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On the catastrophic explosion of the AZF plant in Toulouse
Author(s) -
Guiochon Georges
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
process safety progress
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.378
H-Index - 40
eISSN - 1547-5913
pISSN - 1066-8527
DOI - 10.1002/prs.12197
Subject(s) - damages , liability , ecological succession , environmental science , forensic engineering , political science , law , engineering , ecology , biology
On September 21, 2001, around 10:17 am , a warehouse containing about 300 metric tons of ammonium nitrate rejects exploded in the AZF/Grande Paroisse plant in Toulouse (France), causing 31 deaths, hundreds of casualties, and enormous damages. The criminal investigation focused exclusively on the explosion itself and neglected the long chain of precursor events that took place in the previous hours, and suggest that a complex cascade of successive events was triggered by some unknown event. These strange, unusual phenomena were never investigated. The prosecution adopted an unlikely chemical scenario that cannot explain the origin of the catastrophe. The official investigation and the first instance trial were inconclusive. The judge found insufficient ground for criminal liability. A detailed examination of the different precursor events suggests a tentative explanation for the succession of events that linked to lead to the catastrophe. A strong thermal inversion caused pollutants from local plants to affect a high voltage electric line downwind from the plants, generating strong flames and arcs without triggering the current breakers and perturbing the computers that control the plants. Rogue orders caused a chain of explosions in the neighbor SNPE plant and finally that of a WW II bomb under AZF.