New Lessons Learned Database of Incidents Available
by Patrick Davis, U.S. Department of Energy

DOE has sponsored the development of a Hydrogen Incidents Database - the "grand opening" of this database will be announced next Tuesday, May 16, at our Annual Program Review. You may visit the database at: www.h2incidents.org.

DOE hopes that the hydrogen community will consider using this resource as a place to share safety related experiences so that we all may learn from our individual experiences. While proud of this website, DOE downplays its involvement and sponsorship (no DOE or PNL logos) - it is our vision that this will become a community resource. However, we acknowledge and very much appreciate the hard work of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in putting this together - particularly the work of Matthew Elliott and Bruce Kinzey.

Some features of the website:

• Web-based, completely "open to the public" and non-password protected
• The website is opening with 42 incidents in the database, mostly gathered from open literature sources, a few from DOE experience. We have identified another 60 we will be adding over the next couple of months.
• Specific information about incidents regarding persons, companies, dates or locations is NOT provided. This is intended to encourage the contribution of incident information.
• A focus of the website is "lessons learned" - each incident describes "lessons learned," where available. Detailed incident reports, pictures, video will be available when available.
  
• Incidents are searchable by keyword or category

Wait ... there's more!
We have also recently opened a "Safety Bibliography" database which provides information on hydrogen safety publications, articles and papers. It's available at: www.hydrogen.energy.gov/biblio_database.html or through the safety section of our www.hydrogen.energy.gov site. This site will also be announced next week.

Almost 300 entries are currently available - in many cases the actual paper is provided by download at the site. Where protected by copyright, information or a link is provided to where you may obtain it.

Many thanks to Jim Ohi and others at the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory for putting this together!! Of course, we encourage all to
contribute to this growing database by submitting suggested entries (see "suggested additions" section on the main page of the site).