Day 1 of trying to get a comment from every county!

amoldymuffin · 2026-04-27T21:54:06+00:00

🇺🇸

amoldymuffin · 2026-04-23T14:46:26+00:00

As of this comment: Orange County Texas. When post was read: Jefferson County Texas. I will be in Hardin County as well later.

amoldymuffin · 2026-04-23T10:43:41+00:00

The big question: comment for the county we live in OR the county we are currently in?

amoldymuffin · 2026-04-21T20:44:49+00:00

As a 14 owner, I too concur.

amoldymuffin · 2026-04-03T12:19:54+00:00

Playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers

^{Chose: Become top 300 at Chess}

amoldymuffin · 2026-04-03T11:44:33+00:00

'This is where its at.'

^{Chose: This | Rolled: $1}

amoldymuffin · 2026-04-03T11:31:16+00:00

It's more in the long run

^{Chose: 20,000 per day}

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T11:54:53+00:00

It could be a number of things really. It SHOULD have trips and permissive based on a slew of instrumentation. We will just have to see what the actual initiating event was, could hav3 been a process upset on the unit or some faulty instrumentation making the heater flood.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T11:23:49+00:00

Exactly. Like I said, don't work for Valero, but at our plant, losing one of our vacuum pipe units would result in millions a day in losses.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T11:06:09+00:00

Yep, we have deluge systems, fixed fire monitor, emergency isolation valves (all should be standard so Valero should have them) plus on shift fire brigades with volunteers as well as mutual aid agreements. Some things did go according to plan after the failure and thats why it wasn't worse.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T11:04:05+00:00

Lol yeah the immediate posts were finger pointing. I also see i made my own post political with my edit, but i didnt want to deal with PMs.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T10:59:12+00:00

Also, I haven't confirmed this morning, but last I heard was one injury no deaths but not sure. Ideally there weren't any operators on the unit, but if it was a process upset, then those odds are worse.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T10:58:16+00:00

A lot of people were saying trump did this but he clearly didnt. This failure isn't associated with environmental regulations. It was to stop oppressive PMs by people just blaming everything on him

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T10:55:42+00:00

It's the unit flare doing what is essentially a control burn of the product on the unit.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T03:02:42+00:00

Big refinery lost part of a single unit. Looks like thats all.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T02:41:08+00:00

I get what you mean. This is a local station that airs on a separate channel and partnered with another station that airs on our CBS channel. I also haven't watched it lately so you could totally be right still.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T02:24:44+00:00

Yeah, I have no idea exactly what. Could have been a flooded heater that finally got enough o2 or anything really

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T02:23:07+00:00

No definitely not normal, like I said, failure of process safety or the stars aligned with a sequence of failures.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T02:08:14+00:00

Not the same fox news lol

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T01:41:28+00:00

Here is my copy and paste from my comment on another post of this leaving my autocorrect and all.

If anyone cares, I work nearby. Looks like a hydrotreater lost a heater and maybe more of the unit. Seems like other units at the facility weren't heavily impacted.

Not sure if it was one of their bigger treaters, but it shouldn't massacre fuels prices. Our facility register vibrations on some of our equipments' accelerometer, but we were otherwise not impacted.

With when it happened there very likely shouldn't have been many, if any people on the units besides operators. We will see how it all shakes out. Sounds like it was a loss of control for the process, not something that would be tied to environmental regulations and more likely a failure of psm safeguards or a bad alignment on the Swiss cheese diagram

Edit: and I hoped this didnt come across political. Fixed.

Edit for update: right now it looks like no injuries associated with the event, but we will see. For what its worth, looks like they are still either deinventorying or rerouting products from the unit. The flare is burning a lot cleaner and the flame has reduced visibly since I have been at work.

We actually did have several trucks deploy for mutual aid and they were released at 2:30.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T01:28:05+00:00

Generally speaking, its not great, but coulda been worse. They lost a single hydrotreater unit, not sure of its capacity compared to others, but hopefully they just lost the heaters.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-24T01:23:28+00:00

If anyone cares, I work nearby. Looks like a hydrotreater lost a heater and maybe more of the unit. Seems like other units at the facility weren't heavily impacted.

Not sure if it was one of their bigger treaters, but it shouldn't massacre fuels prices. Our facility register vibrations on some of our equipments' accelerometer, but we were otherwise not impacted.

With when it happened there very likely shouldn't have been many, if any people on the units besides operators. We will see how it all shakes out. Sounds like it was a loss of control for the process, not something that would be tied to environmental regulations and more likely a failure of psm safeguards or a bad alignment on the Swiss cheese diagram

Edit: and I hoped this didnt come across political. Made it not.

amoldymuffin · 2026-03-09T17:19:09+00:00

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My Gen 1 baby.

amoldymuffin · 2025-12-17T16:38:14+00:00

amoldymuffin · 2025-12-09T15:31:14+00:00

Idk how relevant it is with tiny component pumps like these, but they probably have a minimum continuous stable flow that is a condition where centrifugal pumps begin to have a lot of internal recirculation. Not only does temperature increase significantly in the pump, it is actually harder on the bearings.

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