One of the benefits of advertising in trade magazines is the added benefit of occasionally being asked to submit guest articles to those publications. It’s a great way to let the experts in your organization shine and to build a name for yourself when it comes to industry expertise. We enjoy this benefit and, and we realize that so do companies that sell products similar to ours. In those articles, the writer isn’t allowed to use specific product names or even mention the affiliated company, except for a final note at the end where the reader can seek more information. It's important to note that while the articles are intended to be written without an advertising focus, they are still written by those with a vested interest in selling a product. What does this have to do with polyurea coatings?

Imagine the scenario:

Blast-resistant building design gets more fun every year. The original designs conceived by RedGuard in 2005 were “bare bones,” which still have endless applications — from guard shacks to tool cribs. The latest blast-resistant building design interiors look more like luxury offices than metal buildings, with new variations emerging all the time. With corrugated metal as our basic building block, there’s no end to what we can do.

RedGuard will exhibit at the 2017 Reliability and Maintenance Conference and Expo, held May 23-26 in New Orleans, LA. You can find RedGuard at booth #755.

RedGuard will exhibit at the 2017 National Occupational & Process Safety Conference, held May 17-18 in New Orleans, LA. You can find RedGuard at booth #200.

Much of the activity at a refinery involves planned turnarounds in order to ensure safety, perform preventative maintenance, renovation or necessary upgrades to facilities or technology. This allows a facility to make sure they are doing things as safely as possible, to stay competitive in the industry and to meet government regulations. A turnaround involves the careful coordination of many people. It could involve a logistics team, turnaround manager, planners, engineers, and contract workers in many skilled trades—all to ensure that turnarounds happen safely and successfully, meaning in the least amount of time, and using labor wisely and resources as conservatively as possible.

Wichita, Kan. – Following an onsite evaluation of their Production Center and interviews with team members on December 6, RedGuard has been awarded a gold certificate from SafeStart, a behavioral-based safety training program proven to successfully reduce workforce injuries. The gold status celebrates RedGuard’s safety success based on achieving milestones for training, sustainability and integration of the program into the workplace.

Safety can often mean different things to different people. Even within the same company, one person’s opinion on what’s considered “safe” may prove to be completely different from that of the person they work beside each and every day. To ensure that everyone is always on the same page, it’s important that companies institute an in-depth corporate safety program that will develop common beliefs and supports a culture that—above all—values the well-being of everyone who steps foot within the operation.

Wichita, Kan. – RedGuard has announced a joint venture with Specialist Services Group to provide blast-resistant and ballistic modules to the oil and gas, petrochemical and defense industries in the Middle East, Europe and southeast Asia.

When a major refiner came to RedGuard in 2005 asking us to design a blast-resistant building (BRB), we knew immediately this was the reason we were in business. We saw the potential for creating an important product for safety developed around this new type of building that could massively cut construction costs for refiners, yet do a better job than traditional buildings when it came to protecting personnel.

Let’s face it. Petrochemical management comes with more than its share of headaches. From coordinating subcontractor work schedules to jumping through compliance hoops, it can feel like you’re running through quicksand. But with proper planning and the right vendors, there are ways to make it easier. At RedGuard, we’re doing everything we can to streamline the process of buying and leasing blast-resistant buildings (BRBs). We want to make blast resistance easy.

A turnaround is a lot like a military exercise. You have to deploy specialized units of personnel onto different parts of the field, furnish them with the right equipment, keep them fed, facilitate a chain of command, reorganize resources into constantly changing configurations of efficiency and, most importantly, keep your people alive. One of your enemies in this battle is time because lost productivity can cost millions of dollars per day.

We all have too many plates spinning when the turnaround season shifts into full swing, so it’s important to plan early for the additional and replacement buildings you’ll need at your facility during this busy time. You should organize the blast-resistant buildings that you will lease many months ahead to save on shipping costs and assure you’ll have the units you need on time. But leased blast-resistant units for turnarounds are only part of the planning picture. Early in the year is the time to take a look at your entire strategy for blast protection, including the permanent units you plan to purchase.

Blast-resistant modular buildings are becoming standard fixtures in petrochemical operations around the world, replacing traditional buildings at a lower cost and with a shorter construction time. But the technology is still new enough that we get a lot of questions on the specifics of incorporating these life-saving structures into operations. Most people are surprised at how simple it is. It begins with a site study.

