Posted on 03/18/2013 5:52:09 AM PDT by thackney
Back in Ben Franklin’s day, no one worried about lightning causing a chemical tank to explode or shutting down the electronic controls to a nuclear reactor.
Technology has raised the stakes since Franklin invented the lightning rod – lightning-sparked fires caused more than $1 billion in insured homeowners’ losses in 2010 alone, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
The costs can be even higher for the oil and gas industry; a 2006 study published in the Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries found lightning strikes are the most common cause of accidents involving storage tanks at refineries and petrochemical plants.
“For the guys who’ve been around for 30 or 40 years, it’s not if, it’s when they’re going to get hit,” said Matt Jones, project manager for Ashley Automation & Technology, an industrial electrical firm that works mostly in the oil fields. And while lightning is hardly the only risk for oil and gas production and other facilities, it’s a big one, said David Miller, director of standards for the American Petroleum Institute.
The fact that the institute first issued standards for protecting facilities against lightning in 1953 and has updated them seven times since then is evidence of the concern, Miller said.
Strikes in Houston
In the lower 48 states, the risk is highest in Florida and lowest along the West Coast. The Houston area receives more lightning strikes than anywhere else in Texas, according to Richard Orville, a Texas A&M professor who established the National Lightning Detection Network.
The lightning rod is still the most commonly used protection around the world, updated with modern materials but still based on Franklin’s design from the 1700s. Jones said there is also growing interest in a decidedly more modern technology as companies try to protect themselves from the elements.
Roy Carpenter was an engineer for NASA contractor Rockwell International when he came up with a different way of guarding rockets against lightning.
Lightning rods work by drawing lightning and sending the charge through a conducting wire into the ground. Carpenter’s system aims to prevent a strike altogether by disrupting the electrical charge, essentially making conditions less favorable for lightning to develop.
After leaving Rockwell, Carpenter started the company that is now Lightning Eliminators & Consultants.
Roy Carpenter died in 2007, but the company is still in business, based in Boulder, Colo. Carpenter’s son, Peter Carpenter, is chairman of the board.
Skeptics of system
While the system has its skeptics, energy companies make up a growing share of its clientele.
“Twenty years ago, it wasn’t as big a deal, but now oil and gas plants are so technical,” company president and CEO Avram Saunders said. “Lightning rods attract lightning and send it into the ground. If you had a multimillion-dollar facility, would you want to attract that much energy?”
Saunders said several companies along the Houston Ship Channel use the system, including some units at Exxon- Mobil Chemical’s Baytown plant. The company did not respond to requests to discuss the system.
The Tennessee Valley Authority installed the system over a portion of its Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama in 1999 and will use it at another nuclear plant now under construction, said Rick Brehm, the authority’s program manager for electromagnetic interference and instrumentation and control systems.
Brehm said the authority chose to add the protection to a 600-foot-high stack, camera towers and guard towers at Browns Ferry, areas that previously had been protected by lightning rods but still had been damaged by lightning.
“When we lose security equipment, it’s not just the dollars of the equipment, but having to staff security officers to cover the area, so we were paying personnel costs as well as equipment costs,” Brehm said.
An internal study tallied lightning strikes within a 500-meter, three-mile, six-mile and 120-mile radius of the stack for the three years before and after the system was installed.
In the years after the installation, lightning strikes within 500 meters of the stack dropped by 80 percent, Brehm said, while they held steady in the wider area. He said there’s no sign the stack has been struck by lightning since the system was installed.
But such studies have done little to sway some in the lightning protection mainstream, including Bud VanSickle, executive director of the Lightning Protection Institute.
His organization, which certifies companies to install lightning protection systems, supports lightning rod systems “because they work,” VanSickle said.
Apollo program
Peter Carpenter has heard all the criticism.
He was a child when his father designed the charge transfer system as a Rockwell engineer on the Apollo program. The rockets launched from Florida, making lightning strikes a constant worry.
“It seemed odd to him that they were using technology that went back to Ben Franklin to protect men going to the moon,” Peter Carpenter said.
Jones, the project manager for Ashley Automation & Technology, said his company began using Lighting Eliminators’ system at customers’ request but now recommends it.
Jones said much of the current oil field expansion is funded by private investors, who are more concerned about protecting gas processing units, oil drilling pads and other investments from lightning strikes than major oil companies may have been in the past.
“They don’t want to lose their $5 million to a lightning strike,” he said. “They see it (lightning protection) as an insurance policy.”
Why should the Pinto have been taken off the market?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Schwartz_paper
The government is a creature of the majority. It cannot protect minority rights. It does the will of the powerful - the wealthy, the politically connected, and the mob aka the people.
Have you ever read The Tyranny of the Majority?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2216858/posts
I guess we will disagree and move on.
Without items like building codes, electrical codes, etc, doctors would have significant competition in the number of clients killed by other professions.
Thanks for that. .....
How did Monticello, which still stands today, or George Washingtons home get built? How did they survive?
