Salem Harbor steam generator explosion

Forty-year-old utility boiler. Massachusetts state inspector deferred the required corrosion-under-ash inspection of the manifold header for ~15 years because removing several feet of ash was too much trouble. The boiler eventually exploded, killing four. Used to illustrate that boiler/PV code inspection intervals exist for reason and that "money under the table" defeats them.

One of the problems is that it's often a lot of work and expense to remove insulation. I have a situation right now up in Salem Harbor: a forty-year-old boiler for a utility plant generating electricity. For about fifteen years, the Massachusetts state inspector decided it was too much trouble to make them clean all the ash off the manifold header at the bottom of the boiler. There was ash built up several feet deep, and they were getting corrosion under ash — not under insulation, but the same type of attack, where you collect moisture. The boiler code said this was one of the critical areas that had to be inspected on a regular basis. And every three years for about twelve, fifteen years he decided, I will wait till the next time to do it — right until it blew up and killed four guys. A lot of times there's a little money under the table to save the expense of removing all the ash or the insulation.

Utility steam generator (built 1960s, ~10 stories tall), inspector failed to perform required biennial inspections for ~15 years; corrosion-thinned vessel developed steam leak that killed four workers ~7-8 years before the lecture (so ~2004-2005). Illustrates inspection-protocol failure even when code is in place.

I've got a thing up at Salem Harbor right now where a big utility — they've just announced they're going to close it, because it was built in the 1960s, it's fifty years old now. But about seven or eight years ago they had a steam explosion. Steam came out and killed I think four guys. Why? The inspector wasn't really doing his job, because it's hard to get into some of these places and inspect them. For fifteen years running, the inspection he was supposed to do every two years, he always said, oh, we don't need to do it this time, we don't need to do it the next time. In the meantime the thing's corroding. It gets thin enough that one day when some people were about two stories beneath it, it develops a steam leak. This is a huge thing — like ten stories tall, a steam generator — and when it develops a steam leak, even though the hole is only this big, it lets out enough steam that those guys probably had about two seconds to get out of the way. They would have had to get thirty yards out of the way. And they were just basically caught and cooked.