A custom home builder doesn’t toss a stack of plans in front of you and tell you to pick one. You tell them what you want, maybe sketching out some floor plan ideas and a list of options and amenities. Then they work with you to turn it into a viable architectural design.

When our first lease units rolled off the production line years ago, blast-resistant buildings (BRBs) were pretty standard. Our first goal was to design the best blast protection in the world — which we did — but features and options were very limited in the beginning. Our next step was to find new ways to meet as many different client needs as possible, in terms of size, options, amenities and regulatory compliance. RedGuard’s LeaseFleet, currently the largest lease-ready fleet of BRBs of its kind, offers more options than we ever dreamed of when we helped launch this industry.

On June 4, RedGuard elevated the blast-resistant building (BRB) industry to a new level — ISO 9001:2008 certification. After eight years of industry leadership, RedGuard’s management recognized the importance of this crucial next step toward making blast zones safer.

RedGuard has spent many years focusing on how to build the best blast-resistant building (BRB) in the world, but we’ve also been listening to our customers and learning how they operate during the transition to safer and more productive work spaces. In the early stages of the BRB industry, our customers usually specified the requirements of the products we built for them but, today, we’re making the process easier by taking on increasing amounts of the operational planning that goes into adding blast protection to a petrochemical facility. Once you give us a site study, we can take significant portions of the process off your shoulders. The result is a low-impact, money-saving BRB installation that integrates seamlessly with your operation, allowing you to concentrate on the rest of your job.

A lot of myths still surround the use of blast-resistant buildings (BRBs) as traditional building replacements. If you’re planning construction at your facility, this article could help you save hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention countless lives.

As the petrochemical industry returns to a regular maintenance cycle after the cutbacks of 2009 and 2010, turnaround planning is ramping up nationwide. Now that the use of office trailers is declining in blast zones, demand for blast-resistant buildings (BRBs) is headed for an all-time high. At RedGuard, we’ve been aggressively increasing our inventory of lease unit BRBs in anticipation of this upswing. Still, nationwide demand is expected to exceed supply, so this should be one of the first calls made by turnaround planners, if they hope to maximize all the benefits of work site blast protection.

This article was originally published in 2012. It has been updated to reflect current findings consistent with today's blast-resistant buildings and the petrochemical industry. Upsizing and downsizing are part of life in a petrochemical refinery. That could mean capital expansions that reposition limited staff and resources, or turnarounds that change the face of an entire operation. It’s crucial to work through these changes with minimum interruption to business flow. That means the importance of supplier selection is a top priority. Safety is a bigger concern than ever, and it’s important to choose trustworthy partners during these precarious times. Your choice of suppliers for temporary, blast-resistant buildings is an important one. So, what factors should be considered when choosing a supplier? Let's consider.

Everyone talks about safety, as we should in the petrochemical industry, but there are some gray areas in blast zone safety ratings. So, it’s equally important to talk about reliability. Yes, a building can be rated for a certain zone, but if it’s rated “high response” (which means “high damage”) in that zone, there will almost certainly be casualties if people are in the unit during a blast event.

There was a time when the science of blast protection was poorly understood. We built petrochemical control centers out of reinforced concrete or masonry blocks because it was the best-known construction method, but it was never a good solution to the challenge of protecting the people inside. Now we have a new option, and the industry has aggressively adopted it.

There are no college degrees in blast engineering. This specialty can only be learned in the “real world,” and even there, only a small handful of people have the experience to be considered experts. When RedGuard decided to start making blast-resistant buildings in 2005, we talked to everyone who knew anything about the subject, and one name quickly rose to the top of the list: Ali Sari, Ph.D., PE.

The petrochemical industry is rapidly responding to the fact that too many blast zones contain buildings that can’t withstand a blast. While some companies are still trying to tackle the problem with traditional construction methods, there is a widespread movement toward the use of modular, metal buildings because of their proven ability to protect personnel.

Blast-resistant building design is a relatively unexplored frontier. For one thing, very little research has been done on the actual effects of blasts on various types of structures. Then there are aesthetic and psychological considerations. In addition to making a building safe, it’s important to create interior spaces that are functional and provide appropriate levels of comfort for personnel.

In 2005, my team was called in to investigate the Texas City, Texas, refinery disaster. I’ll never forget what I saw there — where wood-frame office trailers had stood, only splinters remained. Fifteen people died because they were housed in those trailers. All I could think was there has to be a better way.