Hoechst Celanese faced a major task to rebuild its processing facilities in Pampa, Tex., as a result of two explosions and major fires that demolished a large portion of the petrochemical plant.
But through the efforts and cooperation of plant workers, the contractor for the rebuild, and the support of the city of Pampa, the plant was reconstructed and went on stream 13-1/2 months after the explosions.
Reconstruction was not limited to just bringing the facilities back to the condition they were in prior to the explosion. New process and control technology was integrated into the new plant to modernize its operations.
DISASTER STRIKES
The lead of the following Associated Press dispatch describes briefly the catastrophe that occurred at the Pampa plant:
"PAMPA, Texas (AP)(Nov. 15, 1987)--Two major explosions flattened a quarter of a chemical plant Saturday, killing at least three people, injuring 37 others and touching off blazes that raged out of control for several hours, authorities said. At least 25 percent of the Hoechst Celanese Corp. plant burned so hotly that firefighters could not get within a half-mile of it and decided to let it burn itself out... "
One day, the Hoechst Celanese plant in Pampa, Tex. was a bustling hub of 600 workers producing petrochemicals for shipment around the world. The next day, it was a charred hulk of crumpled steel.
Ignited by a ruptured feedline to a butane reactor, the Nov. 14, 1987, explosion destroyed 80% of the production capacity of the plant, which only a week before had celebrated its 35th anniversary.
The blast demolished the heart of the plant's production area: the reaction unit consisting of three liquid-phase butane reactors, and a process air and steam generating utility unit. Few of the 775-acre plant's 286 buildings escaped severe damage. Only the plant's coal fired boiler and its waste disposal units survived relatively intact.
What is most significant about the Hoechst Celanese disaster is not how much of the plant was destroyed, but how quickly it sprang back to life. The company rebuilt its Pampa plant from close to scratch in less than half the time normally required by a project of such magnitude, an accomplishment that has stirred interest within the industry.
From the awarding of the first contract to start-up of the first reactor, construction took just 131/2 months. This compares to the 2-3 years that normally would have been required. Within 15 months, the plant was running at 100% capacity, setting what may be some kind of record in the chemical industry.
Getting the plant up and running again loomed critically for both production and employment reasons.
The explosion dealt a severe blow to the chemical marketplace. Customers had almost nowhere else to turn for some of the chemicals that the Pampa plant produces.
"On some of our products, we were the major supplier in the world, so when this plant went down, it created a real shortage and dire need," says plant manager Brent Stephens.
The Pampa plant is the only remaining liquid phase oxidation (LPO) manufacturer of acetic acid in the U.S. It operates three of only four LPO reactors in the world, and the Pampa plant generates petrochemicals that are vital to such products as plastics, pharmaceuticals, textiles, eyeglass frames, automobile parts, dyes, adhesives, and paint.
The plant produces more than 1 billion pounds of commodity chemicals annually and is also the sole North American producer of methyl acrylate.
Hoechst Celanese also is Pampa's largest industrial employer, providing jobs for some 600 employees and contract workers and contributing about $112 million annually to the local economy in payroll, purchases, and taxes.
INITIAL EFFORTS
Hoechst Celanese scrambled to fill customers' needs even as it dug out from the rubble of the plant. A marketing task force scouted for alternative sources of chemicals around the world.
The company diverted production to sister plants in the U.S., West Germany, and Canada. It filled orders through competitors or arranged for chemicals to be shipped in from around the globe.
Although Hoechst Celanese saw hurdles, such as one of the worst winters in years and a shortage of welders, as it mulled whether to rebuild, the town of Pampa showed its support.
On Dec. 3, 1987, some 10,000 residents shut down their businesses, closed schools, and turned out for a rally of support. Two weeks later, the company announced that its Pampa plant would rise again.
But several other factors helped the plant rebuild with extraordinary speed.
Regulatory agencies and plant engineers expedited permits, which took days rather than weeks or months. Using its existing employee base to meet the challenges of rebuilding, Hoechst Celanese accomplished many construction tasks simultaneously rather than sequentially.
The plant also had in place an excellent vendor and raw materials procurement system. But another factor, perhaps the most important, helped the Pampa plant accomplish its feat.
Pampa plant project manager Larry Henderson credits what Hoechst Celanese calls its values, a 20-point list of corporate objectives, in guiding Pampa plant in reorganizing for the rebuild.
"Even though the situation was urgent and unfamiliar, we didn't leave our value system behind when we went through this," he says. "We used it to get the project accomplished rather than regarding our values as an impediment."
PLANT WORKERS HEAVILY INVOLVED
Hoechst Celanese, for example, resolved to maintain job continuity for plant employees left with no plant to operate. Almost immediately, the company took a skills inventory of all employees. "Skills were matched to tasks required whenever possible," says Stephens.
But plant chemists moved furniture, engineers became carpenters, and plant operators wielded post-hole diggers.
Clean-up crews cleared paths through the wreckage. Inventory teams located and collected salvageable products and raw materials.
Repair teams replaced walls and windows. Damage assessment teams recorded the condition of every pump and vessel.
A specially trained team of 175 employees recovered millions of pounds of potentially hazardous debris.
As a result of this approach, no Hoechst Celanese employee was ever out of a job, says Stephens.
Employee participation in the earliest stages was a key to getting the Pampa plant off the ground so quickly, Hoechst Celanese managers agree. So was the involvement of every employee in the fact-finding, planning, and decision-making processes.
On an organization chart of the Pampa plant rebuild, employee teams form a cluster rather than a hierarchical pyramid or vertical line.
"Flexibility was imperative. Sometimes entire teams changed daily," says Stephens. "Without previous experience with teams and a team-based organization, accomplishing these tasks would have been next to impossible."
