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Clean Hydrogen Partnership

Roll-over of a liquid hydrogen tanker

Event

Event ID
141
Quality
Description
A tanker carrying 11500 gallon of liquid hydrogen was travelling on a highway, when it was involved in a collision with a private vehicle. The tanker overturned.
The impact and the unsuccessful attempt of the driver to avoid the impact caused the tractor steering wheel to spin in the driver's hands. The private car hit twice the tractor, and the vehicles came to rest about 40 feet apart. The tractor was nearly at rest when the liquid in the tank trailer shifted causing the tractor-trailer unit to rollover on the passenger side.
No injuries to the driver and his passenger, the driver of the automobile and the passenger had minor injuries but did not go to the hospital.
There was no loss or release of product from the trailer.
Event Initiating system
Classification of the physical effects
No Hydrogen Release
Nature of the consequences
Macro-region
North America
Country
United States
Date
Main component involved?
Lh2 Tanker
How was it involved?
No Failure
Initiating cause
Impact, Rollover, Crash
Root causes
Root CAUSE analysis
The INITIATING cause was a trafficaccident,
The ROOT CAUSE was the loss of control of the second vehicle.
The fact that the trailer, despite the roll over, did not experienced any hydrogen loss, shows that the safety systems in place worked according to design.

Facility

Application
Hydrogen Transport And Distribution
Sub-application
LH2 tanker
Hydrogen supply chain stage
Hydrogen Transport (No additional details provided)
All components affected
none
Location type
Open
Operational condition

Emergency & Consequences

Number of injured persons
0
Number of fatalities
0
Environmental damage
0
Currency
US$
Property loss (onsite)
80723
Post-event summary
No injuries to the driver and his passenger, the driver of the automobile and her passenger had minor injuries but did not go to the hospital.
There was no loss or release of product from the tanker.
The costs indicated were probably related to the damage from the crash.

Lesson Learnt

Lesson Learnt

The fact that the trailer, despite the roll over, did not experienced any hydrogen loss, shows that the safety systems in place worked according to design.

Event Nature

Release type
no release
Released amount
0
Presumed ignition source
No release

References

Reference & weblink

Incident I-1999100714 of the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration PHMSA: <br />
https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/data-and-statistics/pipeline/distribution-tra… />
(accessed September 2024)

Original source: FireWorld<br />
The link to this technical magazine is lost

JRC assessment