Three accidents occur over a 33-hour period at the Dupont plant in Belle (West Virginia).
The series of accidents began on January 22, 2010, when an alarm sounded leading operators to discover that 2,000 pounds of methyl chloride, a toxic and extremely flammable gas, had been leaking unnoticed into the atmosphere for five days. The next morning, workers discovered a leak in a pipe carrying oleum, producing a fuming cloud of sulfur trioxide. The phosgene release occurred later that day, and the exposed worker died the next evening in a Charleston hospital.
The phosgene release followed two other accidents at the same plant in the same week, including an ongoing release of chloromethane from the plant’s F3455 unit, which went undetected for several days, and a release from a spent sulfuric acid unit.
These accidents resulted from numerous safety deficiencies, including lack of safe equipment design, ineffective mechanical integrity programs, and incomplete investigations of previous near misses.
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