Life after Buncefield
Unsurprisingly, the largest fire in peacetime Europe continues to cast a long shadow over the fire protection market
More than two years on and the shockwaves from the explosions at Buncefield continue to reverberate, through Hemel Hempstead as local residents and businesses continue to rebuild, and through the oil storage industry, as it seeks to understand the causes of the disaster and find ways to prevent a repeat.
Much has already been learned through the ongoing work of the Major Incident Investigation Board (MIIB), established within a month of the incident, and the parallel but independent joint regulatory/industry task force, the Buncefield Standards Task Group (BSTG), which was set up in June 2006 and worked through until July 2007.
In the words of one BSTG member, this collaborative response from the regulators and industry – which as Ken Rivers, the chair of the former BSTG liked to say, were ‘aligned but not joined’ in their approach – has been nothing short of groundbreaking.
‘This collaborative approach came about because of the severity of Buncefield, which together with the similarities and parallels with the incident at the BP Texas City refinery, made both regulators and industry realise they needed to do something different,’ says Martyn Lyons, MD of the storage division of Simon Storage and a member of the Process Safety Leadership Group (PSLG), which has been set up to take forward the recommendations of the MIIB and consider how to raise the profile and priority of process safety leadership in companies that store and handle petroleum.
This collaborative approach will now be taken forward by the PSLG, which includes representatives from the Tank Storage Association, the UK Petroleum Industries Association, the Chemical Industries Association, the UK Onshore Pipelines Association, the HSE, the Environment Agency and Sepa. It is now in the process of forming a number of working groups. ‘After a major incident like Buncefield, everything has to be looked at again in detail,’ says Lyons.
