ABSTRACT
When we started conducting training programs at the big, wet, dirty caustic chemical plant where I worked, the first workforce classes involved fasteners. We had some truly impressive disasters with a variety of bolt failures; therefore, the emphasis in those early classes was on preventing bolt breakage. Eventually, we sat back and did some more detailed analyses of our situation and realized that the major physical cause of most of our leakage problems was poor bolting practices. Since that time, we’ve worked with hundreds of plants across North America, and invariably find that a major (if not the major) maintenance cost is repairing leaks. Flange leaks don’t just happen, and those steam and process leaks that required expensive cold shutdowns to repair are almost always unintentionally caused by the people that put them together.
