Y2K Petrochemical Warnings Sounded

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IT'S ABOUT TIME!! Imagine my surprise to find this as the HEADLINE of this morning's Houston Chronicle. Here are the first few paragraphs of the article:

Y2K Petrochemical warnings sounded

Officials race computer-driven clock to avert disaster at local plants

By BILL DAWSON

As the nation's petrochemical capital, Houston faces a unique array of potential problems, ranging from the catastrophic to the merely troublesome, because oil and chemical plants are controlled with thousands of computer chips that may be vulnerable to the much-publicized Year 2000 bug.

Industry officials are racing the clock to identify and correct plant systems containing date-sensitive chips that won't read 2000 properly. At the same time, companies are reviewing and refining their contingency plans in case they don't find all the problem chips and the computer glitch causes an emergency.

With a flood of recent reports on the Y2K bug's threat in other computerized areas of modern life, the additional specter of fires, explosions and toxic clouds at petrochemical plants might seem like premillennial jitters or technophobia.

In this case, however, the warnings are coming from people and groups more noted for their expertise in the industry's complex workings than for any tendency toward doomsaying, and who are taking care to distinguish their concern from alarm.

"It's not a hoax," said Ray Skinner, area director of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Houston South office. "It's a real issue and something that's very, very important."

-- Gayla Dunbar (privacy@please.com), February 14, 1999

Answers

The tone of this article, by your report, reminds me of the tone of articles about the electric utilities industry several months ago, before things were brought "under control" in that industry. Look for similar developments in statements about the petrochemical industry soon.

-- Bill Byars (billbyars@softwaresmith.com), February 14, 1999.

Gayla,

THanks for the info. Is there any way to get a copy of the full article?

-- Bill Watt (wtwatt01@sprynet.com), February 14, 1999.


Bill, you can get the whole article online by registering for it. I typed this straight out of the paper. I checked the online version and they show it in the Metropolitan section, but in the final (4 star) print (paper) edition, it is the FRONT page headline.

-- Gayla Dunbar (privacy@please.com), February 14, 1999.

Gayla, thanks for posting this. How refreshing to see a calm, rational, serious, scientifically-based article about a specific industry which impacts all of us. Front-page headline too! Most YourDoneEres are not suffering from delusional bouts of "premillennial jitters or technophobia." We're reality-based, look-at-the-truth Y2Kers. Hope the tone continues and the experts aren't pressured to spin, dumb down, gloss over, or trivialize the petrochemical precautions.

xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx x

-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), February 14, 1999.


Full article available at:
 
http://www.chron.com/
 
Free registration required.
 


-- Dan (DanTCC@Yahoo.com), February 14, 1999.


I agree that it is refreshing to see a balanced rational assessment of the possibility of severe Y2K repurcussions from those in controlling positions.Many in the establishment have a mindset that refuses to accept any notion that the status quo could be upset in critical ways by Y2K.Some cannot see a difference between unbalanced alarm and real concern over the real frightening scenarios we could see in less than 11 months.

-- Dennis Chornomaz (Dchorno@aol.com), February 14, 1999.

Leska,

I just wonder how we managed to see that much further ahead than the various "industry experts".

First it was food production and transport. Then the electric and natural gas industries. Now it's the oil and perochemical industries finally seeing what we've been trying to point out about their industries and embedded systems for a year or more.

Do you suppose they need to clean their glasses or is reality recognition training more in order?

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), February 14, 1999.


WW, I don't know why the "experts" have not more readily come to the fore and shared their legitimate concerns with the public. It would be *too* gut-churning to think they don't quite understand their spoke in the machine as it heads over the cliff. Other posters have felt their jobs would quickly evaporate if they "rocked the boat." I feel for those who have mortgages and children to support.

Many jobs may vanish @ 2000 -- many jobs today are steps removed from essential survival -- and it seems now one must look to conscious choices and whether one reaches out to awaken/help others or just save their own skin. The wise ones say this is a "red letter" incarnation where our choices will weigh heavily. It really comes down to what kind of person one wants to be. Time is short for putting off idealism. OTOH, many ppl's ridicule and stubborn won't-prepare is frightening and incentive to batten down the hatches for "me and mine" and think of others only as threats to the cache.

Have you seen the new magazine cover re the "magicians" keeping the world economy afloat? The next biggie thing to look at and ponder is the potential for massive job loss and shut-down of businesses because of supply interruptions and snags in all the wheels turning JIT into Jinxed Industrial Trap.

Ashton & Leska in Cascadia

xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxx

-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), February 14, 1999.


