[Les Paul]

Wow, that is it. Of course parts of the story are wrong but that is typical. I had old hs and college buddies I hadn't heard from in years calling after they saw the story on CNN. Not that they gave a particular rats ass if I had made it but there were some strange conversations there for a couple of days. It is amazing what the good old internet can dredge up. I saved all the papers from the next days Sunday papers and going back and reading them and the misinformation is a credit to the spin machines of a major corporation. Of course the company now downplays the entire thing because ultimately it was a management decision not to bring in nitrogen truck to purge the reactor that blew the pipe. What happened is our main reactors have butane a catalyst and 0% Oxygen. Heat it to 800F, pressure it to 700lbs and you get this amazing reaction that creates mostly Acetic acid and about 28 other weird and wicked acids. The reactors are 4 inches thick to control the chaos within. The line that blew was only 1/2 inch thick. Why put a line that thin on something so volatile? Anyway nitrogen is used to displace the oxygen which you don't want in your reaction.

So that particular units manager decided to try bring up that reactor without purging it with nitrogen which is always sop. It would save them 8k. They didn't have enough on site that day and would have had to wait another day to bring up the unit. What that story couldn't tell was that 1 of the operators in that unit would later commit suicide over the guilt he had. A management decision and yet a guy couldn't live with the outcome of that decision.