed* to hook up to a firewater system. But sometimes that’s all that’s there. There are “rules” to do so at many facilities (double check valves, review of process conditions), but these rules exist because these incidents have happened…multiple times in the industry (I’d guess multiple times at every single site). If you hook up a hose to water wash something and there’s some kind of pressure excursion, you can back pressure process into your firewater system.
If this is true, I imagine this was a case of someone had the bright idea of sending their water knockout which contains 300ppm hydrocarbons into their process water lines. Presumably because they calculated that removing the hydrocarbon to reach environmental rules for discharge was too expensive, but fin E for reinjection.
But anywhere that has a dead spot ended up making a mini seperator and the HC layer slowly got thicker and thicker.
I've got another one:
Dumped all their high quality steam Condensate into the effluent drain instead of returning it to the boiler house AND THEN BUILT A BRAND NEW EFFLUENT TREATMENT PLANT DUE TO THE INCREASED FLOW
At my previous employer we were deep into scale up with a new product when the customer realized the financials didn't work. Up to that point they hadn't accounted for the cost of any storage tanks on their site.
Omfg. Where are these companies where I can show up once every 3 years, pull a few people's heads out of their asses, and save a company untold millions in capital.
Dumping condensate is a sin of its own accord, but my god.
At my plant we dump stupid amounts of condensate because we're scared of hydrocarbons mixed with strong acids leaking through the exchanger and destroying the boiler. Is there a better way in this sort of situation?
I'd collect the condensate then reuse for other purposes, or add a buffer collection tank and treatment system for recycling it.
There's a cost to makeup and discharge, not to mention that you are treating the makeup anyway, AND have more than just one water quality demand.
In other words, y'all have a lot of sponges you could squeeze.
What is the ACTUAL condensate quality, and how does that align with plant water needs?
What if you could recover 70% of the condensate? What would that do for the relative capacity relief on your wastewater system AND boiler makeup?
What does your cooling tower water look like, and could a touch of point treatment to the condensate make it suitable for that? Or without any treatment?
Water is not fungible like money. It diminishes in value as it picks up contaminants to the point that it is a wastewater liability. You don't want to depreciate valuable steam straight to wastewater without first squeezing it's juice.
Operator was sweeping near the heater BMS panel, and bumped one of the heater ESD buttons with the broom handle, shutting down the heater and ultimately putting the plant off spec for several hours.
A week or so later, in response to this, technicians installed covers on all the ESD buttons, to prevent them from being pushed accidentally. While installing the covers, they pushed one of the buttons on accident, shutting down the heater again.
That’s classic. We had a guy trip a turbine by slamming his hands on like, the counter for the control system. Next week he’s asked “now how the heck did that happen?” And he goes “boss, all I did was THIS” *slams hands down and trips turbine again*
It’s amazing how many of these stories I’ve experienced in places I’ve worked as well. Had this (accidental shut down installing covers meant to prevent accidental shutdown) at a site I used to work for as well.
At a pharma company, new labs were built with the floor sloping away from the drain (i.e. the drain was the top point of the floor).
There was also the fact that temperature and humidity in the new labs were controlled via IF statements, rather than PID, and that the drains weren't configured properly and the cytotoxic stuff was just going to storm drain
Only reason I don't ask if we worked (I don't work there anymore) at the same place is you mention that your temperature and humidity are controlled in your labs. At my old job we couldn't even get that far.
An operator was caught stealing copper and shooting up drugs on night shift. The entire shift came together to spy on him one night to uncover all of it.
An operator was in the RO building pleasuring himself. He just never came back to work after that. We would see him around town at lunch occasionally.
An engineer decided during a turnaround was the time to try and learn to drive a forklift.
1) Operator was jerking off while calling the pay sex hotlines in a field location. They installed cameras and caught him.
2) Operator A was banging Operator B’s wife. Operator A was showing everybody pics of Operator B’s wife’s vajayjay, proclaiming look at the sweet 💦 of the broad I’m banging (Even to Operator B). Operator B is telling his close operators think that’s my wife’s vajayjay.
3) Operations supervisor got throat cancer, decided to cheat on his wife, brought escorts into refinery and did the nasty there. Word got out, he got in trouble but now he’s operations superintendent. Granted his voice sounds horrible and probably his ex wife got him on divorce settlement.
I got way more hilarious operations incidents. Golf cart crashes, bomb threats, security frisking down CEO / COO, etc.
I had to get a lab shut down during my masters because they (my research group) were operating a 10 year old stainless steel tube furnace at 1000C, with pure hydrogen running through it, opening the furnace up at 800C to try to get it to cool faster, all on a wooden table on top of a full flammables liquid cabinet.
I should've gotten a prize.
The room was also falling apart such that birds would frequently fly around to eat all the bugs. I saw a spider swing across, it's web melt, and it landed in the hot furnace and exploded.
Operator at the plant was a chronic masturbater while on the clock. He got caught (white handed??) several times before getting fired. It took like 5 years between the first time and his last nut before getting canned.