The company's employee team approach came into play again as construction got under way. Instead of delegating the entire rebuild to an outside contractor, for example, Henderson and Stephens turned the project outside in.
CONTRACTOR AND VENDOR COOPERATION
Hoechst Celanese hired Fluor Daniel Inc. as engineering and construction contractor, but it also kept the entire Pampa plant staff on the job doing what no one else could do better: designing and developing their own plant.
Fluor Daniel won the project not only for its expertise in chemical plant construction, but also because it was willing to work in a pioneering partnership with Hoechst Celanese employees.
"The contractor changed its own organization to mirror the Hoechst Celanese team approach," says Henderson.
During construction, self-directed groups of 15-30 employees worked alongside Fluor Daniel personnel on special assignments, one team handling acid purification, another LPO development, for example. Each team, consisting of a leader, engineers, technicians, and operators, set its own standards and directed its individual endeavors.
This reorganization was the one key event that enabled us to complete the project on the very short schedule we had targeted, says Henderson.
Hoechst Celanese also took time to motivate employees, vendors, and contractors by calling attention to exceptional effort. For example, the plant held a special awards ceremony in October 1988 to recognize 36 outstanding suppliers. Cash drawings and pay at per them rates rewarded contract workers who remained on the project to completion.
Such recognition ties in with the company's overall value system.
A certified supplier program started by the Pampa plant in 1982 to give preference to quality vendors proved a blessing when the rebuild team sought ready sources of labor and supplies. Within days of announcing its intent to rebuild, Hoechst Celanese started lining up suppliers and securing commitments from vendors.
Materials were ordered as the plant was designed. Vendors were brought into the plant and informed of the progress and objectives.
The project's 975 suppliers, who would account for 23,000 purchase orders by plant completion, responded with quotations in half the normal time and with a personal interest in meeting the Pampa team's aggressive deadlines.
A small local concrete mixer worked around the clock to supply material for the plant. A steel mill offered to expedite production of the raw steel needed for the plant's towers and vessels.
Two fabricators bid, designed, and assembled four stainless steel towers in 4 months compared to the normal 10-12 months. Such aid from suppliers spared Hoechst Celanese months of waiting on material and parts through normal distribution channels.
SIMULTANEOUS EFFORTS
Between Dec. 26, 1987, when utilities were supplied to the plant using leased boilers, and the start-up of the first butane reactor on March 10, 1989, the plant was a demolition, construction, and production site all wrapped into one.
Operations continually overlapped. Digging out and cleaning up took from November 1987 until June 1988.
Demolition crews worked from December until May. Meantime, employees began brainstorming on the redesign of the plant and ordering materials in December.
Production of some chemicals resumed in March 1988 at three relatively undamaged units, and continued throughout the rebuilding process. Actual construction of the plant began a month later.
"One of the greatest difficulties we encountered," says Henderson, "was the very short time difference between engineering and construction. The contractor ar rived on site Feb. 1 and engineering began in earnest in early March.
By early May, only 8-10 weeks later, the first foundations were being installed. This short time frame caused inefficiencies but was essential to the very short schedule we had targeted."
For several months, plant management operated out of temporary quarters, first at the Pampa Chamber of Commerce, and later in a downtown office building miles from the plant. Employees gathered to socialize and catch up on company news at a storefront support center in a shopping center.
At the plant site, some 3,500 employees, contractors, subcontractors, and vendors were active. Shuttle buses were brought in to ferry workers to and from makeshift parking lots.
All worked 7 days a week, 12-14 hr a day, for several months. The project required 3.7 million hr of field labor and 840,000 hr of engineering.
TOUGH WEATHER
Weather was not the Pampa plant's ally during the winter and spring following the explosion. Instead of the foot of snow that usually falls, the winter of 1987-88 blanketed Pampa with almost 50 in. of snow. Then, as workers dug 2,000 ft of trenches for the plant's network of pipes, spring brought torrential rains.
While work on the plant's more than 250 buildings, 23 towers, and 186 vessels was most visible during the rebuild, the bulk of the construction work actually concentrated on the miles and miles of piping that crisscross the plant.
By May 1989, when the plant resumed full production, workers had installed 250,000 ft of pipe, 1,500 tons of structural steel, 30,000 cu yd of concrete, 750,000 ft of electrical conduit, more than 450 pumps and compressors, 367 heat exchangers, and 52 turbines.
PLANT MODERNIZED
But reconstructing the Pampa plant involved much more than literally replacing its component parts. Technology and legal requirements had changed significantly during the 35 years since the plant was originally built.
Here was a rebuild borne out of tragedy. But here also was an opportunity to build anew, drawing upon the accrued wisdom and experience of hundreds of employees who knew how to make a good plant even better.
Hoechst Celanese redesigned the Pampa plant to reflect its increasing reliance on work teams rather than on a traditional hierarchical workforce. Unlike the former plant, which revolved around the administration building and control rooms, laboratory and product line teams are at the hub of the new plant, with the outlying administration area serving as a resource to them.
Updated electronic instrumentation provides new statistical process control over product quality, reducing variability. Eight small pneumatic control rooms have been consolidated into two multifunctional control centers featuring microprocessor-based computerized control panels.
Modern electrical distribution equipment and an improved boiler feedwater treatment and pumping system eliminated eight antiquated gas-fired boilers.
Fiber optic technology carries instructions instantly from one part of the plant to another.
The rebuilt plant also incorporates the latest safety and environmental features. For instance, the use of benzene, a suspected carcinogen, was completely eliminated from production processes.
New control rooms feature blast-resistant materials and construction.
Today, Pampa plant employees have plunged into accelerated training on the plant's high-tech equipment and instrumentation as part of a new operator certification program.
Copyright 1990 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
