Journalism of Courage
The blast and fire in the gas pipeline of the Coke Oven Battery Complex No 11 during maintenance work in SAIL’s Bhilai plant Tuesday morning, which killed nine people, bears similarities to an accident that occurred in 2014 at the same plant. At the time, six people died in what SAIL described as a “freak accident” and the “first such event in 50 years”.
But official figures of accidents in plants and units of SAIL and Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd (RINL) from 2015 till February 2018 shows that Bhilai leads in terms of reportable accidents, followed by plants at Rourkela and Durgapur. These three are among the country’s largest steel plants in the public sector.
There were a total of 58 fatalities in accidents across plants of SAIL and RINL during the last four years and 153 non-fatal accidents at these plants over this period. Beyond the SAIL and RINL plants, there are a large number of steel factories in the private sector, but the requisite data on accidents is not maintained by the Ministry of Steel.
In case of SAIL’s Bhilai plant, there were eight fatalities in the last four years and 25 non-fatal accidents during the period.
At Durgapur Steel Plant, there were 10 fatal accidents, and 11 in the Rourkela Steel Plant during this period.
READ | Nine killed, 14 injured in blast at Bhilai Steel plant, probe ordered
In the June 2014 accident at the Bhilai steel plant, the main header pipe of the plant’s pump house, which supplied water to the gas cleaning plant of the blast furnaces, suddenly ruptured. As the water supply to the gas cleaning plant had been stopped to prevent flooding, there was a sudden drop in pressure, forcing gas from the blast furnace scrubbers to enter the pipeline.
When the pipeline ruptured, there was a surge of a deadly cocktail of methane and the colourless and odourless carbon monoxide. In a matter of minutes, a maintenance team working on the repairing line started dropping one by one, including two deputy general managers who had rushed to the spot to assist.
Just three days later, on June 16, 2014, two engineers of a private firm — SMS Seimag India Ltd — died of a suspected gas leak at the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, a unit of RINL. Preliminary reports had then attributed the accident to suspected carbon monoxide poisoning.
Two years prior to the 2014 accident in the Bhilai steel plant, in June 2012, over a dozen employees, including some senior executives, died at an accident in RINL’s Visakhapatnam plant.
In response to the 2014 accident at Bhilai, a senior SAIL official had told The Indian Express that the carbon monoxide entering the water pipeline system was, by itself, “a contingency that most steel plants are not designed for”.
There was an element of human error as well, as those who rushed to the pump house that day did not wear protective gear available at the site. While investigations are currently underway to ascertain the causes of Tuesday’s accident at the same plant, there are apprehensions that the lessons of the previous accidents are still far from being fully imbibed.