At least in the building trades, most of the code is written by crony capitalists looking for a captive market. Innovations don’t have to be forced on people.
Plumbing, electric and carpentry work isn’t that hard and is mostly unchanged from centuries ago. The concepts are all well known and well understood. In Illinois you cannot use PEX for water supply lines, only copper. The purpose is to prevent cheap labor. It’s also illegal to change your own toilet or sink.
You cannot build a fence higher that 5’ without an inspection and a permit. That’s life saving?
Would you not attempt to mitigate lightning strikes against your facilities if there were no “controlling legal authority”?
Look up “mavens” they’re another way non-experts get information. You likely have a series of trusted go to people on a variety of topics you know too little about to make good decisions. They’re likely mavens.
We could do away with the majority of regulations and you’d not experience a reduction in safety, but an increase. How much laziness on the part of the participant is encouraged by thinking - this must be safe, government said so?
Plumbing, electric and carpentry work isn’t that hard
There is a huge change in the materials and equipment on the electrical side from say the 30's. If you gave most electricians that same equipment and materials, the item they would most likely build over time is a fire.
You cannot build a fence higher that 5’ without an inspection and a permit. That’s life saving?
You can make all the strawman arguments you want. I design electrical facilities for living. You are not changing my mind with them.
My experience with too many clients over the decades is too many want to save every dollar up front and are ignorant of the risk. The death rate working in the oil/gas industry would be horrendous without most of the codes we are required to follow. For some, legal threats are the only reason they don't proceed with that foolishness. On the individual level, they often expect to be able to move on to another project or company before the problems come to light, if they do before a disaster.
How much laziness on the part of the participant is encouraged by thinking - this must be safe, government said so?
Items like the National Electric Code, produced by the National Fire Protection Agency, are not written government officials. They are produced mostly by the work of volunteers, and some paid staff, who review the current construction methods, material development, past fire/explosion history, etc. The only real impact government has on such safety codes is making them required, after they are developed. Often, states will wait several years making new revisions get proven before they will adopt them and require them.
The only place I have dealt with where government makes the electrical code is Clark County (Vegas) Nevada. They adopt the NEC then write their own special exceptions and requirements to meet the local pay-offs.
I was talking residential, not industrial, sorry.
How about one last argument, no straw, but just a man?
You.
Imagine the complete absence of any electrical code at all. How would you specify and build your facilities?
I would have to do so much immense amount of research, no significant facility could be built in a reasonable cost and time frame.
And on the residential side, you would be amazed at the amount of dangerous installations are done outside the range of proper inspection. I've done volunteer work at a couple of churches over the years, fixing dangerous existing installations from people with good intentions but limited knowledge and funds.
The important thing to remember about most safety regulations, typically they are written in blood. Almost never are they changed due to someone's theory. They are almost always in response to something going wrong. Typically, it won't gain recognition without death or disability; dollars along make for very slow code updates.
I will also admit, that earlier in my career, I did things endangering my own life as well as others, mostly due to lack of understanding of the danger.
Good Judgment comes from Experience.
Experience usually comes from surviving Bad Judgment.
Better to learn from the bad judgment of others.
Which is documented in the codes after significant review by several recognized peers in the industry. I can buy a book with all kinds of crap in it as the opinion of one person. The engineering societies that produce the codes give real review to the design requirements.
Sorry, I’m writing poorly. What if the government didn’t enforce the codes? They’d still exist. They’d remain the standard and the tort system would manage violations.
I don't agree. If they were just a suggestions, the people and companies would not invest the time and expense to produce them.
By mandating them, manufacturing companies spend dollars sending experts to keep the playing field level. If the breakers, wiring, motors are not held to those standards, far too many would just buy the cheapest Chinese junk they could find.
Sometime this gives a manufacture a significant advantage. When the first GFCI breakers & receptacles came out, they were hugely expensive and very few companies made them. Without the legal requirement to install them, the volume of sales would never have climbed to bring the price down to a more reasonable level.
They’d remain the standard and the tort system would manage violations.
Too many companies in today's code requirements are willing to cut corners hoping they won't kill people too often. I am not willing to be like some 3rd world countries (where I have worked before) that views paying of the family of the occasional dead is cheaper than building safely in the first place.
I think you’re proving that the codes don’t reflect the actual risk. If the market isn’t demanding GFCIs then the risk isn’t there.
I’ve lived in old homes all my life and never lost a family member, despite these homes not having GFCIs, arc fault breakers, carbon monoxide detectors, etc.
Being “doubly safe” doesn’t save 100% more lives.
What would happen is people like you would create high quality systems and standards. Some would meet or exceed those, some would innovate your standards out of existence. What government enforced codes do is reward crony capitatlists and delay innovators.
Do all new homes need sprinkler systems in your community? This despite the fact that home fires continue to fall?
We are not going to agree.
I’ve done work in countries where such codes are not required. I would not want my family living there.
Cheers.
OK, I’ve lived in countries without those standards and it wasn’t so bad.
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