I found this on the thread that Bardou posted below. Very interesting:

Y2K or just old age?

http://www.justpeace.org/explosions.htm

FACTORY, GENERATING PLANT, PIPELINE EXPLOSIONS AND FIRES Summary -

1990 - 3 reports

1991 - 1 report

1992 - 1 report

1993 - 1 report

1994 - 1 report

1995 - 2 reports

1996 - 6 reports

1997 - 5 reports

1998 - 29 reports

1999 - 90 reports

2000 - As of TODAY there have been 64 reports since 1/1/2000

-- JoseMiami (caris@prodigy.net), January 24, 2000

Answers

JoseMiami,

Thanks for posting this. Spread the word.

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), January 25, 2000.

Jose, are those fires limited to refinery? Drills?

-- Hokie (Hokie_@hotmail.com), January 25, 2000.

I don't buy the statistical array because the data collecting methods and habits of the internet were far different in the early nineties. Many more local newspapers are on line today, for instance. There were no Matt Drudges or WNDs back then either. Many stories just missed the wires then, I believe.

If the model of data collection is flawed then the data is worse than useless. Looking at the later years may be more useful, though - maybe the last three. Maybe there is something statistically significant there, but you have to be careful. It's interesting, and there's probably something there, but I doubt that the above array is an accurate reflection of it.

-- paul leblanc (bronyaur@gis.net), January 25, 2000.

Paul,

You have made a good point...but it seems unlikely that so many would go unreported...I could see maybe 2 or 3...but IMO, these numbers reflect a need further investigation.

Thanks for your input. Good analysis. =)

-- Dee (T1Colt556@aol.com), January 25, 2000.

Paul commented:

"I don't buy the statistical array because the data collecting methods and habits of the internet were far different in the early nineties. Many more local newspapers are on line today, for instance. There were no Matt Drudges or WNDs back then either. Many stories just missed the wires then, I believe. "

Paul, let's just take the last two years, 1998 = 29, 1999= 90 and year to date 2000 = 64. got the picture!!

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), January 25, 2000.

Your citation at justpeace.org does not exist. It doesn't look like much of an unbiased source anyway. Give us a good source.

BTW, one of my companies business is: Industrial Explosion Protection. We build devices that detect and suppress all kinds of explosions. We track orders and billings, and while I cannot give you exact figures due to confidentiality, both new products and services, including emergency services are down substantially over Dec99.

Enough is enough! Let it go.

-- Veep (vp_it@big_co.com), January 25, 2000.

Veep, do you expect ANYONE to accept your nebulous post for anything but garbage??

Here is a link to some facts on explosions:

Link

Start educating yourself !!

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), January 25, 2000.

Uneducated? Nebulous? Garbarge? Hmm, let's see. My company makes explosion protection systems. What does yours do? As I said, I can't give you confidential information, but all activity, both new installations, and emergency and normal repair of our equipment is lower than it was in December. That, my friend, is a fact. You cannot admit to yourself that Y2k wasn't a problem. You have too much emotional investment in it. I mean, there was another thread at this site about an elevator falling because of a cable shear, and is posted with the comment "This probably isn't y2k problem". Doh! This will be my last post on this site, I just kept lurking to see if y'all had gotten over it yet, and I see you haven't.

Get on with your lives, it's over. Cheers!

-- Veep (vp_it@big_co.com), January 25, 2000.

VEEP commented:

"As I said, I can't give you confidential information, but all activity, both new installations, and emergency and normal repair of our equipment is lower than it was in December. That, my friend, is a fact. "

This my friend is NEBULOUS!

Now go back and check the link I provided. It is not NEBULOUS! It is FACT.

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), January 25, 2000.

Veep, Beep, Beep: commented:

"This will be my last post on this site, I just kept lurking to see if y'all had gotten over it yet, and I see you haven't. "

Don't blame you Veep, Beep, Beep, if I had thrown out that type of garbage I'd be looking for somewhere to hide myself!!

I'm sure you will be returning shortly under a NEW handle.

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), January 25, 2000.

This has already been talked half to death on the forum here and here. More to do with being easy to unearth recent stories than ones from many years ago. How many newspapers had web archives in 1990? Not many.

-- anonymous coward (ac@an.on), January 25, 2000.

RIP VEEP AC DORKS

-- R2D2 (mikeymac@uswest.net), January 25, 2000.

Yes, shills have been trying to spin the story in the other threads also. They won't simply admit that we are having far more problems this year than in prior years. Y2K is the only possible explanation. As Ray pointed out, this is FACT.

-- (hal@gostek.org), January 25, 2000.

I want to clarify that I found this chart of information on a web site at http://csf.colorado.edu/longwaves/jan00/msg00953.html that I got from Bardou's post just below this one. I copied it entirely on to this thread without any background check. I did go to the orginal source and look at it and it was very different in format.

I received at least one email from someone who did a little checking and had serious doubts about this accuracy and value of the information. I think it is a valid point that the collection of data was very different in earlier years. Take it for what it is worth, which may not be much.

-- JoseMiami (caris@prodigy.net), January 25, 2000.

