During late morning, a passer-by walking along a chemical plant making nitrogenous products and fertilisers was sprayed by water droplets causing irritation around his face and lips. Once back home, he rinsed his face and noticed several stains on his T-shirt. Upon making this observation, he filed a complaint with the Police Force, which contacted the plant operator to verify the pH of the site’s scrubber between 10 and 11 am, when the incident had occurred. No anomaly was found. A verification of droplet catchers on the granulating unit’s scrubber washer revealed no clogging.

The inspection authorities for classified facilities conducted an inspection and recorded spattering stemming from one of the stacks on the granulated or underground scrubber system.

After this incident, the operator adopted a series of technical and organisational measures to formalise the maintenance work carried out on all probes and droplet catchers at the time of requests, while including the cleaning of these probes and catchers in the “plant cleaning” log.

The inspectors requested several additional measures to avoid these discharges, namely:

• updating the procedure relative to probe malfunction;
• studying the possibility of measuring droplets at the chimney exhaust;
• enforcing stricter pH regulations to close in on neutrality (for pH probes near granulating unit’s scrubber);
• to complement the 1st one, installing a 2nd probe on the granulating unit’s scrubber tower;
• installing a more effective droplet catcher as part of the project to both increase capacity and enhance the granulating unit’s scrubber performance;
• contacting the droplet catcher supplier for the underground scrubber to learn about the initial equipment performance characteristics and the possibilities of installing a more effective catcher.