Most LPG safety incidents are not caused by missing equipment. They are caused by equipment that was correct on the day it was installed and slowly drifted out of spec in the eighteen months since. Pressure relief valves stick. Hose couplings develop hairline cracks. Calibration certificates expire. Drivers' tickets lapse. None of these things make a noise when they fail. They just sit there until the day they matter.
Bomart has not recorded a major incident since 2015. Eleven years. Three plants. A bridger fleet that runs daily. The reason is not that we have better equipment than anyone else. It is that we run a 12-point check on the first Monday of every month, the same way every time, with sign-off from the plant manager and a copy filed against the next NMDPRA inspection. Below is what is on the list, why it is there, and what we look for at each step.
Equipment integrity (1–4)
1. Storage tank & bulk vessel hydrostatic test certification. Every storage tank and bulk vessel on site has a hydrostatic test certificate with an expiry date. We pull each one, check the date against the calendar, and flag anything within 90 days of expiry. A tank with an expired certificate cannot legally hold product. We never want to be the operator who finds out at 06:00 on a delivery day.
2. Pressure relief valve calibration. Every PRV gets a visual inspection for corrosion or seat damage and, where due, a calibration test against the manufacturer's set pressure. PRVs are mechanical safety devices. They are also the cheapest piece of equipment on a plant site. They almost never fail noisily. They fail quietly, by sticking, by drifting, by being painted over.
3. Pump & meter calibration verification. The meter that says how much LPG you delivered is also the meter the customer pays from. Calibration drift is a customer-trust issue before it is a regulatory one. We verify against a known-good reference twice a year and run a cross-check against a sister meter every month.
4. Hose & coupling visual + pressure test. Loading hoses are the highest-stress, most-replaced piece of equipment on the site. Visual check for swelling, cracking, abrasion. Pressure test against rated working pressure. Replace at the first sign of wear, not the second.
Operational discipline (5–8)
5. PPE inventory & condition. Helmets, fire-retardant overalls, gloves, eye and ear protection, anti-static footwear. We do not just count units, we check condition. A scuffed helmet stays in service. A cracked one does not. A glove that has been chemically softened does not. Drivers get fresh PPE at the start of each rotation.
6. Gas detection equipment battery & calibration. Portable gas detectors are useless if the battery is flat or the sensor drifted. We check battery, run a bump test against a known calibration gas, and replace the unit if either fails. Cheaper to replace than to investigate.
7. Emergency stop control verification. Every plant has E-stops at the loading bay, the storage area, and the office. Every month, we pull each one, confirm it kills power to the dispenser within the rated response time, and reset. This takes less than fifteen minutes total. Skipping it once is the kind of thing you remember after the fact.
8. Driver, dispatcher & operator certification expiry tracking. Every operator on site has a certification: NMDPRA training, defensive driving for bridger drivers, plant operator licence, first aid currency. We pull a single spreadsheet, sort by expiry date, and chase anything within 60 days. Nobody loads on an expired ticket.
The day a plant has an incident is rarely the day someone made a mistake. It is the day a long-running drift finally aligned with a routine action. The 12-point check is how we keep the drifts shorter than the alignment windows.
Documentation & regulatory (9–12)
9. NMDPRA compliance file review. A current copy of the NMDPRA permit on site. Renewal dates calendared. Any open correspondence with the regulator logged and tracked to closure. The plant manager owns this file personally.
10. SON cylinder marking audit. Every cylinder on site is checked for valid SON markings, manufacturer plate, and hydrostatic test stamp. The 2025 enforcement actions on substandard cylinders were not a one-off. Compliance is the cost of being in the business.
11. Fire suppression system inspection. Wet chemical, foam, and dry-powder extinguishers across the loading bay, storage, and office. Pressure gauge in the green, no tamper-seal damage, no obstructions in front of the units. A fire suppression system that takes thirty extra seconds to reach is a fire suppression system that did not work.
12. Incident & near-miss log review. Every minor incident, every near-miss, every customer concern from the previous month gets reviewed. Lessons-learned is logged, action items assigned, closure tracked. We have not had a major incident in eleven years partly because we treat the small ones like they could have been larger.
Why monthly, why this list.
An annual audit is a snapshot. A monthly check is a movie. The drift you cannot see in twelve months you can see in two. The list itself is curated against ten years of operating data: these twelve are the ones that, when neglected, most often correlate with downstream operational pain. They are not the only safety checks we run, but they are the ones the plant manager personally signs off on.
If you operate an LPG plant — your own, a partner's, or one you are about to buy from — feel free to copy this list, adapt it, run it. The work is not in the list. The work is in actually doing it the same way every month, with sign-off, on a calendar nobody is allowed to skip.
If you would like a printable version of the checklist for your team, send a note to info@bomartworld.com. — The Bomart HSE team