Some of you may remember that I lost my wife about four years ago to a sudden pulmonary embolism. Some of you may also, if you follow me on Facebook, know that I got re-married on Saturday 4/27 to a fantastic woman named Joy Ward-- she's keeping her name...put her first and my last names together and you'll undoubtedly see why. She is a brilliant woman, a writer, a renowned market research director, a leading dog rescuer, a science fiction and fantasy author and currently blogging for Life With Dogs.

Yesterday I wrote the following in a brief meditation on the subject of plant safety, West, Texas, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, in particular:

In the United States, it was the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 that coalesced a long-building movement to improve factory safety conditions. But even the deaths of 146 people. mostly young women, didn't solve our safety problems. Safety is still a struggle in any manufacturing environment.

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.

At the close of its 2013 Technology Conference, PAS declared itself "The Human Reliability Company." Here's the press release of the announcement:

Several years ago, Eddie Habibi, founder of PAS, called me up and said he'd developed a new thing, and wanted to know what I thought of it. He called it the "Automation Genome" and wanted to know what I thought of it.

As an idea, a way of visualizing the way plant operations, plant safety and automation systems work and interact, I thought the concept of a DNA-like structure was fascinating and the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.

Here's a wonderful press release from Banner Engineering:

Project Gemstone: Making the Fieldbus Experience Easy and App Centered

WALT: The Fieldbus Foundation continues to expand and evolve as more plants, especially greenfield plants like the Jamnagar Petrochemical Complex, use fieldbus exclusively. We asked Larry O'Brien, DCS expert, analyst, and marketing director of the Foundation to talk with us about the present and the future of the Fieldbus Foundation.

Project Gemstone: Making the Fieldbus Experience Easy and App Centered

WALT: The Fieldbus Foundation continues to expand and evolve as more plants, especially greenfield plants like the Jamnagar Petrochemical Complex, use fieldbus exclusively. We asked Larry O'Brien, DCS expert, analyst, and marketing director of the Foundation to talk with us about the present and the future of the Fieldbus Foundation.

Based on the twitter cloud and the very fragmented and contradictory information so far, it is not possible to know why a West, Tex., fertilizer plant exploded last night with casualties and property destruction. This is not the first time a fertilizer plant has self-destructed, of course.

I am struck by one thing. According to most reports, the explosion itself occurred about two hours AFTER the West Volunteer Fire Department responded to a fire at the plant. Since it appears there were heavy casualties among the first responders we don't know yet what happened.