Update of 19 May 2014 16:00
Five days after the explosion on May 13 at the Soma mine in Turkey, the worst industrial disaster in the history of modern Turkey, the number of victims has risen to 301.
Twenty-four people have been arrested on charges of negligence, including directors and technical managers of the private company that manages the mine, the Soma Komur, including director general Ramazan Dogru, finance director Ulu Ali and operations manager Akin Celik. According to Turkish media, the prosecutor may also decide to arrest mine owner Alp Gurkan. 

This morning, Turkey's Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said that the extremely serious accident during the night between Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 at a mine in western Turkey was caused by a failure in an electrical transformer.
"The drama is even more serious than we thought. It is emerging as the incident with the highest number of deaths ever in Turkey," the minister continued.

The catastrophic event triggered the explosion and fire, causing the blackout of the power system and collapse of part of the underground infrastructure (at a depth of approx. 2,000 metres), where around 780 miners were working at the time. At the moment, there are over 232 dead and 300 missing.

Catastrophic events of this magnitude underline the need for life cycle management (LCM - Life Cycle Management) of oil-filled transformers focused on loss (damage) prevention and environmental protection.

To achieve these objectives, Sea Marconi has developed a new line of integrated sustainable analysis, diagnostic and integrated treatment solutions complying with state of the art and with reference technical standards such as IEC 60422, IEC 60296, IEC 60599 and IEC 62697-1. Since 1968, Sea Marconi has acquired exceptional international expertise in more than 50 countries with an ample case history of more than 3,000 clients, 55,000 transformers and a database containing 170,000 diagnoses..
Sea Marconi products, services, technologies and R&D are able to provide owners of electrical equipment with insulating fluids with assistance through the development of integrated protection programmes based on best available techniques (BAT) and best environmental practices (BEP). This approach permits constant monitoring of equipment state of health and extension of service life, in full compliance with the safety of the asset, public health and protection of the environment.

Criticality - TOP EVENT

"Explosion and/or fire incident in oil-filled transformer"
Disaster with explosion and/or fire in an oil-filled transformer, and therefore loss of the asset, with possible impact on the site's environmental matrices (soil, subsoil, water, air and surfaces). This event is ranked among the priority technological risks characterised by direct damage (loss of asset), potential personal injury, indirect damage (loss of production) and environmental damage. This event is typically caused by an electrical failure with yielding of insulation and lack of or deficient electrical and fire protection tripping. It may also be a result of natural events or hostile actions. In the presence of persistent organic pollutants such as PCBs/POPs, this event may also be characterised by high level environmental impact deriving from the formation of highly dangerous cancerogenous, mutagenous, teratogenous compounds also at very low concentrations such as PCDD (dioxin) and PCDF (furans) with negative effects on public health and the environment (Stockholm Convention) and/or with emissions of SF6 (if present in the insulating fluid) which have effects on climate change (Kyoto Protocol).