At approximately 6:10pm on 29 October 2009, a leak of gasoline occurred on the Indian Oil Corporation's (IOC) Petroleum Oil Lubricants Terminal at Jaipur, India. This leak continued for some 75 minutes, when the vapour cloud ignited, resulting in a severe vapour cloud explosion (VCE), eleven fatalities and many tank fires. The sequence of events and cause of the spillage were investigated by an independent Indian committee. However, the VCE in the Jaipur incident shared a number of characteristics with the VCE at the Buncefield terminal in the UK in December 2005. Given these similarities, evidence related to the Jaipur VCE was collected by the author over a three day period at the site during February 2010, at which time much of the evidence on the site was relatively undisturbed. The combination of the evidence from the two incidents, supported by information from a small number of previous incidents, provides both an indication of the VCE potential for dense vapour clouds and the nature of key forensic evidence that is likely to be observed following such events. This evidence is summarised and comment provided on the implications for the assessment of explosion hazards on onshore sites.
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