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Same-Day Analysis
Gas Power Plant Blast Kills Five in U.S. State of Connecticut
Published: 2/9/2010
IHS Global Insight Perspective | |
Significance | A natural gas-fired combined-cycle power plant nearing construction, suffered an explosion at the weekend (7 February), killing five workers and injuring another 12. |
Implications | This blast is just the latest in a series of similar incidents around the country resulting from gas purging operations. The Chemicals Safety Board (CSB) has dispatched an investigative team to the plant to establish whether purging was in fact responsible for the blast and, if this is found to be the case, is likely to speed up implementation of new gas safety codes to help prevent such incidents in future. |
Outlook | As the plant was not yet operational, power supplies to the New England grid will not be affected, but given the apparent scale of the damage, the region's independent systems operator will nevertheless have to readjust its expectations on when this facility will contribute to the regional power grid, if ever. |
An explosion took place at a natural gas-fired power plant in Connecticut early on Sunday (7 February), resulting in a number of fatalities, several newswires report. The blast occurred in the power block building of the Kleen Energy Systems plant, reportedly knocking down all walls and producing a shock wave heard by communities several miles away. At present, five workers have been confirmed killed, while another 12 have been injured. The 620-MW combined-cycle plant was at an advanced stage of construction at the time of the incident and had been due to come online before the end of the year. The facility is located in Middletown, in a low-density industrial area, some 20 miles from Hartford, next to the Connecticut River.
Hundreds of state emergency services personnel arrived on site very quickly following the blast, and have been working diligently with recovery teams to ensure that no-one is still trapped under the rubble. While no exact cause for the explosion has yet been determined, there is informed speculation that the workers may have been attempting a blowdown operation to purge gas from the plant’s pipelines. If confirmed, the incident appears to bear some resemblance to a number of recent incidents, the most important of which was a fatal explosion last June at the ConAgra Foods Slim Jim plant in Garner, North Carolina. In that incident, a gas pipe blowdown went wrong, causing an explosion that killed four and injured 67 others. That incident prompted the U.S. federal Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), itself responsible for investigating serious chemical incidents, to issue two new urgent safety codes for natural gas purging. As expected, the CSB has dispatched an investigative team to Connecticut to determine what exactly went wrong at the Kleen Energy plant. With recovery operations still under way, however, they have yet to be allowed on site.
Outlook and Implications
The CSB had previously issued a safety bulletin on gas purging last October, not just because of the ConAgra blast, but also because of a noticeable uptick in serious purging problems at other sites around the country. At the time, the CSB set down a number of "key safety lessons", ranging from ensuring that gases are purged to a safe location outdoors, to making sure that non-essential staff are evacuated from the premises during purging operations. Other safety recommendations included using monitors to detect combustible gas accumulations, and providing better training to workers involved in the purging process. It is unclear whether workers at the Kleen Energy plant were following these recommendations.
As the plant was not yet producing power, power supply in the New England area is unaffected. That said, as the facility was due online later this year, the New England Independent Systems Operator (ISO-NE), responsible for overseeing both day-to-day and longer-term power generation and transmission in the region, will have to readjust its expectations over when, or indeed whether, the plant will become operational. The plant was 95% complete at the time of the blast, and while a damage assessment has yet to be undertaken to determine how much equipment and infrastructure is salvageable, this incident is likely to have pushed back construction by at least a year. Elsewhere, the loss of life will raise serious questions over purging operations around the United States, and is likely to speed up the implementation of CSB safety codes. If there is any comfort to extract from this sad tale, it is that with 123 workers present at the plant at the time of the blast, the loss of life was not greater.Most Viewed Articles
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