It's been two weeks now since the explosion and fire at the West Fertilizer Company destroyed the facility, killed 15 people, leveled more than 50 houses, an apartment complex, two schools and a nursing home. In some respects, we don't know anymore now than we did the day after the event, but some things are becoming clear. The regulators are going to be under some severe scrutiny and the politicians are going to have a field day.

You may have seen this elsewhere, but just in case, BP today announced Nov. 15 that it’s “agreed with the United States government, subject to court approval, to resolve all federal criminal charges and all claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against the company stemming from the Deepwater Horizon accident, oil spill, and response.”

I'm not usually much of a Disney fan. The characters from Snow White onward were fantastic, but they were almost always pure good or all bad. Unfortunately, this black-and-white ethos always seemed kind of flat and artificial, like early Superman or DC comics or Lawrence Welk's robotic performers. I always leaned towards more fleshed-out characters like Bugs Bunny, Spider-Man, Oscar the Grouch or Bart Simpson, who exemplified the world's negatives as well as its positives, and seemed a lot more human to me. Plus, I didn't appreciate Uncle Walt's busting some of his best artists to the U.S.

It's been exactly a year and a day since Japan's devastating earthquake and tsunami. So, in addition to all the lives lost and communities swept away in northeastern Japan, it's also been almost a year since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was damaged to the point that several of its units lost their cooling capacity, and began to meltdown. If you want to know more about how this tragedy unfolded, and see what events looked like on the ground, then there's probably no better source that PBS's recent Frontline program, "Inside Japan's Nuclear Meltdown." You can watch it and view related content at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/japans-nuclear-meltdown/

In the keynote address I gave last September to the TUV Rheinland Safety Symposium, I referred to the accident that had just occured at the Bayer CropScience facility in Institute West Virginia. I pointed out that despite thousands of man-hours of standards writing, training and compliance enforcement, accidents were still happening, and people were still being killed.

Once again, we've been treated to another process plant blowing itself up. Or rather, to people blowing up a process plant. There's a subtle but important difference there.

Here's some video of the Sunday night accident. http://cw11tv.trb.com/video/?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipId=3648783 EDITOR'S NOTE: THIS TV STATION VIDEO IS NO LONGER UP AT THIS LINK. YOU NEED TO SEARCH THEIR ARCHIVES FOR THE VIDEO.

Truth in Blogging Notice: Walt's taking a break from SoundOff!

Deborah Grubbe, vice president of safety change management for BP and General Ken Eickmann, USAF (ret.), from the Energy Institute of the University of Texas presented an interesting view of safety.

Bob Adamski, Invensys' SIS guru, has been talking about the hacking of process safety systems for several years now. I think he's right, but we appear to be in a minority. Bob gave me his nightmare about how this could be done several years ago, and I've had it for a while now. Some of you may have listened to my little fiction about "Ali al Qaeda" a time o...

Joe Kaulfersch of Pepperl+Fuchs tried to post as a comment a white paper that he wrote on preventing just the sort of dust explosion that we all theorize might have caused the disaster at the Imperial Sugar Dixie Crystals plant near Savannah, Georgia last Thursday.

I asked him to send me the white paper instead, and rather than post it as a very wordy and difficult to read comment, I posted the white paper to the ControlGlobal.com white paper library. Here's the URL of this excellent discussion...