A few years ago, John McClain worked with Shell as a drone pilot after the company implemented its drone program.
PEMEX, TEAM: Drones in the air help save lives on the ground
Pictured from left are Ron Kessler, VP of robotic inspection solutions with TEAM Industrial and John McClain, security specialist with PEMEX’s Deer Park refinery.
The program’s mission, he said, was three-tiered: safety, emergency response and cost savings, in that order of priority.
"We wanted to keep people on the ground and the drones in the air," said the security specialist and chief Unmanned Aircraft Systems pilot with PEMEX Deer Park. "We wanted to see what the drones could do — first, to identify the issue and the impacted equipment, and then build a scaffold and put a person up."
The timing of the drone program’s launch was particularly significant when Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast in 2017, bringing catastrophic flooding to the region. Portions of the Shell Deer Park refinery, now PEMEX Deer Park, were completely flooded; there was no access in or out.
"After Hurricane Harvey, we had the site leaders’ attention and were able to show them what drones can do," McClain said.
McClain’s next emergency response incident was the Intercontinental Terminals Company (ITC) fire in 2019. His team was dispatched as part of the Industrial Mutual Aid System.
"That was the first time that drones were used for tactical vision for a large fire incident," McClain said. "There were 15 tanks within one large tank wall. It started off as a single tank seal fire, but within a day all 15 tanks were either on fire or caught fire."
On the third day of the ITC fire, three tanks collapsed within 15 minutes of each other, engulfing the inside of the tank wall in flames. At the end of day three, the tank wall itself collapsed.
"You had product, foam and water heading to the Houston Ship Channel; that was the first time those drones were used for equipment accountability," McClain said as a panelist discussing robotics and drone incident response at the 7th Annual Energy Drone and Robotics Summit in The Woodlands, Texas. "The equipment was set up where command wanted it. It was very important that the water streams and the foam were going where they wanted them to."
McClain said his career to that point had included being an Army infantry combat soldier, a police officer and an EMT.
"I couldn’t really call myself a firefighter, but one incident commander walked by me while I had a drone in the air during the foam application. I said, ‘Hey, I’m not a firefighter, but I can tell you this is not doing you any good,’" McClain said.
The commander agreed. The fire, Mc-Clain said, was out in 10 minutes, thanks to drone data.
As the security specialist at PEMEX’s Deer Park facility, McClain currently manages 500 drones on the 1,500-acre site.
Co-panelist Ron Kessler, VP of robotic inspection solutions with TEAM, agreed that drones are highly valuable when responding to industrial incidents.
"You not only better understand the landscape and the damage impact, but also how to disassemble the site safely, because the normal mode of operations and how we may take a unit apart no longer applies," he said.
Drone surveillance enables teams to position cranes most effectively for safe entry and determine "how close we can get without putting people in harm’s way, and then develop that plan of action to properly recover the facility," Kessler said.
Additionally, Kessler explained, recent experiences have involved "enormous releases of energy." Putting drones in the air, he stated, helps ascertain exactly what happened to cause those releases.
Beyond drones, Kessler said laser scanning also helps in terms of understanding exactly what was impacted during incidents, "like pipe racks that have moved a couple of inches. Are they still stable? Or, what’s been going through the piping system and how far back did it go?"
Kessler’s teams also utilize tools, including crawlers, to pull out items that may have blown through the line.
"That’s more common on a daily basis at certain facilities, it seems, rather than just in emergency response, but that’s part of emergency response, as well," he said.
Kessler also recommended that safety leaders and others follow "the thorough and educational" information about plant emergencies provided by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.