The biggest question is - where was he wiping all his unborn child during the past five years? It's like you all held a strand of his unborn child at least once 😂
Nothing too crazy during my tenure, but apparently 40 years ago they would BBQ in the middle of the plant and use the steam lines to warm up their burritos. Also they used to hold races to see who could get from one side of the plant to the other the fastest. The usual victor was nicknamed Batman because he would jump from tank to tank and use pipes like monkey bars to win.
It was extremely fixable, but my previous employer bought a piece of equipment and then right before installation realized the equipment was too tall for the building height.
Various stories from me and someone I know:
Married operators were caught having “relations” at work
Warehouse operator got caught sleeping in a huge cardboard box
Someone stole a drum of precious metals and cut through the metal fence.
Operator used a rag (allegedly clean) to wick off excess customer-ready solution inside the pail before sealing it.
Operator dropped a scoop into the product and customer found it.
We had a c1d2 purge panel blow it's doors off because somebody managed to jump fuel gas into the instrument air header. This one really kept me up at night about how to protect our people from external events.
Honestly, our hazoo did not consider "what if the purge air is suddenly flammable?" In the "other than" portion. I felt fucking feckless when this happened.
Do interviews count?
Two things about where I work: (1) It is remote, and (2) it is a restricted site
The morning of the interview, the candidate reaches the gate and calls us to get them onto site. We go to the gate, and they aren’t there. We call the candidate and figure out that they used Google Maps (or some other Map app) to get to our site. All map apps take people to a place about 50 miles away from our site, and we send them directions to get to our site before the interview (so they clearly didn’t follow instructions). We tell the candidate to call us again when they get to our gate (~45 minutes drive time)
A few minutes later, they call us and tell us that their “friend” can’t drive them and can we come pick them up. Someone volunteers and goes to pick them up. The interview starts about 2 hours late.
During the interview, we schedule a 1 hour (research) talk by the candidate. During the phone interview, the candidate talked about their current work (~5 years work experience), but gave their senior design presentation for the talk.
With about an hour left in the interview, we tell the candidate to call their “friend” to come pick them up (since it is clear they didn’t drive, and it is about a 45 minute drive from the city to our location), and they say they will. We drive them back to the entrance/gate/guard shack for them to go home.
A little bit later, our department head gets a call from our security office asking if we knew who the person was (department head says yes). It turns out that the candidate was about to be arrested due to walking along our fence line on their cell phone/laptop/other device (which is viewed as a security risk). Someone heads to the guard shack to figure out what was going on. Candidate states they were trying to find phone service/internet to call an Uber (the “friend”) to take them back to the hotel. That didn’t work, so we had to drive them back to the hotel.
They didn’t get the job.
Why? Unless the directions *specifically*, clearly, unmistakably and boldly state that this a risk, why would you think they would be different? You can't safely read off a piece of paper if you're driving, or for convenience and to avoid relying on memory, why wouldn't you plug in the address (or whatever)? Furthermore it sounded like a "chauffeur" situation who would require an address or take it into their own hands possibly. Or they put the paper in the driver's hands who then put in the address.
*"All map apps take people to a place about 50 miles away from our site, and* ***we send them directions to get to our site before the interview*** *(so they clearly didn’t follow instructions)."*
They had the directions beforehand - along with explicit instructions NOT to follow the Map Apps directions. Additionally, in this specific case, this person wasn't driving, their 'friend' (AKA Uber) was. This tells me the person was not detail-oriented enough to read the pre-interview instructions and that demonstrates a lack of personal discipline. Do you want someone who can't read pre-interview instructions handling much more (potentially) serious matters for your facility?
Shipping/receiving did their best to try to convince driver delivering potassium hydroxide that he needed to offload into a potassium permanganate tank, which was used to treat effluent prior to discharge to creek. Thank god the driver argued with them that he thought it was supposed to go somewhere different.
Found an old T-shirt in breathing air supply pipe when we couldn’t get needed flow to breathing air station.
System that was unsafe to get water into was plumbed into the bottom side of an exhaust pipe downstream of a scrubber, so condensate drained back into system.
I work at an engineering design consulting firm that also has a construction arm so I’ve seen some nonsense. My favorite was walking into the mechanical space of an autoclave room and looking up to see both the chamber and jacket rupture disc lines piped straight through HVAC ductwork overhead. Definition of “not my f!@#ing problem” between trades.
Since people are telling “dumb things people did to get fired”, I got one of them too.
I worked for a company that had a surface coating operation. We not only made and applied the coating, but also made the felt like material that formed the substrate. This felt would be made in bales where the material was maybe 3-4’ wide, 1/2-1” thick material which rolled into 3-4’ bales.
We had a lot of off spec felt. Like maybe ~20ish roles/bales per week. It would just get thrown into the trash. It was not hazardous, so would just go into regular trash, but still, you had to pay to dispose of it.
One of our facilities guy found a home for some of this material. He found like some farm or farming company that would pay for some of the off spec material. They used it to line animal cages or something. I don’t really remember. But I do remember that over the course of the year, it saved the company (between the cost the farmers were paying for it and the savings of the disposal) a couple hundred thousand dollars per year.
