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Port Neches - TPC chem plant explosion

tx 3 putt

By tx 3 putt
in Daily Texan

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austingirl

austingirl 2192

Posted
Posted
12 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

That facility is older than dirt and looks it 

That plant is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, ones in the area. The road it's on (136) has been called Rubber Plant Road as far back asI can remember.

Drove in to Groves yesterday. The boom woke me up, but we were supposed to get storms last night and I thought it was thunder. We are at my parents' house, about 1.5 miles away as the crow, flies but no damage.

The hand of God must have been over that place because it is amazing that no one was killed.

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Pescado_Rojo

Pescado_Rojo 19452

Posted
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7 hours ago, spystud13 said:

 

Second one is better. 

The second video is from a high school classmate's security camera. I've seen several posts from old high school friends that live in PN that have damage to their homes ranging from pictures knocked off the walls to broken windows and sections of sheet rock falling from their ceilings. 

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Bevo&Pevo

Bevo&Pevo 5265

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1 hour ago, fattyflattie said:

I don’t miss being in those plants one bit.   Hope everyone is ok, that was pretty nasty.  

X2 Sir.  I don't miss 'em either. I missed 3 KBs by one day simply because of luck of the shift schedule.  KBs are Ka-Booms and there are also KFBs.  

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Biff Tannen

Biff Tannen 45753

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9 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

The second video is from a high school classmate's security camera. I've seen several posts from old high school friends that live in PN that have damage to their homes ranging from pictures knocked off the walls to broken windows and sections of sheet rock falling from their ceilings. 

So pics?

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Pato del Muerto

Pato del Muerto 52665

Posted
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7 minutes ago, Bevo&Pevo said:

X2 Sir.  I don't miss 'em either. I missed 3 KBs by one day simply because of luck of the shift schedule.  KBs are Ka-Booms and there are also KFBs.  

I had one close call but they got the fire out before it got to any of the tanks. That was in Pasadena. Pharma was always better, the main ingredient in most cases is water, and my last gig was in a small scale controlled substance manufacturer so the amounts weren’t sufficient for a huge boom like that. 

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Kyrie Eleison

Kyrie Eleison 9312

Posted
Posted

grew up about a half-mile from that plant as the crow flies...it went up once when i was a kid, too. my dad ran the QC lab at Gulf/Chevron in Orange, and when plants would go up he'd boost me on the roof of the house so i could see which refinery it was.

the next day at school at PNG, we'd guess who was hurt or killed by who was absent knowing where their dad worked.

TPC (f/k/a Neches Butate) is literally across the street on the southside from PNG high school...our school used to have the highest cancer rate of AML, CML and Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in the US for that age group due to the butadiene they'd spew.

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tx 3 putt

tx 3 putt 77650

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Posted (edited)
22 minutes ago, fattyflattie said:

Pasadena Refinery was the worst I ever worked in.  Looked and felt like one of the state water platforms, but in about 3x worse condition.  First place I’ve ever felt I was “lucky” when the project ended and I didn’t have to go back.  

Lion Oil in El Dorado laughs at Pasadena Refining. Turn around kick off meeting, fire chief gets up to speak.

Fire Chief - guys, if you hear the fire alarm don’t worry, we are experts at putting out fires - We have them weekly. In fact plan on at least two fires during this outage.

6 guys got up and left. He wasnt joking, we had 3 fires in 45 days, while the plant was down.  Granted one was during start up but rather nasty.
 

Also, the operators had a home made set up to fill propane tanks, free of charge of course. Also x2, Arkansas women sure like Texas guys. Very friendly times to be had. Also x3, one of the shop guys had a still at his house, refinery lab quality checked his stuff. Needless to say, first time I had ‘moonshine’ was in Arkansas. Not bad, but it burns. Also x4, a retired plant guy raised rabbits. For $10 you’d get damn big bag of cut up rabbit. Damn I miss that bbq’d rabbit, fucking mouth watering and delicious. Also  x4, people thought I was Italian. Probably why the women were so friendly, international flare. 

Edited by tx 3 putt
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Pato del Muerto

Pato del Muerto 52665

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My near miss was an operator turned a pump on but didn’t open the valve in the line, so the pump was pushing hot material into a dead end. Eventually it overheated and blew apart, spraying hot hydrocarbon material out. Some metal hit an electric panel, caused spark that lit the liquid, which was pooling right under a sealed methanol tank of like 5-10 thousand gallons. That’s when they evacuated us in the lab. 
That tank was too small to have a pressure relief valve I think, but either way if they didn’t get the fire out it would have either caused a catastrophic tank failure and big whoof or a BLEVE. 
 

also had a methanol soaked filter auto ignite in a dumpster during a hot summer day but that was a small fire contained within the dumpster that got put out pretty quick. 
 

but it’s never good when you hear the alarm and walk outside and see a decent smoke cloud. 
or when you hear the boom of a pressure disc rupturing and wondering which plant it came from. 

Edited by Pato del Muerto
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