The Gecko link is informative. If you really want to pin down refinery accidents. Go to the EPA site and look up "unplanned environmental releases" (yes they do plan some). Whenever there is a rupture or fire at a refinery or chemical plant, loss of material no matter how small, must be reported to the EPA and tracked. These quantities will be added to the TRI (toxic release inventory). Working in and being surrounded by various plants, the earlier years do look "lite". The recent years do look real. However, any not making the Gecko tracking list will appear on the EPA list due to their thorough tracking for the last 25 years. We spent several 100K on proccess crash/explosion suppression equipment in 99/00, guess we did not spend it at VP's company.

-- Surrounded (hiding@thefirststate.com), January 25, 2000.

I'll probably get flamed for posting this, but since I started the thread,I feel that I should stive to keep it balanced. In fairness the follwing email from Flint taking issue with the figures above should be posted here. I recieve this from him yesterday and later received his permission to post his email comments here. Since this thread is now several days old, I doubt anyone will see his response, but here it is. - JoseMiami ************************* Hi Jose Just thought I'd contribute some comments on this oil controversy. This is (in my opinion) the most wild display of willful ignorance I've ever seen on this forum, so I was amused. Anyway, I noticed the numbers you posted, which you called "explosions and fires". So I went to Marcia's site where the details are to be found. Have you looked at these details? You seem like a thoughtful and reasonable person, so you might be interested in some observations here. 1) Your list includes 140 "incidents", yet Marcia's chart details only 67 of these. I wonder where the rest came from? 2) (Background data) There are about 750 refineries in the world, of which about 150 (20%) are in the United states. 3) Of the detailed reports on the chart, 49 are in the US, and only 18 are elsewhere in the world. Since refining is a mature technology, done the same way worldwide, you'd expect 4 incidents elsewhere for each ONE in the US. Yet we see more than twice as many in the US as everywhere else combined. Clearly, the data reporting is extremely US- centric, to the point where the numbers become very suspect indeed, on this basis alone. 4) Of the 67 detailed "incidents", 22 are normal, ordinary planned shutdowns for standard maintenance. ALL of these "incidents" are within the last year. Does anyone really feel that refineries NEVER had planned maintenance shutdowns anywhere in the world before 1999? Doesn't it strike you as odd that planned maintenance is ignored before 1999, and then suddenly used to vastly inflate the "outage" numbers within the past year? I wonder why? 5) Of the unplanned outages, only about half are due to actual fires, explosions, or mechanical breakdowns according to the detailed reports. Of the remainder, about half of the reasons are unknown, and the other half is due to circumstances external to the facility. These include shutdowns for lack of demand (there was a glut, you know), or for regulatory changes, civil unrest, or loss of external power. Of the 67 "incidents" detailed, only 1/4 of them are the result of explosions, fires or mechanical breakdowns. And you should also notice that ALL of the non-breakdown outages are to be found within the last year. How very curious. 6) We know from multiple posts by people in the oil industry that refining is a messy and dangerous process -- we're dealing here with highly flammable materials under high heat and pressure, in an inconvenient physical form (gooey liquid). Mechanical breakdowns are common. Maintenance shutdowns are common. Fires and explosions, while not nearly so common, probably happen every few years at every refinery. NOW, let's make the incredibly generous assumption that that the average refinery experiences an unplanned outage only once every 20 years! (And if you read those details, you'll see they include stoppages of a mere 15 minutes, so ANY unplanned outage is included PROVIDED it's very recent, right?). And by contrast, I believe you'll find that refineries almost surely experience unplanned stoppages at least once a year. But anyway... At a rate of one unplanned outage every 20 years per refinery and 750 refineries worldwide, this comes to around 35-40 outages worldwide per year. This is an absurd minimum, and the real number is likely to be around 500 unplanned outages worldwide per year. YET, you will notice that up until 1999, the number of REPORTED outages is 1-3 per year worldwide! The direct implication is that only a very few percent of outages were either reported somewhere (likely) or that if they were reported, they weren't collected to compile your numbers (also likely). The number of reported *unplanned* outages in 1999 is still lower than one would expect, suggesting that the majority of such outages are simply not being reported to anyone. And that's what you'd expect refineries to do if they possibly could. Which they can, especially overseas (where problems are systematically underreported as discussed in point #3). 7) Finally, you will notice that this PURELY ARTIFICIAL numerical trend was compiled by someone who is trying to build a case that y2k is causing it. Even though these numbers are absurd every way you look at them, they are swallowed whole by those who are desperate to make this same claim. The entire exercise is like reporting one death out of a million up until 1999, reporting 1/4 of all deaths in 1999 (a vastly larger number, but still way too small), and then reporting both all deaths and all injuries in 2000 (a huge, completely noncomparable number). Hey, if I wanted to illustrate a trend and was willing to use this utterly fraudulent method, I could fabricate any trend I wanted. And make it as spectacular as I chose. The fact that no such trend exists is irrelevant! I'm not saying that y2k has NOT been a contributing factor to any outages. I'm saying that we simply have no way of knowing this, and the oil numbers provided give us ABSOLUTELY NO INSIGHT into whether y2k has contributed to a single outage anywhere. These numbers are pure garbage according to every objective test imaginable. Flint

-- JoseMiami (caris@prodigy.net), January 26, 2000.