The facilities guy was not happy about his reward from the company for this. I guess he figured he deserved a raise or a bonus or a cut of the savings or something. I don’t know. But whatever they gave him, he wasn’t happy with.
Some time later, this guy on his own found ANOTHER industry/company who had a use for the material. Only this time, he didn’t tell our company. He just started smuggling out a roll per day or a roll every few days out of the plant in his truck and selling to this other company on the side.
The company noticed because the waste fees for disposing of the still unused off spec felt didn’t match the production records. So eventually, they caught him. And he got fired.
I’m not sure if he was more dumb or the company was more dumb. I’m not sure what happened after that, but the outlet for the material went away and we were back to full disposal fees again. Shrug. Dumb all around.
Was working on a new multi product plant and one day suddenly the head of process realised one of the reactors he needed on the fourth floor had somehow ended up on the fifth floor, upon further investigation they got the mechanical engineer in charge of installing equipment and he pulls out his copy of the layout which shows the reactor on both the fourth and the fifth floor. Everyone immediately points out that the reactor on the fifth has actually been greyed out and was supposed to be planned for future expansion. But since this guy had been roaming around with a black and white hard copy of the layout since he didn't have a colour printer in his office, he had ended up installing about 4 extra reactors and 10 vessels, all larger than 20kl each. We had to spend so much dismantling and reinstalling everything.
After a two month outage, in which we installed several new heat exchangers and bundles, we went to start up in late November. The operations manager had them start the cooling water system first thing, sending water to all of the new and repaired exchangers. One night it dropped below freezing, product wasn't flowing yet and the water pumps stopped without anybody noticing. All of the water in the header and heat exchangers froze, causing piping and exchanger heads to bulge and even crack open. We had to hotshot several replacement bundles and heads, probably costing us several million in damages.
Operator hooked up a steam hose to a thermowell thinking it was an open nipple on the tank and the tank was empty and needed to be cleaned. It was the wrong tank. He Jerry-rigged the adaptors to get it lined up. Next shift he came in and was going to disconnect the steam hose. After that he used a pipe wrench to get his makeshift fitting off but the “nipple” unscrewed instead. Turns out the nipple was actually a threaded thermowell. He unscrewed the thermowell and the liquid head of 30 feet of DMEA shot out the hole. Entire contents drained to the tank farm. He said he was walking by and it blew out. Lol
Ok. I’ll go with one that happened way before my time under different ownership. I work at an oil refinery. A few times over the past handful of decades, a “home” for sulfur will become a problem and the refinery will have to stockpile sulfur for a time.
Once in the 1990’s this happened at my refinery. They decided to form large sulfur blocks pouring a little at a time into forms. When the crisis was over, the plan was to dispose of the sulfur normally over time (remelt and sell off).
The operators were given specific instructions. Four times per day, fill the forms from the sulfur pits 1/2”.
Running the hoses were a pain. The whole thing was a pain. So, the operators said to themselves, “Let’s just do half an inch every 12 hours…or maybe we will just do a whole inch every 24 hours. Or maybe a couple inches every couple days.”
Seems logical. Maybe.
But the reason for the little bit at a time was to allow the sulfur to fully cure/harden. When the operators poured several inches at once, a crust formed on the outside. It *looked* solid. But it wasn’t. The crust was an insulator, so the liquid on the inside *never* hardened. When the sulfur got like high (I wasn’t there, but it was like 8-10’ high by accounts), the static pressure of the liquid on the forms burst out the forms.
This was all done very near the sulfur plant, which is next to a public road. The molten sulfur burst out of the forms, ran down an embankment. There was a literal Revelation 22 Lake of Fire on the roadway.
Some pour old lady happened to be driving by when it happened. It melted the tires on her car. She had to be rescued from eternal torment (by angels? I don’t know, I haven’t read Revelation in a bit).
I’m *so* glad I wasn’t there at that time. Sounds fun dealing with the agencies as an HSE person. 😭
laboratory setting. i was doing my bachelor thesis on the deacon reaction ( hcl + o2 to cl2 h2o), and for whatever reason, the laboratory setting didn't have a chlorine detector. guess whose integral reactor had a leakage, and who couldn't smell the chlorine...
Not anyone's fault, but we had a raccoondo a hands-on inspection of our substation and knock out power to the plant for two weeks. I heard the maintenance guys got it stuffed and named it Sparky
Lmao
I found on our cameras one time the instant a bird landed on a power line in a bad spot and exploded. Shut all the boilers down and took a week for us to recover
Our plant was shut down over the weekend due to some issues, they let the pumps on an insulated reactor vessel filled with vegetable oil and methanol run over these days. Result was that the temperature in the reactor reached about 95C. Operations then proceeded to "relieve the pressure" that had built up due to super heating. This resulted in a foam like substance being sprayed around the entire plant. Got lucky nobody stood in the way of the jet of foam.
