Sand Won’t Save You This Time - Derek Lowe “Things I Won’t Work With” on chlorine trifluoride.
This is a chemical compound that will burn asbestos tile.
Have a buddy that switch to chemical from mech, and he likes talking a lot of shit in college.
Now he helps design food processes in factories. Said it’s hell, he got to look at the peanut butter and chocolate for Herseys and he can’t stick his fingers in the vat. The horror.
Buddist monk level zen right there. Hopefully the client hooks him up with a couple boxes of the end product?
They let them have all the rejects. It’s a brown paper bag filled with ugly chocolates. He said how they taste better because most of the time they are not homogenous. Might get a big yummy blob of peanut butter or something.
So you never heard of CSB raids? Where they come in and randomly turn stuff on/off and close/open valves to see if your plant blows up?
So they do the things that a competent fucking maintenance worker knows not to do and it isn’t considered gross negligence?
The CSB doesn’t regulate and it can’t issue fines. They also don’t show up unless you’ve already had an incident. When they do show up, it’s simply to document and investigate the root causes, so they can issue recommendations to one of the regulatory agencies that actually enforces things. You need to have really fucked up for an agency with literally 40 staff overseeing one of the largest industrial economies in the world to notice you.
“Oh yeah? Well what’ll happen if I push this button and then turn all the knobs to max?”
“Everything will be fucked up.”
“Well I just did it. Now what?”
“Everything is fucked up.”
“Bet ya didn’t think of that 😎”
As someone who does safety audits and advice for both civil and chemical, the main difference is that when something goes wrong on a chemical site, it takes hours. When something goes wrong at a civil site it takes like 3 seconds.
They both have their ups and downs. I still don’t know if I should prefer sudden and dramatic collapse, or the “shelter in place because running will kill you” alarm while in what’s basically a drafty garage.
The cracks etc. on the Miami bridge collapse developed over… weeks? They just said “nah, it’s fine” and failed to even measure how big and deep they actually are. I mean if you ignore everything up to the collapse, then it really is sudden. Not saying that you are generally wrong, but usually it is more a lack of data or ignoring it.