Extremely well said Leska, your perceptiveness is tremendous.

I suspect as we get nearer the fateful moment, more and more experts will decide once and for all whether they will "batten down the hatch" or go for it and expose the truth, knowing that they have only their jobs to lose if they are prepared.

I'd rather lose my job than my self-respect and my love for mankind.

-- Chris (catsy@pond.com), February 14, 1999.


One of the things driving awareness in these companies is EPA's Y2K enforcement policy, which provides a bottomline incentive to get their emissions systems straightened out before the rollover. Fix-on- failure will absolutely not be tolerated as an excuse for Y2K pollution.

http://www.epa.gov/region04/air/enforce/y2kpolcy.htm

-- Brooks (brooksbie@hotmail.com), February 14, 1999.



Try this url:

http://www.chron.com/content/story.html/metropolitan/195526

-- (trying@pasting.url.com), February 14, 1999.


Brooks' hotlink http://www .epa.gov/region04/air/enforce/y2kpolcy.htm

Here's Gayla's full article from Hou ston Chronicle:

February 13, 1999, 08:10 p.m.

Y2K petrochemical warnings sounded

Houston-area plants race computer-driven clock to prevent disaster

By BILL DAWSON
Copyright 1999 Houston Chronicle Environment Writer

As the nation's petrochemical capital, Houston faces a unique array of potential problems, ranging from the catastrophic to the merely troublesome, because oil and chemical plants are controlled with thousands of computer chips that may be vulnerable to the much-publicized Year 2000 bug.

Industry officials are racing the clock to identify and correct plant systems containing date-sensitive chips that won't read 2000 properly. At the same time, companies are reviewing and refining their contingency plans in case they don't find all the problem chips and the computer glitch causes an emergency.

With a flood of recent reports on the Y2K bug's threat in other computerized areas of modern life, the additional specter of fires, explosions and toxic clouds at petrochemical plants might seem like premillennial jitters or technophobia.

In this case, however, the warnings are coming from people and groups more noted for their expertise in the industry's complex workings than for any tendency toward doomsaying, and who are taking care to distinguish their concern from alarm.

"It's not a hoax," said Ray Skinner, area director of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Houston South office. "It's a real issue and something that's very, very important."

Other examples:

7 The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which counts the United States and 28 other nations as members, declared in December through its Working Group on Chemical Accidents that the possibility of problems caused by the Y2K bug is "a serious problem which must be addressed immediately."

7 The U.S. Chemical Safety and Accident Investigation Board, a new nonregulatory agency, has been drafting a report to Congress on the need to head off Y2K problems. "This is a problem that touches everybody, but I don't think there's a reason to be panicked," said Dr. Sam Manan, a Texas A&M University expert on chemical safety participating in the report's preparation.

7 The Oil & Gas Journal, a leading trade periodical, last fall called the Y2K bug, including its safety ramifications, a "problem of unprecedented scope for (the) petroleum industry."

7 An OSHA memo advises industry officials to evaluate devices including alarms, air monitors, hazard-communication databases, generators and underground tank monitors for possible Y2K problems. "Fixing the problem may be painstaking and labor intensive," it says. "Not fixing it may be worse."

Industry officials not only are trying to prevent problems in their own plant systems, but also are alert to the disastrous potential if the Y2K bug somehow cuts off electric power to their facilities for an extended period.

Dr. Angela Summers, a chemical engineer and safety consultant who works with many petrochemical companies, imagines such a scenario:

It's early morning on Jan. 1, 2000. Dancing lights sparkle on the Houston Ship Channel's murky waters. They aren't reflections of anyone's millennium party, but dozens of safety flares that have roared into action at oil and chemical plants along the channel. The improbable suddenly has become reality.

"Houston will be well lit" if that happens, Summers said. "It will look like a big birthday cake from the sky."

The cheerfulness of that image is actually fitting. Planned shutdowns of large oil and chemical plants take days, even weeks, to ensure safety and pollution problems don't crop up. Any unplanned shutdown is riskier, but the successful activation of all those flares would be the best outcome, because they burn gases that otherwise might escape disastrously.

The extensive safeguards in place at petrochemical plants have become increasingly dependent on computer technology in recent years, necessitating the correction of software and other items that might fall prey to the Y2K bug.

Since the 1970s, plants increasingly have been laced with thousands of devices employing date-sensitive computer chips, which help workers control chemical reactions, monitor operating conditions and carry out safe plant shutdowns.

If even one or a few chips can't read the year 2000 properly, those systems might not work properly. The prospect of several simultaneous failures is particularly worrisome to safety experts, as is the prospect of one failure causing other devices to malfunction.

