No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
T here are two complementary old sayings to which I quite firmly subscribe -the first, 'A little knowledge is dangerous' and its companion 'The more you know, the more you realise what you do not know'.
I am often rather surprised when asked to give a talk, or provide a course. I have been involved with sealing for long enough to realise just how little I know and what huge gaps there are in my knowledge, compared with others. And one of the by-products of research often can be that a programme of work may answer one question, but will usually produce several more. My contributions in helping to generate this fund of ignorance have helped keep me employed for 35 year! However, I have been reminded of the saying 'A little knowledge is dangerous' by an item I found while searching for news for this issue. There was apparently a fire at the Tema Oil Refinery in Ghana on 19 January in which two people died.
I do not know if the fire could be attributed to a seal failure but the news item in question was an interview with a member of the Ghana Energy Commission, Charles Kofi Wayo. It sounds as if Wayo has been conducting a campaign to highlight poor operating standards at the refinery, which may be quite justified.
The interviewer asked: 'But we have qualified engineers who are working on it and for some time we haven't had the fire outbreak there and the understanding I have is that they are maintaining a high standard of safety, so why do you conclude that way?' The reply included: 'If you have engineers there why is it that one small bolt you have to wait for a white man two, three months. You can't even make your own bolts. You can't even tool anything down there, even gasket, common gasket when it blows, you shut down the RFCC and stuff like that so where are the engineers?'
As far as I am aware, RFCC refers to a type of catalytic cracker, which generally works at rather high temperatures. The thought of someone in the refinery workshop turning up a few bolts and knocking out a gasket for the cat cracker sounds like a recipe for a rather bigger fire than the one they have just experienced.
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