Today’s video I am looking at a disaster back in Blighty albeit
very far from my freezing corner of south London.
It is quarter past noon on the 11th of May 2004 and emergency workers are searching the
rubble of a disaster site, the search for survivors and victims has only just begun.
The site they are working on in Grovepark Mills, Maryhill, Glasgow, and is officially owned and
operated by ICL Plastics Limited, but locally it is called the stock line plastics factory.
The disaster would highlight that British plants were no safer than anywhere else
on earth, bursting the AT least nationally perceived bubble of UK industrial safety.
Of course we know this to be a wrong assumption, my name is John and welcome to plainly difficult.
Stockline Plastics a background.
This is my second video about a disaster in Glasgow.
As a side note, the city has one of the best transport museums I’ve ever been to.
Anyway, great museums aside, our story starts with the opening of
the stockline plastics plant in 1969 flanked by Hopehill Road,
Grovepark Street and Grovepark Place, which is around here on a map.
The site has been used for industry for over 100 years,
originally seeing use as a textiles factory later being repurposed into a paper mill.
The main building was a product of its time being
constructed of timber supported by a grid of cast iron beams.
It had a stair tower added in 1907,
and in the 1970s had its pitched roof replaced with a flat one.
As the site turned into a plastics plant the site would undergo some changes.
On the main building One third of the ground floor was used as a despatch area and the remaining two
thirds housed the coating shop; this was where plastic coating was applied to metal components.
To do plastic coating you need ovens and that needs heat.
This came from 8 ovens 6 electric and 2 gas. The latter used lpg.
Fabrication was undertaken on site at a different building,
this was where plastic and metal items were well fabricated.
By the early 2000s stockline plastics was mainly storing and selling bulk plastic sheeting,
with the ability to alter and cut the sheets to customer requirements.
So the lpg pipe work and storage on-site was installed by calor gas, which for those of
you not from the UK are a major supplier of lpg, you see their tanks all over the place.
Well calor installed the gas work and this included a 2 tone tank and
a buried pipe into the main building for the lpg ovens.
The pipes ran through the basement of the main building,
then went to the ground floor and ran along the wall to the lpg oven.
Much of the pipe work was made of galvanized steel.
But The pipework between the storage vessel and
the point of entry to the basement did not have a waterproof coating.
Most of the screwed iron fittings, straight
couplings, bends and elbows joining lengths of pipework were ungalvanised.
After installation in the 1960s the yard of the site was raised by approximately 1.1 meters,
this meant that the pipework running into the main
building became inaccessible and visible from the outside.
It still could be seen from the inside,
but a later modification of a steel floor made internal inspection also not possible.
The Health and safety executive undertook several inspections over the site's history,
a recurring concern raised was that of the tank location.
In 1998 Johnston oils took over supply to the site from calor gas, they requested calor remove
their tank, which was completed in march, and Johnson oils then went and installed a 1 tonne
tank of their own, but due to the company not being involved in the original installation
the liability on Johnston oil only went as far as the first regulator and not the buried pipe work.
During the new tank install a soundness test was undertaken and no issues could be seen,
but it wasn't a full visual check of the system.
Thus the unprotected and only partially galvanized pipework went virtually unchecked.
In 2002 another souness check was undertaken during a regulator change
and again no issues were reported by again this wasn't a visual check of the system.
So I need to address the rather confusing naming of the site, I’ve been calling it so
far the stockline plastics site, it was actually called ICL Group, me calling it stockline was no
mistake however, due to Stockline being the main public facing part of the business in
that if you wanted to buy that was the arm of the organization that would have fulfilled the order.
Stockline was mainly based out of the warehouse,
with ICL Plastics and ICL Tech actually using the main building for production and admin.
So all was quiet at icl plastics, not much in the way of disasters
had affected the site, well until a deadly day in 2004.
The disaster
It is the morning of the 11th of May 2004 and workers at icl
and stockline plastics are working as normal.
With No hint of what was coming,
orders were being processed and general admin was being undertaken in the main building.
At about midday an explosion erupted from the Victorian main building, within seconds the
Overpressure caused the structure to collapse into its footprint.
Emergency services were called and by quarter past 12 the police had set up a
control point on-site. A major incident had been declared by half past as rescue began.
Initially 5 fire crews were in attendance but the nUmber would swell over the afternoon.
Triage was set up nearby for the injured of which there were many,
debris had scattered buildings nearby and into the street.
Injured were sent to various hospitals around Glasgow, by mid afternoon 24 had been rescued
from the rubble but another 16 were feared to still be buried.
By 9pm the last survivor was rescued, leaving a total of 9 losing their lives and 37 injured.
Amongst the victims were two of the company directors
Bodies would be removed for the next 3 days with
the final victim being found at 11:25 on the 14th of May.
In total 300 would assist in rescue and recovery.
The site was handed over to the police and thus the cause of the disaster was to be found.
The investigation
Fire investigators and police scoured the disaster site looking for any hints as to the cause.
The report into the disaster would be provided by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), they
are the government organization that usually investigate these kind of things.
The buildings basement and floor had shown the most damage at the
hope hill road end hinting at the starting point of the explosion.
The Grovepark Street end was severely damaged but remained standing.
The lpg tank had been dislodged and the warehouse was largely intact. This
allowed investigators to zero in on the epicenter.
The concrete floor was destroyed. This damage was a hallmark of a large sudden
force, what would be produced by an explosion from below the steel floor.
Blood samples from one of the victims found in the basement was discovered to have traces of propane.
This hinted strongly to a lpg leak.
This pointed the finger to the lpg storage and plumbing situation at icl plastics.
Needless to say it was time to dig up the pipe work for a thorough inspection,
and what they found was a smoking gun of sorts.
Upon excavation they found the pipe to be severely
corroded where it made its way into the basement of the main building.
There was a crack that was around 70% of the circumference of the pipe which
had allowed lpg to leak out into the basement.
It was found that the soil around this section of the pipe nearest
the building was highly corrosive, due to a high run off of rain from
the building leading the soil to be almost constantly damp.
The section had been covered during the yard raising with
backfill and concrete which aggravated the corrosion.
The lpg leaked and accumulated in the basement where it was only a matter
of time before a spark would set off the whole building.
The lpg system on the site was clearly the issue,
but who was to blame, well criminal and civil proceedings unsurprisingly would come next.
In 2006 the crown prosecution service had enough to charge icl
under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.
They were accused of:
Failing to make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to the health and safety
of employees while at work in failing to identify that the pipework conveying Liquefied Petroleum
Gas (LPG) from the bulk vessel storage to the premises presented a potential hazard and risk;
to appoint one or more competent persons to assist in carrying out such risk assessments;
to have a proper system of inspection and maintenance
in respect of the LPG pipework concerned,and to ensure, so far as was reasonably practicable,
that the pipework was maintained in a condition that was safe and without risk to employees.
The next year On 17 August 2007 at Glasgow High Court, ICL pled guilty to the charges and two
of the companies under ICL group ICl tech and ICL plastics were ordered to pay 200k£ each in fines.
So today’s subject I’m going to rate it as negligence as well that the pipe was
allowed to corrode which sadly led to disaster.
I’m also going to rate it a 5 on my legacy scale.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/16_07_09_icl_inquiry.pdf