Other facilities like offshore oil platforms and pipelines, which form a spider's web beneath the Houston area, also depend on "embedded systems," so named because computer chips are embedded in them.

`Triage' situations

The word "triage" frequently crops up in descriptions of industry efforts to find and correct systems susceptible to Y2K problems. Because there may not be enough time left to find all date-sensitive items -- especially for some late-starting or slow-moving companies -- many efforts are focusing on systems critical to plant operations and safety.

Some industry officials say flatly that if a company is not far along in its efforts to become "Y2K-compliant" by now, it should now work intensively on contingency planning for a possible emergency.

Many corporations, trade organizations, government agencies and academic experts are paying attention to the issue and stepping up their efforts to address it.

A frequent refrain is that large petrochemical companies will probably avoid major Y2K-related problems but that small and mid-size enterprises -- including facilities that use but don't make toxic chemicals -- may lack sufficient awareness or resources to do the necessary detective work and retrofitting.

"There is a sizable concern, which I share, that there may be people who are not attentive to this issue and that it could cause serious problems at their facilities," said Dr. Jerry Poje, a toxicologist and member of the Chemical Safety and Accident Investigation Board.

"At a minimum, they might have a plant shutdown," Poje said. "But even if it's a safe shutdown, the period of time (to accomplish that and then safely restart operations) is too painful for small businesses and work forces to absorb."

Drawing criticism from some chemical safety advocates, government agencies at the state and federal level are pursuing a nonregulatory approach that emphasizes communicating the need for potentially affected companies to take preventive action.

The Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the state's principal environmental protection agency, has confined its involvement to form letters advising regulated facilities that Y2K-related corrections may be needed to assure public health and safety. The letters provide references to sources of information on the Internet.

Limited resources

"We really don't have the resources to offer the regulated community any kind of technical assistance," TNRCC spokesman Patrick Shaughnessy said.

Federal agencies have principally focused on working with industry organizations, such as the American Petroleum Institute and Chemical Manufacturers Association, to spread the word to member companies about the need to fix Y2K problems.

"Early in these discussions, we told trade associations we were not approaching them as a regulator, but were trying to partner with them, to increase awareness, develop surveys and make them public," said Don Flattery, sector outreach coordinator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Project Y2K Management Team.

Congressional leaders have made clear they have little interest in granting extra powers to federal agencies to address the issue now, either with regulation or detailed advice on corrective measures.

"Specific technical guidance would be very difficult, particularly at this juncture, at this stage of the game," he said.

OSHA's Skinner said efforts aimed at finding and correcting Y2K problems are widespread at Houston-area plants, at least those visited recently.

"At every plant we've dealt with, they're working on it," he said.

Still, he voiced concern that plans to get prepared for computer-glitch complications at certain plants could increase safety risks, especially for workers.

He worries, for instance, that companies' concerns about a Y2K-triggered shortage of oil or processed chemicals might prompt them to stock up, refilling older process vessels near plant control buildings that are now kept empty to enhance worker safety.

At the same time, he said, such companies may assign additional workers to these now more-vulnerable buildings in case they need to perform more control functions manually when Y2K problems afflict plant systems.

Two companies with Houston-area plants -- OxyChem and Rohm and Haas -- described their Y2K-readiness efforts in December at a special meeting of the Chemical Safety and Accident Investigation Board in Washington, D.C., on the issue.

18,000 items to check

With the help of a consultant, OxyChem identified 18,000 items in its 34 plants' control systems that needed to be checked -- a much-larger number than plant personnel had found in their own, more limited inventory in 1996.

Employees developed a screening method to identify those devices with possible Y2K problems -- looking for those that generate a real-time date, for instance, or share digital signals with another device, said Dan Daley, the company's maintenance director.

This screening winnowed the 18,000 devices to fewer than 500, which are now being fixed, undergoing further testing or which require extra guidance from their manufacturer to assess, said Dan Daley, the company's maintenance director.

"Nominally, by midyear we hope to have all remediation complete," Daley said. "Our objective is to run through the key Y2K dates, but there are still issues that we need to deal with, including whether our electric suppliers and the overall electricity grid will be supplying our plants adequately."

Like OxyChem, Rohm and Haas is combining its search-and-repair efforts with contingency planning, including an evaluation of whether to temporarily shut down plants before Dec. 31 as an extra precautionary measure.

"Certainly one is to stop production at some point before the millennium, but that's only one option," spokesman Ken Gedaka said.

