Ammonia Leak in Brisbane

300 workers evacuated after gas leak

September 14, 2006 08:17am
Article from: AAP

HUNDREDS of workers were evacuated from a Brisbane abattoir last night following a gas leak.

Emergency services crews were called to Teys Brothers Meatworks on Logan River Road, Beenleigh, around 7pm yesterday after ammonia gas leaked from a faulty valve in the cooling system, police said today.

One worker suffered breathing difficulties and was treated at Logan Hospital.

Up to 300 employees were evacuated until the valve was repaired.

They returned to work about 10pm.

This is pretty toxic stuff and it appears from the article that the leak occured for around 3 hours! Hmmmmm I wouldn't want to be one of the residents in the area (either private or business) knowing this has occured for such a long period and the only concern the Meatworks had was to evacuate the employees, what about those downwind of the leak.

But then I have been into organisations that operate with Ammonia and seen some of our so called safety experts work and it fails big time when it comes to evacuation!

In fact one organisation had 7 consultants come in and write 5 or 6 different evacuation plans and after reading through them not one would be effective in an evacuation! The majority would be evacuated but they had no idea how to inform workers and the public.

I was asked to re-write them again and I coped heaps of flake for my response at the time (in a report) and that was after investigating the whole plant!

Yep these safety boffins had written some good plans (one consultant was the fire brigade) but not one of them had any idea about the workplace and communications.

I identified that there were no communications in place in the event of an emergency, in fact the safety boffins had been that good at the writting of policy and proceedure they had even developed an emergency response group in the event of an emergecy.

I asked two questions and the first was if an ammonia leak how would people know which way was upwind! And the second was how do you communicate with the emergency response group and isolated workers in the event of a leak.

They could not answer even though they had employed 7 different safety experts to write these procedures. Recommendations of the report (short version) update emergency communications systems to meet basic Australian Standards and install a device that lets people know which way the wind is going!

Other recommendations included co-ordinating with business around the site so they were aware of an Ammonia spill and help with their evacuation plans. Some of those businesses included McDonalds and the local hospital as well as the usual needs with emergency services.

Another important recommendation was to contain any leaks! Yep have a secondary containment facility so if the primary facility leaked it would be contained in the secondary system.

I guess this was too hard as organisations don't want to develop best practice but only want to comply with the minimum, at least they complied with the rest of the report after a couple of weeks complaining.

In this instance it would seem that it would have been appropriate to have a secondary containment of the ammonia as a leak occuring for three hours is pathetic and places the whole community at risk of exposure.

Regards
Daniel