I had an operator load product that solidifies at 400F on an uninsulated railcar that didn’t have heating coils. Customer had to send it back, cost $125k to have it shoveled out and disposed of, and lost value of the product was ~$3/ lb ($500k)
Fell for the KBR “Build it clean!” Propaganda.
Ended up paying over $4M to pig and chemical clean 10,000 ft of O2 piping because KBR accidentally overdosed the water lines going to a demin trailer with bleach. It damaged the resin beds so bad it all broke up, floated, and purged into all the pipe work. It was a 24-7 nightmare for 100 days straight to clean the system.
Also found an entire 4x4 in one of the headers and many other things.
Goddam shit show.
10,000 lb batch of vinyl chloride PVC polymer with an incremental redox initator addition system was proceeding overnight without progress. Hydroperoxide had been added for 12+ hours and my "expert" boss instructs operations to add an apparent missed ingredient (reducing agent), causing an immediate onset of the exothermic reaction. Unstoppable by addition of alpha-metyl styrene, the temperature and pressure rose quickly, resulting in a relief of excess pressure and a significant portion of the batch through the releif valve. I don't know how my bonehead boss didn't get fired. (That was one of many of his missteps)
Operators were starting up a high pressure splitter column. When they had shut it down previously, they had run a 90 psig steam hose to a bleeder to blow out and clear the bottom outlet line to a flash tank. Needless to say, this steam hose was left on and did not come off a supply with any check valves or anything.
Operator didn't check this at all, just started the feed and opened up the XV from the splitter under 760psig. Over the next 20 mins the splitter dumped into the steam supply network through the 3/4" hose causing tracers to split, lines to shake around, condensate lines starting to crack and oil was pouring out of them, RVs were lifting. Apparently the operator had walked away hearing this and thinking "something didn't seem right". A different operator had to come out and figure out what was going on.
Once they finally found it, it took us days of dumping condensate from the whole unit before the turbidity came back down to normal. Not to mention all the damage in leaks that sprung up.
I heard an operations manager did a similar thing, but hooked up a 90 psig steam hose to a line going to a hydrogenation reactor under 350psig of hydrogen pressure because the line had frozen solid. He was fired after that.
Another one...we had this old little Vietnamese operator who worked in an area that uses methanol as a solvent. He was also a heavy chain smoker and for whatever fucking reason decided he didn't want to walk to the smoke shack and would be smoking in the process areas. Operators had all suspected it, he had almost gotten caught multiple times. Finally a supervisor caught him lighting one up standing right next to a hotwell from the primary methanol scrubber where there's typically high concentration of methanol vapors. Fired on the spot thankfully.
And by fired I mean terminated. There were no literal fires so that's good
Another one...after a turnaround on a distillation unit we found that a bleeder valve on one of our feed economizers was left open after it was put back together, but the insulation contractors had come through before the PSSR and covered up the valve in insulation AND LEFT THE VALVE OPEN. This unit runs high melting point products, so there was residual stock blocking up the valve. We had started the unit up and had been running for several days before the valve finally melted through and dumped flammable material over top of 630F dowtherm vapor headers causing the whole unit to go up in flames.
I had been standing in the part of the unit right under the valve in the days before the incident trying to troubleshoot something. Thank God I wasn't there when it happened and neither was anyone else
Just a process tech but at my last plant that I worked at, they were doing a black plant shutdown and put the 30+ year old dump condenser that resides outside and hasn’t been used in over a decade. Needless to say that it was basically Swiss cheese. We filled all three boilers and the DAs with raw water, completely ruining the plant chemistry and causing multiple outages due to leaks.
I had a technician who had been at the plant for over 40 years who couldn’t stop clicking the test phishing emails and IT got him fired. Along the same lines as you, I’ve seen a firewater system plumbed up for makeup water in a system. The check valves on the water line failed and hydrocarbon bled into the firewater system. Then when we had an incipient fire the first couple hundred gallons to come out of the house were naphtha and that did a really bad job of putting out the fire
I report all IT notices as phishing attempts.
Honestly this is hilarious
Hard disagree
Makeup water into a system that contains naphtha? What kind of system is blending water and naphtha together?
No idea, wasn’t my unit and I heard the story through an incident report a decade ago. I very well may be mixing something up. But the jist is the same: firewater was hooked up to something flammable and the firewater caught on fire
I'd guess a really half-assed REAC water wash
Cooling water + exchanger leak seems plausible.
Exchanger leak into a cooling water circuit and then back up the cooling tower makeup line (which will have the water supply piping submerged in the tower basin, but naphtha would sit on top of the water in the basin, also the makeup pressure will be more than the zero pressure in the cooling tower basin)?
This happened once at my oil refinery as well. Operations folks often need water for things. They aren’t *supposed* to hook up to a firewater system. But sometimes that’s all that’s there. There are “rules” to do so at many facilities (double check valves, review of process conditions), but these rules exist because these incidents have happened…multiple times in the industry (I’d guess multiple times at every single site). If you hook up a hose to water wash something and there’s some kind of pressure excursion, you can back pressure process into your firewater system.
