This past Wednesday before thanksgiving, we had a pump failure. It was on a circulating pump not a loading pump which is better but still was a mess.
Here’s the inside of the pump house that is attached to the shore tank. The pump on the left is for loading trucks and railcars and it’s suction is directly on the bottom of the tank. The pump on the right is for circulating and heating the product. It’s suction is off the side wall of tank and routed thru a heat exchanger before returning back to the side wall of tank but higher up.
This is the routing of product. As it passes thru the heat exchanger there’s are internal tubes that we open a steam valve and allow steam to pass thru the tubes and that heat gets transferred to the product.
When a tank product gets down to around 85° is when we start the heating process to get the product up to as high as 120° in some cases. With the majority of our tanks being million gallon capacity, typically not always full but normally we are at levels 245-260”. So when we start this process we open the suction and discharge valves and then start the pump. Always pinch down on discharge side to make sure the product is flowing and the pump isn’t air bound, which does happen from time to time. This pump will circulate product thru the exchanger for up to 5 days non stop getting the temp from 85-118°. It takes time.
So this process was started by day shift on Monday. Come Wednesday the pump was off and product was spewing from the backside or the dry side of the pump. This means the basket was breached and who knows how long that leaked for. We usually do a good “walk thru” at the beginning and the middle of our shifts looking for spills, leaks, power failures, heat traces not functioning or any signs of potential problems. Day shift said they checked it at 11am, afternoon guy said he found a lake around the tank at 7pm so who knows how long it was leaking for. Our go to in the industry is 150 gallons is all we lost because that puts us just under the recordable quantity. According to the met-tape reading it was a lot more than that but nothing I’m willing to put into words online.
So it was all hands on deck Wednesday to suck up the product and put into tanker trucks and then “control spill” of dilute scrubber tank acid to neutralize the spill. But I will say, this was all in containment and not a spill or threat to environment.
This was how it looked this morning when I went back to check on it before my shift starts at 11pm where it’s hard to see the whole picture. It has to look presentable before Monday morning when the majority of the company is gonna find out we had an oopsy.