Alireza
Nariman Nejad, Deputy Director of the plant’s HSE Department, told NIPNA that two
employees of Urmiya Petrochemical Company lost their lives at the facility’s melamine
unit, while cleaning and disposing of the waste.
He added
that the melamine unit of the plant had two filter units (with 380 elements), and
was designed in a way that only one of the filters were operated at a time and
the other one was in standby.
Unfortunately,
at 1:35 P.M. local time on the day of the incident, the increase of pressure in
the unit caused the standby filter to operate and two employees who were cleaning
the elements inside the filter unit were hit by falling elements which killed the two of them, he added.
He said a
team from the National Petrochemical Company (NPC) and the Persian Gulf
Petrochemical Industries Company (PGPIC) were sent to the spot for further
investigation.
Urmia Petrochemical
Plant is one of the subsidiaries of PGPIC.