Flixborough disaster

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A chemical accident in a British chemical plant owned by the Nypro company in Flixborough near Scunthorpe in England is known as the Flixborough accident . The accident happened on June 1, 1974. 28 people were killed.

prehistory

At the plant, caprolactam is produced in an oxidation process from cyclohexane to produce polyamide -6 in several reactors. In March, cyclohexane leaked from a reactor. There were several interruptions in operation over the next few weeks, and some reactors were merged without prior static calculations.

accident

On June 1st, due to a fire that broke out in the factory, a bypass line filled with cyclohexane with a strength between 15 and 45 tons of TNT burst . Within a minute, 40 tons of the chemical escaped in a 100 meter high cloud and exploded at 4:53 a.m. In addition to the 28 fatalities, 36 were injured. There were no fatalities off-site, but 50 people were injured and around 2,000 properties were contaminated. The accident took place on a weekend with a greatly reduced workforce, otherwise the number of victims would be even higher.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Crisis Management - RiskNET - The Risk Management Network ( Memento of the original from April 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.risknet.de
  2. ↑ HMSO (Ed.): The Flixborough disaster: Report of the Court of Inquiry . London 1975, ISBN 0-11-361075-0 , pp. 14 ( PDF - free full text). PDF ( Memento of the original from March 13, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.icheme.org
  3. ^ Disaster of Chemical Plant at Flixborough

Coordinates: 53 ° 37 ′ 12 ″  N , 0 ° 42 ′ 0 ″  W.