Carelessness caused chemicals blaze. (Allied Colloids Group PLC)

Conditions at Allied Colloids' Low Moor plant near Bradford invited the major fire which occurred in July 1992; it could have been prevented easily if the correct safety procedures had been followed, according to a report from the UK Health and Safety Executive. Last year, the company was fined |pounds~100,000 for breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act (C&I 1992, 103).

According to the HSE's report, the fire, which caused over |pounds~4M of damage, was the result of a chain of 'apparently unrelated errors, omissions and failures, some of them relatively minor'. The most important of the errors was the storage of drums of azodiisobutyronitrile (AZDN), an unstable, …