Biographicals of Major Contributors to Process Safety and Awardees of the S&H Division
(J. Louvar, J. Davenport, Stan Grossel, J. Murphy, and E. Ural - 2009)

Bill Doyle
William H. (Bill) Doyle graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1931 with a BS degree in Chemistry.  He was immediately employed by the Factory Insurance Association (FIA) and located in the Syracuse Office. In 1940 he was transferred to the Eastern Regional Office (ERO) in Hartford as a supervisor. In 1945 he established the ERO Chemical Department. He retired from FIA in 1973.

He was a charter member of Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) in 1950. He served on the Board of Directors of SFPE from 1971 to 1977. He was elected to SFPE Life Member in 1973 and elected to Fellow in 1978. He was a member of the New England Chapter and was President from 1967 to 1969.

For the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AlChE) he founded the Loss Prevention Programming Committee (11A) which held its first annual Loss Prevention Symposium in 1967. These symposia are continuing today. He taught the AlChE Chemical Plant Loss Prevention Management continuing education course for many years. He was elected to Fellow of AlChE.
He was chairman of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Hazardous Chemical Committee and was a member of the NFPA Chemicals and Explosives Correlating Committee, Flammable and Combustible Liquids Committee, Liquefied Natural Gas Committee, and Liquefied Petroleum Gas Committee.

In 1984 the Loss Prevention Programming Committee (11A)  established the William H. Doyle Award. This annual award is presented to the person presenting the most outstanding paper at the previous year’s Loss Prevention Symposium. The first recipient of the award was Dr. James McQuaid of the United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Executive. Annual awards are still presented at each Loss Prevention Symposium.

Norton Walton:
Norton Walton graduated from University of Pennsylvania and spent his first 7 years as an operator at the Atlantic Refining plant where he gained grass-roots respect for safety.

Because of major industrial accidents with low temperature air separation plants in the early 1950s, a group of people met at the AIChE meeting in Boston in December 1956. Based on the interest shown, an Ammonia Programming Committee was formed and the annual Ammonia Symposia titled Safety in Air and Ammonia Plants were started. Mr. Norton Walton, General Foreman at the Atlantic Refining Company, was an organizer of the first symposium held at the Baltimore National Meeting in September 1957. Norton Walton was the founder of the Ammonia Safety Programming Committee. He was also the chair of the second symposium held at the National Meeting in Salt Lake City in September 1958.

The problems with air separation plants were largely solved in a number of years and the symposia titles were changed to Safety in Ammonia and Related Facilities. These symposia are still held, continue to attract substantial attendance and are held at venues separate from the AIChE national meetings.

One of the early activities of the Safety and Health Division, other than programming, was the establishment of the Walton-Miller Award. This award was originated to reward those people who have made an outstanding contribution to safety in the chemical industry.

Russell Miller:
In about 1965, a number of sizable explosions and fires occurred in the oil and petrochemical industries. A light hydrocarbons plant and a refinery, both in Louisiana, suffered vapor cloud explosions. This phenomenon, while it had occurred before, was largely unrecognized in industry. At about the same time, the process industries were moving toward the “jumbo” plants.
As a response to these trends, Mr. Russell Miller, Director of Safety and Loss Prevention at Monsanto Chemical Company contacted Mr. William Doyle, Chief Chemical Engineer at Factory Insurance Association to put together a symposium on Loss Prevention in the Chemical Industry. Together they put together six sessions of papers and the first symposium was held at the AIChE National meeting in Houston in 1967. Again, attendance was excellent and a committee was formed to prepare annual symposia on safety. Russell Miller was the founder of the Loss Prevention Programming Committee (11A). These symposia are still held at AIChE National Spring meetings.

One of the early activities of the Safety and Health Division, other than programming, was the establishment of the Walton-Miller Award. This award was originated to reward those people who have made an outstanding contribution to safety in the chemical industry. As previously stated, Norton Walton was a founder of the Ammonia Safety Programming Committee and Russ Miller was a founder of the Loss Prevention Programming Committee. The first recipient of this award in 1987 was Dr. Walter B. Howard of Monsanto. Walt Howard assisted Russ Miller in forming the Loss Prevention Programming Committee. The second award was to Gene DeHaven, founder of the Division.

Ted Ventrone:
Ted received a bachelor's degree from Rhode Island State College in Chemical Engineering in 1937. Ted immediately went to work for Factory Insurance Association (FIA) as a field engineer. He was drafted in the Army in World War II as a private. He progressed through the ranks and after attending Officer Candidate School became an officer, serving in Europe. He was discharged as a major.

He rejoined FIA after the war, and In November 1953 Ted left FIA and joined American Cyanamid as loss prevention manager in Bound Brook, NJ. Ted's career with Cyanamid lasted for 26 years when he retired in 1980.

Early in his career, Ted worked with a group of engineers that were concerned with loss prevention for the chemical industry that was going through a period of expansion and growth. Ted was a member of the organizing committee for the first Loss Prevention Symposium (LPS) in Houston in 1967. He was also a cochairman of the 7th Loss Prevention Symposium in 1972. He continued to serve as an emeritus member of the 11A Committee (responsible for organizing the LPS) for many years.

