Flixborough disaster

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The Flixborough disaster was an explosion at a chemical plant close to the village of Flixborough, North Lincolnshire, England, on Saturday, 1 June 1974. It killed 28 and seriously injured 36 of the 72 people on site at the time. The casualty figures could have been much higher if the explosion had occurred on a weekday, when the main office area would have been occupied. A contemporary campaigner on process safety wrote "the shock waves rattled the confidence of every chemical engineer in the country". The disaster involved (and may well have been caused by) a hasty equipment modification. Although virtually all of the plant management personnel had chemical engineering qualifications, there was no on-site senior manager with mechanical engineering expertise. Mechanical engineering issues with the modification were overlooked by the managers who approved it, and the severity of potential consequences due to its failure were not taken into account. Flixborough led to a widespread public outcry over process safety. Together with the passage of the UK Health and Safety at Work Act in the same year, it led to (and is often quoted in justification of) a more systematic approach to process safety in UK process industries. UK government regulation of plants processing or storing large inventories of hazardous materials is currently under the Control of Major Accident Hazards Regulations 1999 (COMAH). In Europe, the Flixborough disaster and the Seveso disaster in 1976 led to development of the Seveso Directive in 1982 (currently Directive 2012/18/EU issued in 2012).