Pollution
Humain
Environnement
Economique

At a paint and varnish plant, a leak occurred around 12:30 pm on the exchanger of a 50 m³ liquid nitrogen tank (pressure : 10 bar); 150 employees were evacuated from all units except the resin workshop, which had been secured. A chemical emergency squad was called to the scene. The internal emergency plan was activated since the cistern had been placed just opposite the solvent bulk storage zone, whose capacity was slightly less than 1,500 m³. Exposed to the effect of a very low-temperature nitrogen leak, the operator feared for the structural integrity of facilities at the level of the leak, which could have blasted fragments (or projected pipeline parts) in the direction of this zone. Traffic on the adjacent ring road was halted by police officers. A specialised subcontractor plugged the leak at the base of the cistern by around 2:45 pm; all plant personnel returned to their workstations. This leak led to a loss of inerting on all facilities requiring inerting to maintain safe plant operations. The operator was obliged to introduce measures for managing activity resumption under 100% safe conditions (degraded mode operation). Moreover, the operator was required to conduct a detailed analysis of site installations and establish for each one the protocols to be adopted either immediately or prior to production restart, in addition to submitting an accident report indicating the full set of measures taken to ensure safe installation restart. This event was then thoroughly examined as part of the safety report filing procedure.