Event
- Event ID
- 974
- Quality
- Description
The truck was delivering hydrogen to a steel products plant. It contained approximately 8500 gallon of liquid hydrogen. The operation of transfer to the customer tank had just terminated. The fire started at the tanker vent stack during post-delivery venting.
The emergency services were called - fire engines from two stations attended. The facility and the neighbourhood, including local schools and businesses were evacuated as a precautionary measure.
The fire was limited to the tanker vent stack.
The hazardous material incident team personnel closed the vent valve the 2.5 hours later.The emergency services closed the traffic and evacuated several businesses, schools and homes for a few hours.
- Event Initiating system
- Classification of the physical effects
- Hydrogen Release and Ignition
- Nature of the consequences
- fire
- Macro-region
- North America
- Country
- United States
- Date
- Component involved
- valve (vent)
- Failure mode
- rupture & ignition
- Initiating cause
- unknown
- Root CAUSE analysis
According to preliminary findings, the INITIATING CAUSE was the failure of a valve. The ignition of the hydrogen may have been caused, of facilitated by a lack of proper grounding, through static build-up.
The investigation to determine the ROOT CAUSE was not yet terminated at the moment the source issued this event.- Root causes
- Unknown
- Date entry in HIAD
- 01/01/2024
Facility
- Application
- Hydrogen transport and distribution
- Sub-application
- LH2 tanker
- Hydrogen supply chain stage
- All components affected
vent valve
- Process temperature range [C]
- cryogenic temperature (below -50°C)
- Process pressure range [MPa]
- low to medium pressure (below 2 MPa)
- Location type
- Open
- Location
- industrial area
- Operational condition
Emergency & Consequences
- Number of fatalities
- 0
- Number of injured persons
- 0
- Currency
- US$
- Property loss (onsite)
- 47.000
- Post-event summary
There was no release of hazardous materials due consumption by fire.
There were no reported injuries or damage to property.
The rear of the tanker did incurred some minor fire damage.- Emergency action
The emergency services were and fire engines from two stations attended. The facility and the neighbourhood, including local schools and businesses were evacuated as a precautionary measure.
Although the sources do no report the tactics adopted by the fire-fighting teams, a news picture shows a water jet directed to the place of the fire.
The hazardous material incident team personnel closed the vent valve and the 2.5 hours later.The tanker was inspected by the emergency response teams, declared safe and released to the owner which transported it back to its premises.
After that, it was inspected by a 3rd party vendor.
Lesson Learnt
- Lesson Learnt
A picture provided by local news shows that the emergency teams fought the fire by means of a water jet directed to the tank vent.
It is in general not advised to use water to stop a fire on a cryogenic tank. The action can cause freezing of the water and the blocking of the pressure relief venting, with consequent building up of the pressure inside the tank and possible catastrophic failure of the entire tank. In this case, however, the LH2 had already been transferred and it could be assumed that the little hydrogen left in the taker was already evaporated or in the process to do so, with negligible potential for a major pressure increase.
In-depth data
- Release type
- gas
- Involved substances (% vol)
- H2 100%
- Released amount (kg)
- 597.74659348978
- Release pressure [MPa]
- 1
- Probable IGNITION SOURCE
- Explosion type
- Fireball
References
- Sources categories
- PHMSA
- Reference & weblink
Incident I-2018100122 and I-201810012 of the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration PHMSA:
https://portal.phmsa.dot.gov/analytics/saw.dll?Portalpages&PortalPath=%…
(accessed September 2024)Metroforensics news of August 29, 2018
https://metroforensics.blogspot.com/2018_08_30_archive.html
(accessed November 2020)Hard Working Trucks news of August 29, 2018
(accessed November 2020)
https://www.hardworkingtrucks.com/explosion-during-hydrogen-tanker-truc…