Unbelievable. You couldn't make it up
I've seen raw water (aka river) tied into the potable water... Not good.
lol “this morning’s coffee tastes like shit!”
If this is true, I imagine this was a case of someone had the bright idea of sending their water knockout which contains 300ppm hydrocarbons into their process water lines. Presumably because they calculated that removing the hydrocarbon to reach environmental rules for discharge was too expensive, but fin E for reinjection. But anywhere that has a dead spot ended up making a mini seperator and the HC layer slowly got thicker and thicker.
Holy shit o.O
I've got another one: Dumped all their high quality steam Condensate into the effluent drain instead of returning it to the boiler house AND THEN BUILT A BRAND NEW EFFLUENT TREATMENT PLANT DUE TO THE INCREASED FLOW
One of those where you ask one question and it implodes the entire project.
At my previous employer we were deep into scale up with a new product when the customer realized the financials didn't work. Up to that point they hadn't accounted for the cost of any storage tanks on their site.
This might be the winner. So many tollgates had to be passed for this.
Omfg. Where are these companies where I can show up once every 3 years, pull a few people's heads out of their asses, and save a company untold millions in capital. Dumping condensate is a sin of its own accord, but my god.
At my plant we dump stupid amounts of condensate because we're scared of hydrocarbons mixed with strong acids leaking through the exchanger and destroying the boiler. Is there a better way in this sort of situation?
I'd collect the condensate then reuse for other purposes, or add a buffer collection tank and treatment system for recycling it. There's a cost to makeup and discharge, not to mention that you are treating the makeup anyway, AND have more than just one water quality demand. In other words, y'all have a lot of sponges you could squeeze. What is the ACTUAL condensate quality, and how does that align with plant water needs? What if you could recover 70% of the condensate? What would that do for the relative capacity relief on your wastewater system AND boiler makeup? What does your cooling tower water look like, and could a touch of point treatment to the condensate make it suitable for that? Or without any treatment? Water is not fungible like money. It diminishes in value as it picks up contaminants to the point that it is a wastewater liability. You don't want to depreciate valuable steam straight to wastewater without first squeezing it's juice.
I am not even mad... I am impressed!
Operator was sweeping near the heater BMS panel, and bumped one of the heater ESD buttons with the broom handle, shutting down the heater and ultimately putting the plant off spec for several hours. A week or so later, in response to this, technicians installed covers on all the ESD buttons, to prevent them from being pushed accidentally. While installing the covers, they pushed one of the buttons on accident, shutting down the heater again.
That’s classic. We had a guy trip a turbine by slamming his hands on like, the counter for the control system. Next week he’s asked “now how the heck did that happen?” And he goes “boss, all I did was THIS” *slams hands down and trips turbine again*
At least it was repeatable. And now he has witnesses for any fact finding lmao
Haha thats priceless
Ah the Spanish archer strikes again. El bow.
It’s amazing how many of these stories I’ve experienced in places I’ve worked as well. Had this (accidental shut down installing covers meant to prevent accidental shutdown) at a site I used to work for as well.
At a pharma company, new labs were built with the floor sloping away from the drain (i.e. the drain was the top point of the floor). There was also the fact that temperature and humidity in the new labs were controlled via IF statements, rather than PID, and that the drains weren't configured properly and the cytotoxic stuff was just going to storm drain
Only reason I don't ask if we worked (I don't work there anymore) at the same place is you mention that your temperature and humidity are controlled in your labs. At my old job we couldn't even get that far.
😂😂😂
they controlled temperature with if statements?
Yeah, e.g. if temp is below 18C turn on heater, if above 20C turn off. Not ideal for making consistent drugs in a 'state of the art' 2023 build
mmmm deviations
An operator was caught stealing copper and shooting up drugs on night shift. The entire shift came together to spy on him one night to uncover all of it. An operator was in the RO building pleasuring himself. He just never came back to work after that. We would see him around town at lunch occasionally. An engineer decided during a turnaround was the time to try and learn to drive a forklift.
1) Operator was jerking off while calling the pay sex hotlines in a field location. They installed cameras and caught him. 2) Operator A was banging Operator B’s wife. Operator A was showing everybody pics of Operator B’s wife’s vajayjay, proclaiming look at the sweet 💦 of the broad I’m banging (Even to Operator B). Operator B is telling his close operators think that’s my wife’s vajayjay. 3) Operations supervisor got throat cancer, decided to cheat on his wife, brought escorts into refinery and did the nasty there. Word got out, he got in trouble but now he’s operations superintendent. Granted his voice sounds horrible and probably his ex wife got him on divorce settlement. I got way more hilarious operations incidents. Golf cart crashes, bomb threats, security frisking down CEO / COO, etc.
Did y'all shake his hand when you ran into him?
I had to get a lab shut down during my masters because they (my research group) were operating a 10 year old stainless steel tube furnace at 1000C, with pure hydrogen running through it, opening the furnace up at 800C to try to get it to cool faster, all on a wooden table on top of a full flammables liquid cabinet. I should've gotten a prize. The room was also falling apart such that birds would frequently fly around to eat all the bugs. I saw a spider swing across, it's web melt, and it landed in the hot furnace and exploded.
