A Brief Discussion on Safety Accidents in Chemical Parks: 5 Current Situations
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①The spatial planning within these industrial parks lacks scientific rigor, and the layout is chaotic. Given the current state of industry in China, most chemical industrial parks do not have a comprehensive safety plan in place; they fail to classify different safety hazards within the park and to establish safety barriers to prevent dangerous explosions. Some companies do carry out planning for their industrial parks at the time of establishment, but they fail to take into account the increasing number of problems that will arise as the companies grow. In reality, most areas have not designated chemical industry clusters or parks; the production and storage of hazardous chemicals continue to develop in an unregulated manner. As a result, the layout of chemical enterprises is unreasonable, and some newly built chemical plants already face the need to be relocated. In the existing overall planning system for chemical industrial parks, safety planning is not considered as a separate plan, and no regional risk assessment has been carried out. There is a practice of selecting a site for each company and then constructing infrastructure based on that company’s specific needs, which results in insufficient safety distances between the various chemical plants that have been built. In some areas, although safety plans have been developed, due to pressure to attract investors, the actual parks operate on a first-come, first-served basis for entry. For chemical enterprises located there, the master plans are designed solely based on their own land usage, and the spacing between major hazard sources among these enterprises is not properly considered at the design stage, which greatly increases the likelihood of a domino effect occurring between such hazard sources.
②The enterprise admission mechanism is not well-established. Research on the enterprise admission mechanism in chemical parks has only just begun in China. Most chemical parks (especially those at the county or district level) still exhibit, to varying degrees, an attitude of emphasizing production over safety in their development process. When introducing new projects, they adopt a \"take them all\" approach, deciding to accept them all once they are introduced. In chemical industrial parks, there are both large international chemical industry giants and small, workshop-style factories with fewer than 10 employees. While large chemical enterprises implement standardized safety management, small chemical enterprises often suffer from poor safety management practices, a weak awareness of safety laws, neglecting routine safety measures in pursuit of short-term gains, and severe shortages in investment for safety purposes. These varying levels of safety management hinder the improvement of the overall safety standards within the industrial park.
③Some industrial parks do not have comprehensive emergency response plans in place. When a danger actually occurs, a thorough set of emergency measures can usually help minimize the economic losses caused by disasters. However, at present, the emergency response systems in most industrial parks in China are inadequate, or the emergency facilities have exceeded their useful life. In the event of a fire or explosion, the decision-making systems fail or are severely inadequate, preventing timely communication with headquarters and making it difficult to obtain first-hand information, as a result of which various departments miss the critical window for rescue efforts.
④Chain explosions pose a significant risk. From past reports, it can be seen that once an accident occurs in any petrochemical industrial area, it usually doesn’t happen as a single incident; rather, a chain reaction takes place and lasts for an extended period of time. For example, in the explosion at Lanzhou Petrochemical Company in 2010, a severe fire involving over 300 tanks triggered a series of explosions in 11 surrounding areas, resulting in heavy casualties. Such problems are more pronounced in cities along the eastern coast where economic development is rapid. In the big explosion in Tianjin, wastewater from the ruins after the explosion flowed into the Bohai Sea basin, causing serious seawater pollution and economic losses; therefore, we should be vigilant against such domino-effect consequences.
⑤The mechanism for investing human and financial resources in safety supervision within chemical industrial parks is outdated. There are many different types of enterprises in these parks, and as the chemical industry continues to develop, the variety of enterprise types and services also increases. It mainly includes enterprises in storage, transportation, use, and production. Given the unique and hazardous nature of the chemical industry, adequate human and material resources must be ensured to carry out safety supervision tasks, in order to conduct inspections related to the safety and production practices of various chemical enterprises. However, most chemical industrial parks suffer from insufficient staffing in their safety supervision departments. The supervisors lack professionalism and have limited expertise; their duties require not only careful oversight of safe production practices but also verification that production standards are being followed, as well as checking whether the safety permits for various chemical projects are appropriate. Given the complexity and intricacy of these tasks, it is difficult to ensure that supervision work is carried out in an orderly manner without standardizing the mechanisms for allocating human and financial resources to these departments.
It’s an article reposted from the internet; it’s well-written