`Shutdown' mode

Some Rohm and Haas plants are typically shut down between Christmas and New Year's Day anyway, and the company may place others that operate at that time -- including its Deer Park facility -- in a "ready-to-shut-down mode," Gedaka said.

The company is now testing some corrected items, Gedaka said, and expects to finish a final step of reintegrating all repaired systems into plant operations by June 30.

Some industry officials and other experts fear, however, that not all companies are that far along.

"I haven't heard any customer say they've found a (Y2K-related) failure that would have caused an explosion, but they've found a lot of little things that failed, which in combination may result in an incident," said Summers, the La Marque-based director of Premier Consulting and Engineering, part of Triconex, a company that makes emergency shutdown systems for petrochemical plants.

"I've worked with some companies with process systems that are archaic, with safety systems that are 20 years old," she said. "Some companies are spending a lot of money to fix these problems and some are not spending anything at all."

As a result, she believes some plants may not be able to avoid all computer-related safety problems.

"For some of the companies without adequate Y2K preparation, it's likely that some kind of incident will occur -- a potential fire, explosion or toxic release," she said.

With that prospect in mind, experts such as Manan, a chemical engineering professor at A&M and director of its Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center, see a need for public officials in communities near petrochemical facilities to make sure they are ready for Y2K-related emergencies there.

"From a local government perspective, do Houston's emergency coordinators know the total number of facilities that might have problems?" he asked. "Do they have response mechanisms in place, and do they have their own Y2K problems in emergency response?

"The whole area of contingency planning needs a quick going-over."

-- Chris (catsy@pond.com), February 14, 1999.


Chris, your post supports my own positions on several matters and so rather surprised me that you posted it. Note that 18,000 devices over 34 plants became 500 actually affected when examined closely. This works out to about a bakers dozen per plant. The embedded problem is quite manageable on close examination.

Also they are telling you they will get done. And giving the facts to support their position.

Now someone with real problems has given what you have asked for - real facts and figures that show exactly what they are facing and what they are doing. Do you feel more secure?

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), February 14, 1999.


Do I feel more secure? On the contrary, I feel more scared. This is fact and evidence to me that chemical disasters might indeed happen. I've agreed with you before on the embedded chip issue. A small percentage of the total chips are non-compliant. The issue of how many systems are non-compliant is another matter however, as each system is made up of chips that can be both compliant and non-compliant. How they go about deciding if a system is compliant overall is the issue that troubles me.

"With the help of a consultant, OxyChem identified 18,000 items in its 34 plants' control systems that needed to be checked -- a much-larger number than plant personnel had found in their own, more limited inventory in 1996.

[OxyChem is obviously a larger company. What's happening with the medium and smaller size ones?]

Employees developed a screening method to identify those devices with possible Y2K problems -- looking for those that generate a real-time date, for instance, or share digital signals with another device, said Dan Daley, the company's maintenance director.

[What exactly is this "screening method"? Do you know Paul? Can you explain it to us? How can they be certain a system will actually work as intended on the roll-over date?

This screening winnowed the 18,000 devices to fewer than 500, which are now being fixed, undergoing further testing or which require extra guidance from their manufacturer to assess, said Dan Daley, the company's maintenance director." [The 500 systems they "identified" are not the problem that bothers me as those at least will be worked on, but the remaining 17,500 which they wrote off. As I said, how good is their "screening method"?]

Paul, you've latched on to this one paragraph, and you have dismissed the rest of the article which is entirely negative.

I can't rewire your brain synaps to see what I see. You've been on here too long, you'd understand by now if you ever were going to.

-- Chris (catsy@pond.com), February 14, 1999.


Anyone who has ever seen the monstrosity called Texas City (part of the Houston area) knows that there is just no...absolutely no way, they could possibly find all of the embedded chips. Anyone who has seen the documentary on the big blow at Texas City several decades ago knows what it would mean if it got out of control now. And then for folks who live in the Houston area there are the mega miles of major pipeline running all over everywhere (and occasionally blowing up -- as they did several years ago during a flood)... And that's just the tip of the iceberg of Houston's chemical/petrol/industrial maze...

If electricity goes down there will be no way to prevent some very major disasters...

-- Shelia (shelia@active-stream.com), February 15, 1999.



Thanks Gayla,

Will get back to this one with additional research later.

Paul, there are embedded chips that are not life-threatening and those that are. Chemical plant accidents, certainly pose the risk of being life-altering, IMHO.

Question is, will "they" find ALL the potential twisted chips across the planet in time? Need to check 100% of the life threatening ones to find the "cracked" chips. Look's like a big job to me.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), February 16, 1999.


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