From the founding of LPS in 1967 until the early 1980s the papers presented at the Loss Prevention Symposia and the Ammonia Safety Symposia were published as proceedings by the AIChE. It was recognized that many valuable papers were being lost for the future. In 1982 a decision was made to develop a new AIChE journal; i.e. Plant/Operations Progress (POP) that is now called Process Safety Progress (PSP). Because of Ted’s extensive background and interest in chemical process safety he was chosen to be the first editor of this new Journal and served for 22 years. During that time 88 issues of POP and PSP were produced, containing more than 950 papers by more than 1200 authors and coauthors.

He received the 1992 Walton-Miller Award from the Health and Safety Division. At the 2003 AIChE spring meeting, the Safety and Health Division established the Ted Ventrone Safety and Health Division Design Award. This award is given to the student whose design best incorporates inherent safety into the solution of AIChE's Annual Student Design Competition.

In 2002 the S&H Div. created the Ted Ventrone Award for the Application of Inherent Safety.

Walt Silowka:
Walt received his BS degree from the University of Delaware and his MS degree from Lehigh University, both in chemical engineering. In 1997 he received the University of Delaware Engineering Alumni Association's Outstanding Alumnus Award. For several years, he was consultant/lecturer for the chemical engineering senior design course at Lehigh. In addition to being a member of AIChE, he was a voting board member of the Compressed Gas Association and a member of the Society of Plastics Engineers.

Walt was 2005 Chair of the AIChE Safety and Health Division and was a Director of the Division from 2001 to 2003. He was also involved in the Center for Chemical Process Safety and its Risk Assessment Subcommittee.
Walt retired in June 2005 after a 31-year career with Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. His most recent assignment with Air Products was a Director of Process Safety and Reliability in the Corporate Engineering Department. In this capacity, he managed a group of process safety specialists who developed and implemented the policies, tools, and work practices that the company followed worldwide in the areas of process safety. This work included hazard identification, consequence and fault tree analysis, and employee and public risk assessment. Previous assignments included work as a process design engineer, section manager, senior process engineer, and director of process technology and corporate engineering. Before his Air Products years, he worked for NL Industries and for DuPont.
In 2006 the S&H Div. created a student AICHE design problem award in his honor – for the best use of inherent safety in their designs.

Ephraim Scheier:
Ephraim earned a BS degree at Rutgers University and an MS degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, both in chemical engineering.  He was most recently the HSSE Manager for BP America in Houston, TX.

Active in the Safety and Health Division affairs, he was particularly valuable in the programming efforts.  He was a Division Program Coordinator, 2002-2003, and served as the Vice-Chair of the 6th Biennial Process Plant Safety Symposium held in New Orleans in April 2003.

He was an especially bright, energetic, outgoing individual who made significant contributions to the Safety and Health Division, especially the work of the Program Area 11a Committee.    

In 2006 the S&H Div. created an student AICHE design problem award in his honor – for the best use of inherent safety in their designs.

Walter Howard:
Walt was born on January 22, 1916 in Corpus Christie, TX. Walt received a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Texas, Austin, after which he spent a short time there as a professor. In 1955 he began a career with Monsanto, starting at Texas City and moving to St. Louis in 1965. He retired in 1981 but continued to be a major international presence in process safety.
In 1965 the Executive Board of the AIChE National Program Committee asked Dr. Walter Howard of Monsanto to be Chairman of the Technical Program Committee (TPC) for the spring 1965 National Meeting of AIChE at Houston. As a leader of this meeting Dr. Howard then presented to the Executive Board the idea for a process safety or loss prevention symposium. He asked his boss at Monsanto at the time, Russ Miller, to be an organizer and suggested that Bill Doyle of the Factory Insurance Association be a co-organizer. Walt facilitated this first session on process safety. These three pioneers in loss prevention laid the foundation for the 40 years of successful symposia.

At the April 1976 AIChE meeting in Kansas City, Dr. Alan Duxbury of ICI presented a paper outlining the weaknesses in our knowledge of chemical reactor venting design. Dr. Walter B. Howard of Monsanto arranged for a special meeting that was held after the regular Loss Prevention Symposium in the basement of the of the meeting hotel. About 50 interested people attended the meeting and the first seeds of the Design Institute for Emergency Relief Systems (DIERS) were planted. Mr. Harold Fisher of Union Carbide later designated the chair of DIERS  to develop methods for the design of emergency relief systems to handle run-away reactions. Of particular interest was the prediction of when two-phase flow venting would occur and the applicability of various sizing methods for two-phase vapor-liquid flashing flow. DIERS spent approximately $1.6 million to investigate two-phase vapor-liquid onset / disengagement dynamics and the hydrodynamics of emergency relief systems. The primary contractor on the original DIERS work was Dr. Hans Fauske.

Walter Howard was essentially the founder of the Loss Prevention Symposium and DIERS. Walt received many awards. In 1987 he received the first AICHE Safety and Health Division Norton H. Walton / Russell L. Miller award for significant contributions in loss prevention and safety. He was named a Fellow of AICHE in the early 1990s. In 1999 he received the Merit Award from the Mary K. O'Connor Process Safety Center. In 2003 an award was designated in his honor by SACHE for the AICHE senior student design problem solution that exhibited the best application of the principles of chemical process safety.