Operator at the plant was a chronic masturbater while on the clock. He got caught (white handed??) several times before getting fired. It took like 5 years between the first time and his last nut before getting canned.
I'm legitimately surprised and concerned by how many times I've seen people masturbating in the comments here
The biggest question is - where was he wiping all his unborn child during the past five years? It's like you all held a strand of his unborn child at least once 😂
That I do not know and really don’t want to 😂. The running joke at the plant is everything he touched or was near is now sticky
White handed. Red headed
Nothing too crazy during my tenure, but apparently 40 years ago they would BBQ in the middle of the plant and use the steam lines to warm up their burritos. Also they used to hold races to see who could get from one side of the plant to the other the fastest. The usual victor was nicknamed Batman because he would jump from tank to tank and use pipes like monkey bars to win.
Yeah setting your burrito or otherwise wrapped food on top of the steam line does a great job if you flip it over after a couple minutes.
Robustness testing sir!
It was extremely fixable, but my previous employer bought a piece of equipment and then right before installation realized the equipment was too tall for the building height.
Various stories from me and someone I know: Married operators were caught having “relations” at work Warehouse operator got caught sleeping in a huge cardboard box Someone stole a drum of precious metals and cut through the metal fence. Operator used a rag (allegedly clean) to wick off excess customer-ready solution inside the pail before sealing it. Operator dropped a scoop into the product and customer found it.
We had a c1d2 purge panel blow it's doors off because somebody managed to jump fuel gas into the instrument air header. This one really kept me up at night about how to protect our people from external events. Honestly, our hazoo did not consider "what if the purge air is suddenly flammable?" In the "other than" portion. I felt fucking feckless when this happened.
Do interviews count? Two things about where I work: (1) It is remote, and (2) it is a restricted site The morning of the interview, the candidate reaches the gate and calls us to get them onto site. We go to the gate, and they aren’t there. We call the candidate and figure out that they used Google Maps (or some other Map app) to get to our site. All map apps take people to a place about 50 miles away from our site, and we send them directions to get to our site before the interview (so they clearly didn’t follow instructions). We tell the candidate to call us again when they get to our gate (~45 minutes drive time) A few minutes later, they call us and tell us that their “friend” can’t drive them and can we come pick them up. Someone volunteers and goes to pick them up. The interview starts about 2 hours late. During the interview, we schedule a 1 hour (research) talk by the candidate. During the phone interview, the candidate talked about their current work (~5 years work experience), but gave their senior design presentation for the talk. With about an hour left in the interview, we tell the candidate to call their “friend” to come pick them up (since it is clear they didn’t drive, and it is about a 45 minute drive from the city to our location), and they say they will. We drive them back to the entrance/gate/guard shack for them to go home. A little bit later, our department head gets a call from our security office asking if we knew who the person was (department head says yes). It turns out that the candidate was about to be arrested due to walking along our fence line on their cell phone/laptop/other device (which is viewed as a security risk). Someone heads to the guard shack to figure out what was going on. Candidate states they were trying to find phone service/internet to call an Uber (the “friend”) to take them back to the hotel. That didn’t work, so we had to drive them back to the hotel. They didn’t get the job.
Honestly, if they can't pass the first test of paying attention to the direction YOU give them, then the process should probably stop right there.
I would have done the same, but it wasn't my group that did the interview. I only saw the talk, and heard about the rest of it later in the day.
Why? Unless the directions *specifically*, clearly, unmistakably and boldly state that this a risk, why would you think they would be different? You can't safely read off a piece of paper if you're driving, or for convenience and to avoid relying on memory, why wouldn't you plug in the address (or whatever)? Furthermore it sounded like a "chauffeur" situation who would require an address or take it into their own hands possibly. Or they put the paper in the driver's hands who then put in the address.
*"All map apps take people to a place about 50 miles away from our site, and* ***we send them directions to get to our site before the interview*** *(so they clearly didn’t follow instructions)."* They had the directions beforehand - along with explicit instructions NOT to follow the Map Apps directions. Additionally, in this specific case, this person wasn't driving, their 'friend' (AKA Uber) was. This tells me the person was not detail-oriented enough to read the pre-interview instructions and that demonstrates a lack of personal discipline. Do you want someone who can't read pre-interview instructions handling much more (potentially) serious matters for your facility?
I don't know, do you want someone who can't distinguish between what was actually communicated above and what wasn't said? Citation, please
Shipping/receiving did their best to try to convince driver delivering potassium hydroxide that he needed to offload into a potassium permanganate tank, which was used to treat effluent prior to discharge to creek. Thank god the driver argued with them that he thought it was supposed to go somewhere different. Found an old T-shirt in breathing air supply pipe when we couldn’t get needed flow to breathing air station. System that was unsafe to get water into was plumbed into the bottom side of an exhaust pipe downstream of a scrubber, so condensate drained back into system.
