Delayed Coker - Coking Safety & Communications

This happened during a turnaround. "We pulled the over head vapor line blind flanges for the overhead line clean out. The contractor, as he was cleaning these flanges, noticed that they were really gouged out. "It was almost as if they were made this way," he said. So he started thinking, "Geez they’re 2 ½ inches thick out toward the gasket area and they’re only ¾ inch in the middle." So he finished cleaning them out and then he talked to other contract help and they looked at the other blind flanges and they were all that way.

So he alerted his supervisor, who got a hold of a planner, and the planner got an inspector out. They discovered that they were not the right metallurgy. They were supposed to be 9-chrome, but they were regular mild steel.

They checked all the blind flanges in that service and they replaced 8 of them. They kept one around for an example of just how much metal you can lose because of the wrong metallurgy.

Wrong Metallurgy