Article

Engineering a safer environment

Challenged by change and tragedy, Al Linder raised the industry’s safety standards

Jim Dassel of Dassel’s Petroleum nominated Al Linder, right, for the Western Propane Gas Association’s Distinguished Service Award in 2008. (Photo courtesy of the Western Propane Gas Association)

Elbert “Al” Linder had earned a high school diploma in his native California and started a family with his wife, Helen. The only part missing from his life in the 1950s was a challenging career.

So when Suburban Companies offered him a propane sales and service and management training position in 1953, Linder put the company on the clock.

“I told the fellow who hired me that I would give it 90 days, and if I found that it was not challenging and not something I could make a career out of, I would start looking for something else,” Linder says. “That 90 days turned into 43 years.”

With Linder incorporating more than four decades of engineering expertise into his work, often in bulk plant operations, the propane industry became better and safer. He has been praised by many, called a leader and a legend for his achievements, and was recently honored for them.

Award winner
Linder received the 2009 NPGA Safety Award last fall at the board of directors meeting in Seattle. The Western Propane Gas Association (WPGA) also honored him with its Distinguished Service Award in 2008. Some say the accolades are long overdue for a man who fueled change when it was needed most.

“Al Linder is the most well-informed engineer in designing safety in propane plants that I know,” says Bill Stewart, chairman of the board of Blue Star Gas. “He is the inventor of the concept of product control in handling liquefied petroleum gases.”

Dassel’s Petroleum President Jim Dassel nominated Linder for the WPGA award. He and others also encouraged the WPGA to nominate Linder for the NPGA award, which recognizes distinguished service to the cause of safety in the propane industry.

In presenting the WPGA award to Linder, Dassel said, “Al is a stalwart in our industry and is known for his enlightened engineering concepts of containment of product in storage. He developed standards in his career that are now accepted as ‘best practices.’ … It would be impossible to guess how many accidents and fires have been avoided due to the engineering and safety concepts Al developed. Al convinced fire services that dominate NFPA 58 of accepting his concepts and writing it into code.”

Linder says he was “quite honored and surprised” to receive the awards, especially since he retired almost 15 years earlier, in 1996, as director of technical services for Coast Gas. That’s also when he began his chairmanship of the NFPA Technical Committee on Liquefied Petroleum Gases until 2003.

“When I became chairman of the NFPA 58 Committee, I withdrew from the industry. I didn’t want people saying the chairmanship is in the pocket of the industry,” Linder says. “I really respected the position of the standard, and I didn’t want to do anything to take away from that.”
Groundwork

Linder cites two major accomplishments during his tenure as chairman. One was thwarting an EPA attempt that would have altered requirements of the standard relating to the design and operation of retail propane bulk storage facilities. The other was completing the perceived necessary plant storage changes that would prevent disasters such as the 1973 tragedy in Kingman, Ariz., where 12 people died in a railroad tank car explosion.

The Kingman incident occurred almost immediately after Linder became director of technical services for Williams Energy Co., which owned the bulk plant. He spent considerable time investigating the incident and became convinced that the occurrence was preventable through inexpensive changes in plant design.

“It seemed to me that this kind of incident need never happen again if plants were modified properly,” Linder says.

Another potentially volatile situation occurred prior to Kingman that had Linder already considering plant modifications. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of college campus unrest. As regional manager for Williams Energy Co. in Denver, Linder learned that its storage facility was the target of a planned attack. He began to consider product storage and control measures that would improve safety and curtail terrorist efforts.

What resulted from the Kingman and Denver incidents was the concept of redundant failsafe product control measures.

“Propane plants could be significantly more efficient in the way they transfer product, the speed with which they transfer product and much safer,” Linder says of the measures. “A large part have become standard within the industry and are required to be implemented by the standard.”

Linder gained much of his experience in bulk plant design as assistant to the regional manager for Suburban Companies from 1962-69 in Portland, Ore. During this time, railroad tank car sizes were increasing from 10,000 gallons to 30,000 gallons and requiring new plant designs.

“I really began to be involved in rethinking plant design to accommodate these larger railcars,” Linder says. “Much of our product in the Northwest at the time came into the area by railcars.”

Throughout his career, Linder served on a number of NPGA, WPGA and NFPA committees. He was “highly honored” to be named an emeritus member of the NFPA 58 Committee. Another of his notable accomplishments with NFPA 58 was helping to author regulations governing propane installations in California.

Then and now
Linder says the propane industry had a good safety record at the outset of his career. That record was maintained by a lot of independents whose success was tied to being safe in their businesses, “so they watched it closely,” he adds.

“There wasn’t the formal training that there is today,” Linder says. “You have the larger companies where senior management is not that familiar with the day-to-day operations. Training programs by necessity have to be more sophisticated. Society is not as tolerant with accidents as they were back then.”

Linder might be retired from the propane industry – he does some consulting on plant storage design, safety inspection and training – but he’s staying as busy as ever. He is the founder and president of Energy Control Equipment Inc. in Watsonville, Calif. Its Frigitek product is designed to save energy and cost in refrigeration systems.

He and his wife of 60 years, who have five adult children scattered across the country, reside in Watsonville, in a home sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and redwood trees. “It’s a terrible place to live,” jokes Linder, who enjoys fishing and visiting family when he’s not going to the office at 8 each morning and taking work home.

“My wife says I’m getting old enough to retire. She’s probably right,” the 79-year-old says. “At least to slow down.”