By Wyatt A. Doop THE WOODLANDS, TX.-The inherent nature of midstream facility operations requires a constant awareness of process safety. On Dec. 3, 2015, an initial fire and subsequent explosion occurred in the inlet area of the Ramsey cryogenic processing plant in West Texas. There were no serious personnel injuries, but much of the plant's equipment was damaged or destroyed. After recognizing that rebuilding the entire inlet system to match the pre-incident configuration would require as many as 18 months of plant downtime, the Ramsey engineering team began looking for innovative solutions to allow the plant to resume processing gas from third-party Delaware Basin producers as quickly as possible. The team adopted an engineering and redesign approach that led to constructing a safer, more operable and more efficient plant in a relatively short time frame. The Ramsey facility's first cryogenic plant started operations sooner than four months after the incident, and the facility's daily throughput was restored to pre-incident processing capacity within five months, an amazing feat by any industry standard. MAY 2017 55