T2 Explosion Final Report

JACKSONVILLE, FL -- The U.S. Chemical Safety Board has identified the causes of the runaway chemical reaction at the T2 Laboratories that killed four employees and injured 32 other people on December 19, 2007.

The explosion rocked the city's Northside, with debris found a mile away and damaged buildings within a quarter of a mile of the T2 Labs.

The CSB says that a runaway exothermic (heat producing) reaction happened during the first stage of the process to make an octane-increasing gasoline additive.

Robert Hall was the lead investigator who was in Jacksonville to explain the safety board's final report.

"The owners that developed this process did not fundamentally understand the hazards of the material they were dealing with," Hall told reporters.

The CSB released a detailed animation explaining the chemical process and the failure that led to the explosion. CLICK HERE to watch the video.

The December, 2007, explosion, according to the CSB, was not the first problem T2 Labs experienced at its Northside processing operation.

"The owners had these warning signs, they had these near misses," said Hall.

"The response was not to further investigate the hazard and try to find out why this occurred, but just to begin making another batch."

Two factors have been identified as contributing to the explosion.

Investigators concluded:

"The cooling system employed by T2 was susceptible to single-point failures due to a lack of design redundancy.

"The MCMT (methylcyclopentadieny manganese tricarbonyl) reactor relief system was incapable of relieving pressure away from a runaway reaction."

In recreating the events leading up to the T2 explosion, the CSB determined the explosion could only have been prevented by "relieving at a lower pressure during the first exothermic reaction allowing the MCPD and diglyme solvent to boil and vent, removing both heat and reactants."

The CSB will hold a public meeting today at the Marriott Hotel located at 4670 Salisbury Road. The meeting is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m.

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