Chemical factory where blast occurred had no qualified staff, no cooling system: draft report

Draft report reveals organizational and regulatory failures behind chemical factory explosion that killed six employees in Sangareddy district.

The draft report of a committee constituted for investigating the explosion that killed six personnel at the chemical factory in Sangareddy district flagged several organisational and regulatory shortcomings/failures as reasons for the blast.

Six employees died on the spot and 19 were injured in the blast in a chemical reactor of the SB Organics Limited, located in Chandapur village, Hathnoora Mandal of the district on April 3. The plant was engaged in production of guanidine nitrate, a chemical compound used in pharmaceuticals.

According to the report, the blast was only waiting to happen, given the inadequacies of the production process. “This incident could have happened any time earlier. Only probability delayed the occurrence,” the report notes. For one, there was no provision in the reactor for cooling it after completion of the reaction, and natural cooling of an insulated vessel while stirring was inadequate.

The eight-member committee, constituted over a month after the incident, included two expert members apart from the representatives of the Factories Department, Industries, Fire, Disaster Management, Telangana State Pollution Control Board, and Environment Protection Training & Research Institute. The committee could obtain little information or material from the company, and had to mostly depend on literature and video footage of a CCTV camera near the reactor, seized by the police after the blast.

“The SBOL team that came before the committee had no understanding of the process and the conditions in the reactor that led to the eventual explosion. The shift in-charge is unqualified for the job and does not understand the process. There is hardly any documentation on the process technology or the design of the reactors. No process flowsheet and equipment details are available. Information given on the process is sketchy, contradictory, and faulty,” the draft report noted.

The engineer-manager who, as per the CCTV footage, appeared to be taking stock of the situation that developed before the blast was an electronics engineer, and had no background in process engineering, the draft revealed. Unqualified/improperly qualified personnel, absence of any documentation whatsoever, manual operation without safeguards, lack of cooling system, inadequate employee training, and missing hazard analysis and risk assessment were found to be the reasons behind the blast.

There was 21-minute gap between the rapid release of decomposition gases from the reactor and the final explosion, which was enough time to save lives. Just before the final detonation, massive clouds of gases were released, yet no attempt was made to run away, which indicated absence of safety protocols.