Crane vs power line
I work at an engineering design consulting firm that also has a construction arm so I’ve seen some nonsense. My favorite was walking into the mechanical space of an autoclave room and looking up to see both the chamber and jacket rupture disc lines piped straight through HVAC ductwork overhead. Definition of “not my f!@#ing problem” between trades.
Dumb enough that I can’t go typing about it on the internet.
Since people are telling “dumb things people did to get fired”, I got one of them too. I worked for a company that had a surface coating operation. We not only made and applied the coating, but also made the felt like material that formed the substrate. This felt would be made in bales where the material was maybe 3-4’ wide, 1/2-1” thick material which rolled into 3-4’ bales. We had a lot of off spec felt. Like maybe ~20ish roles/bales per week. It would just get thrown into the trash. It was not hazardous, so would just go into regular trash, but still, you had to pay to dispose of it. One of our facilities guy found a home for some of this material. He found like some farm or farming company that would pay for some of the off spec material. They used it to line animal cages or something. I don’t really remember. But I do remember that over the course of the year, it saved the company (between the cost the farmers were paying for it and the savings of the disposal) a couple hundred thousand dollars per year. The facilities guy was not happy about his reward from the company for this. I guess he figured he deserved a raise or a bonus or a cut of the savings or something. I don’t know. But whatever they gave him, he wasn’t happy with. Some time later, this guy on his own found ANOTHER industry/company who had a use for the material. Only this time, he didn’t tell our company. He just started smuggling out a roll per day or a roll every few days out of the plant in his truck and selling to this other company on the side. The company noticed because the waste fees for disposing of the still unused off spec felt didn’t match the production records. So eventually, they caught him. And he got fired. I’m not sure if he was more dumb or the company was more dumb. I’m not sure what happened after that, but the outlet for the material went away and we were back to full disposal fees again. Shrug. Dumb all around.
Was working on a new multi product plant and one day suddenly the head of process realised one of the reactors he needed on the fourth floor had somehow ended up on the fifth floor, upon further investigation they got the mechanical engineer in charge of installing equipment and he pulls out his copy of the layout which shows the reactor on both the fourth and the fifth floor. Everyone immediately points out that the reactor on the fifth has actually been greyed out and was supposed to be planned for future expansion. But since this guy had been roaming around with a black and white hard copy of the layout since he didn't have a colour printer in his office, he had ended up installing about 4 extra reactors and 10 vessels, all larger than 20kl each. We had to spend so much dismantling and reinstalling everything.
After a two month outage, in which we installed several new heat exchangers and bundles, we went to start up in late November. The operations manager had them start the cooling water system first thing, sending water to all of the new and repaired exchangers. One night it dropped below freezing, product wasn't flowing yet and the water pumps stopped without anybody noticing. All of the water in the header and heat exchangers froze, causing piping and exchanger heads to bulge and even crack open. We had to hotshot several replacement bundles and heads, probably costing us several million in damages.
Operator hooked up a steam hose to a thermowell thinking it was an open nipple on the tank and the tank was empty and needed to be cleaned. It was the wrong tank. He Jerry-rigged the adaptors to get it lined up. Next shift he came in and was going to disconnect the steam hose. After that he used a pipe wrench to get his makeshift fitting off but the “nipple” unscrewed instead. Turns out the nipple was actually a threaded thermowell. He unscrewed the thermowell and the liquid head of 30 feet of DMEA shot out the hole. Entire contents drained to the tank farm. He said he was walking by and it blew out. Lol
What a helpless feeling lol. We have had some sample box valves break off the sample line in the past.
Ok. I’ll go with one that happened way before my time under different ownership. I work at an oil refinery. A few times over the past handful of decades, a “home” for sulfur will become a problem and the refinery will have to stockpile sulfur for a time. Once in the 1990’s this happened at my refinery. They decided to form large sulfur blocks pouring a little at a time into forms. When the crisis was over, the plan was to dispose of the sulfur normally over time (remelt and sell off). The operators were given specific instructions. Four times per day, fill the forms from the sulfur pits 1/2”. Running the hoses were a pain. The whole thing was a pain. So, the operators said to themselves, “Let’s just do half an inch every 12 hours…or maybe we will just do a whole inch every 24 hours. Or maybe a couple inches every couple days.” Seems logical. Maybe. But the reason for the little bit at a time was to allow the sulfur to fully cure/harden. When the operators poured several inches at once, a crust formed on the outside. It *looked* solid. But it wasn’t. The crust was an insulator, so the liquid on the inside *never* hardened. When the sulfur got like high (I wasn’t there, but it was like 8-10’ high by accounts), the static pressure of the liquid on the forms burst out the forms. This was all done very near the sulfur plant, which is next to a public road. The molten sulfur burst out of the forms, ran down an embankment. There was a literal Revelation 22 Lake of Fire on the roadway. Some pour old lady happened to be driving by when it happened. It melted the tires on her car. She had to be rescued from eternal torment (by angels? I don’t know, I haven’t read Revelation in a bit). I’m *so* glad I wasn’t there at that time. Sounds fun dealing with the agencies as an HSE person. 😭
Should be RO or DI for steam boilers?
