Re: Flixborough
I'm old enough that my university course went heavily in on Flixborough and other similar incidents. What's really distressing is that I mentioned the name to a recent (<5 years ago) chem eng graduate and they'd literally never heard of it. I felt like telling him to get off my lawn.
I elided the bit where the PHB's request is put through design safety checks so Flixborough doesn't repeat. The issue - *my* issue - is that bit where you get the safe proof-of-concept design working, and that just becomes the production plant.
@EVP - another reason chemical plants look like they do: poor attention to detail in construction contract negotiation, restricted budget and unrealistic timescales. This leads to:
- no money to build a proper 3D model of the plant
- no time to prepare isometric drawings
- a piping contractor who is paid by the number of welds they do when site running pipework.
This can lead to some... "creative" pipe routing, requiring many more bends and supports than you might have imagined are necessary.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
