Exercise 3. Use the word in capitals to form a word that fits in the space in the sentence.

1) They were bored with work and wanted to do something ___________ (complete) different.

2) An electric bulb proved the only______________ (illuminate).

3) After the continual draught there was a serious ___________ (threaten) of famine.

4) ____________ (Deliver) of the emergency kits should be made promptly.

5) We cannot entirely ______________ (exclusion) the possibility of power cuts under these unfavourable weather conditions.

6) The endangered area will be closed for a week as a _____________ (precaution) measure.

7) He is _____________ (report) not intending to return to his country.

8) The strike caused widespread ______________ (disrupt) to train services.

Text 16. Large accident in The Netherlands –

Dutch chemical plant explodes

At a chemical factory at Cindu a heavy explosion occurred which caused the death of 3 firemen of the works fire brigade and injured 11 workers including 4 firemen of the works fire brigade. The damage was estimated at hundreds of thousands euros. There was a severe material damage. The fragments were found at a distance of 1 km.

The accident started with a typing error in a prescription by a laboratory worker. Instead of tank 632 he typed tank 634. In the first tank there was stored some neutral chemical, and the hazardous active chemical was stored in the second tank. The operator, who had to check if the tank contents were equal with the prescription, filled the reactor with the wrong chemicals. The process started with steam heating via the coil in the reactor. After temperature rose the operator tried to cool the reactor with more water of the water mains and later on the works fire brigade was alarmed to cool the reactor. An administrator, who checked the prescription every morning, found the error and tried to contact the operator, but it was too late. As a result of this error an enormous explosion led to the closure of the factory.

Because the works fire brigade expected that the contents of the reactor would release through the safety valve and the bursting disk, they were connecting deluge guns to prevent spreading of the expected fire. The firemen did not wear the prescribed personal safety articles, such as hand-gloves and breathing apparatus, because they expected to do a familiar easy job.

After releasing chemicals through the safety valve and the bursting disc only several seconds later, the reactor ruptured, the contents of the reactor released and an explosion followed. The local fire brigade was alarmed and together with the works fire brigade, they tried to prevent the fire from spreading to the other installations, such as cylinders filled with very dangerous, easily inflammable substance. To prevent enormous damage to the environment due to polluted fire fighting water, it was decided to let the fire burn out by itself.

The Dutch news said that the responsible person had been found and he would be charged with negligible conduct causing death. It is this type of oversimplified explanation that encourages misunderstandings about accidents and how to prevent them and maybe leads to more and unnecessary accidents in the future.

Who were they going to put in jail? The programmer who wrote code that allowed such a predictable input error to cause a dangerous output? The person who wrote the requirements and neglected this? The chemical engineers who built a plant that could blow up with one error like that? The managers who allowed all this to happen? What about the regulatory authorities who gave a license for such a dangerous design? Without a complete investigation, nobody should be talking about the "cause" of an accident. Were there interlocks? If so, why didn't they work? If not, why weren't there any? And etc. There are hundreds of factors that we know nothing about that could have been the real causes of the accident.

The Bhopal explosion was blamed by Union Carbide as a maintenance error. But a complete investigation turned up hundreds of factors that were involved, most of which go back to poor management. The maintenance error was probably the least important. An accident was inevitable at Bhopal because of all the other factors.

Something else just would have been the direct cause, and it sounds like an accident was unavoidable in this case too. The chemical industry can ignore all the lessons from Bhopal because it was a "maintenance error." We are probably going to hear for years now about the chemical plant that blew up because of a typing error or computer error (when it may not have had anything very significant to do with the accident). The law likes to simplify causes down to one simple event. But we, as scientists and engineers, should require more than this.

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