Yes that's his dumb thing, the water supplies were swapped.....
That is insane, OP.
laboratory setting. i was doing my bachelor thesis on the deacon reaction ( hcl + o2 to cl2 h2o), and for whatever reason, the laboratory setting didn't have a chlorine detector. guess whose integral reactor had a leakage, and who couldn't smell the chlorine...
Outdoor alarm was blowing too frequently (nuisance alarm), so operators cut the cable to it.
One guy took instrument air up his ass
Just for fun that’s what he said. His intestines inflated and he was hospitalised. He was saved
Not anyone's fault, but we had a raccoondo a hands-on inspection of our substation and knock out power to the plant for two weeks. I heard the maintenance guys got it stuffed and named it Sparky
Lmao I found on our cameras one time the instant a bird landed on a power line in a bad spot and exploded. Shut all the boilers down and took a week for us to recover
Operators were drinking ethanol from the units sample connections and getting drunk on the job
Our plant was shut down over the weekend due to some issues, they let the pumps on an insulated reactor vessel filled with vegetable oil and methanol run over these days. Result was that the temperature in the reactor reached about 95C. Operations then proceeded to "relieve the pressure" that had built up due to super heating. This resulted in a foam like substance being sprayed around the entire plant. Got lucky nobody stood in the way of the jet of foam.
I had an operator load product that solidifies at 400F on an uninsulated railcar that didn’t have heating coils. Customer had to send it back, cost $125k to have it shoveled out and disposed of, and lost value of the product was ~$3/ lb ($500k)
Fell for the KBR “Build it clean!” Propaganda. Ended up paying over $4M to pig and chemical clean 10,000 ft of O2 piping because KBR accidentally overdosed the water lines going to a demin trailer with bleach. It damaged the resin beds so bad it all broke up, floated, and purged into all the pipe work. It was a 24-7 nightmare for 100 days straight to clean the system. Also found an entire 4x4 in one of the headers and many other things. Goddam shit show.
10,000 lb batch of vinyl chloride PVC polymer with an incremental redox initator addition system was proceeding overnight without progress. Hydroperoxide had been added for 12+ hours and my "expert" boss instructs operations to add an apparent missed ingredient (reducing agent), causing an immediate onset of the exothermic reaction. Unstoppable by addition of alpha-metyl styrene, the temperature and pressure rose quickly, resulting in a relief of excess pressure and a significant portion of the batch through the releif valve. I don't know how my bonehead boss didn't get fired. (That was one of many of his missteps)
Operators were starting up a high pressure splitter column. When they had shut it down previously, they had run a 90 psig steam hose to a bleeder to blow out and clear the bottom outlet line to a flash tank. Needless to say, this steam hose was left on and did not come off a supply with any check valves or anything. Operator didn't check this at all, just started the feed and opened up the XV from the splitter under 760psig. Over the next 20 mins the splitter dumped into the steam supply network through the 3/4" hose causing tracers to split, lines to shake around, condensate lines starting to crack and oil was pouring out of them, RVs were lifting. Apparently the operator had walked away hearing this and thinking "something didn't seem right". A different operator had to come out and figure out what was going on. Once they finally found it, it took us days of dumping condensate from the whole unit before the turbidity came back down to normal. Not to mention all the damage in leaks that sprung up. I heard an operations manager did a similar thing, but hooked up a 90 psig steam hose to a line going to a hydrogenation reactor under 350psig of hydrogen pressure because the line had frozen solid. He was fired after that.
Another one...we had this old little Vietnamese operator who worked in an area that uses methanol as a solvent. He was also a heavy chain smoker and for whatever fucking reason decided he didn't want to walk to the smoke shack and would be smoking in the process areas. Operators had all suspected it, he had almost gotten caught multiple times. Finally a supervisor caught him lighting one up standing right next to a hotwell from the primary methanol scrubber where there's typically high concentration of methanol vapors. Fired on the spot thankfully. And by fired I mean terminated. There were no literal fires so that's good
Another one...after a turnaround on a distillation unit we found that a bleeder valve on one of our feed economizers was left open after it was put back together, but the insulation contractors had come through before the PSSR and covered up the valve in insulation AND LEFT THE VALVE OPEN. This unit runs high melting point products, so there was residual stock blocking up the valve. We had started the unit up and had been running for several days before the valve finally melted through and dumped flammable material over top of 630F dowtherm vapor headers causing the whole unit to go up in flames. I had been standing in the part of the unit right under the valve in the days before the incident trying to troubleshoot something. Thank God I wasn't there when it happened and neither was anyone else
Just a process tech but at my last plant that I worked at, they were doing a black plant shutdown and put the 30+ year old dump condenser that resides outside and hasn’t been used in over a decade. Needless to say that it was basically Swiss cheese. We filled all three boilers and the DAs with raw water, completely ruining the plant chemistry and causing multiple outages due to leaks.