Chlorine Explosion at Closed Bleach Plant

The Federal Bureau of Inquiry announced this morning that last weeks blast at the shuttered Bleichen Chemical plant in Delano, GA was being treated as a terrorist attack. Johnathan Quest told reporters that it appears that the attackers remotely accessed the plant control systems to cause an overpressure event in a facility reaction vessel. The rapid rise in pressure caused the vessel to catastrophically fail, destroying large portions of the facility and releasing small amounts of chlorine gas into the atmosphere. There was no one in the closed plant when the accident happened and there were no injuries.

Carl Scheele, the plant manager, joined the today’s news conference via video messaging as he is recovering from a COVID-19 infection. He noted that the plant was closed two weeks ago due to five employees coming down with severe COVID-19 illness and had been expected to reopen in three weeks after all employees had a chance to recover.

Scheele explained that Reactor 2, the vessel that exploded Friday, was being used as a safety vessel to neutralize chlorine gas emissions from the railcar on site. The pressure relief vent on the railcar was piped to Reactor 2. The company had not been able to empty the railcar before the plant closed and expected the temperature in the car to rise in the relatively mild Georgia spring resulting in a rise in pressure.

To avoid that pressure venting resulting in a release of chlorine gas, it was to be chemically neutralized Reactor 2. The system had been set up to maintain the caustic soda solution in the vessel at a low temperature to control the side reactions and reduce the pressure produced by the exothermic reaction of chlorine and caustic. Immanuel C. Securitage from the ECS-CERT told reporters that control system records showed that instead of keeping the temperature low in Reactor 2, someone had remotely accessed the control system and increased the temperature to near boiling. Then, at the same time that the railcar vent opened, the attacker also added an additional 1000 lbs of caustic soda to the vessel. The vessel temperature rose rapidly with a sharp increase in the vessel pressure. Safety limits were exceeded, and the vessel exploded.

Securitage said that it was too early in the investigation to determine who or how the attackers gained access to the control system, but that the control system was set up for remote operation to allow for sick operators to oversee the systems from home. The standby operator was supposed to be notified when the railcar pressure approached the emergency vent pressure setting to allow them to watch the operation, but no such notification was made by the system. No one from Bleichen was on-line when the incident happened.

In a related development, Eric Schlamm, the manager of the Delano Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP) said that they were still looking for an alternative source for industrial bleach that they had been getting from Bleichen. There are no other local suppliers and the nearest plants are all ready fully committed.

The Delano WWTP has about four days of bleach on hand for continued operations.

CAUTIONARY NOTE: This is a future news story –