Petrochemical, Oil & Gas
Plant fire brigades, FR workwear, and contamination you cannot simply wash out
A refinery brigade wears the same structural kit as a local authority brigade, under the same ISO 23616 obligations — and returns it contaminated with process chemicals rather than combustion products. Vorrex was built for that standard first, and the contamination workflow is the part that matters most on a plant site.
How Vorrex applies here
The site brigade is the core case. The FR fleet is the same loop at volume.
Petrochemical sites usually run two PPE populations at once. A works fire brigade in structural firefighting kit, governed by ISO 23616 — which is precisely what Vorrex was built for. And a much larger FR workwear fleet across operations, maintenance, and contractors, governed by EN ISO 11612, EN 1149-5, and EN 13034.
Both populations run through the same loop: issue, wear, soiled return, wash, inspect, repair or condemn, replace. The difference is the rule set on each garment type, and those are configured in Vorrex Manager rather than written in code. We are pre-first-customer in petrochemical and will say so — but the ISO 23616 machinery your brigade needs is the machinery the product already is.
Chemical contamination
Isolate first, identify second, decontaminate third
ISO 23616 §6 sets the order: seek specialist advice before attempting decontamination, and isolate the garment until the contaminant is identified. On a plant site that is not a formality — the sort bench operator has no way of knowing what a coverall was exposed to during an incident.
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Flagged at source — A wearer can raise a contamination report in Vorrex Me from the field, before the kit reaches the plant. The garment arrives already flagged rather than being assessed cold at goods in.
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Quarantined on arrival — A flagged garment is held in quarantine and cannot be pulled into a standard wash batch. There is no route by which it joins another client’s load.
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Individually assessed — Individual assessment mode in Vorrex Terminal walks the operator through a structured checklist for that single garment, with photographs captured at the point of assessment and attached to the lifecycle record with timestamp and operator ID.
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Routed on the outcome — Identified contaminant with an authorised treatment goes to the specialist wash pathway, with its parameters recorded. Unidentified agent stays segregated and goes to disposal or destruction under your protocol and local regulation.
Vorrex tracks five contamination categories — standard soiling, chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear, and physical contamination such as fuel and oil — and each routes to its own treatment pathway. Physical contamination from hydrocarbons is the routine case on a refinery and still gets its own record, because a fuel-soaked garment is an FR performance question, not a housekeeping one.
FR workwear lifecycle
The limit is enforced by the system, not remembered by a person
Flame-resistant and antistatic performance is consumed by laundering. The failure mode is not dramatic — it is a coverall quietly going past its rated wash count while nobody is counting.
Wash count and calendar life
Both limits are set per garment type in Vorrex Manager and evaluated on every wash return. A garment approaching its rated wash count is flagged for inspection; one that reaches its limit is condemned automatically, with a certificate naming the rule that fired.
Wash parameters per batch
Temperature, chemistry, and cycle count are recorded against each wash batch and the garments in it. If a load ran outside the programme specified for that FR textile, the deviation is on the record and visible before the garments are dispatched.
Inspection with hard fails
Checklists are configured per garment type with mandatory items. Seam damage, contamination staining, and hardware defects are answered against a body map. A hard-fail answer withdraws the garment from service at the moment it is recorded.
Shutdowns and turnarounds
Headcount triples for six weeks. The record should not degrade with it.
A turnaround brings contractors onto the site in numbers the plant does not carry year-round, all of them needing compliant FR kit on day one and none of them on the permanent wearer register. Handled manually, this is where the audit trail usually breaks: temporary kit issued against a name on a clipboard and never reconciled.
In Vorrex a contractor is a wearer like any other, and temporary kit is issued against them individually with a garment UID. When the turnaround closes, the outstanding issue list is the recovery list. Items not returned are visible by wearer, not as an inventory shortfall discovered at the next stock count.
Throughput is managed the same way it is on a normal week. Work queues at Vorrex Terminal present garments in priority order, so operators work the queue instead of triaging it, and dwell time thresholds surface a stage that is backing up while there is still time to move labour onto it.
Wearer coverage
Nobody goes to the unit without compliant kit
The protection engine checks every active wearer against their entitlements daily, fires instantly on any condemn event, and runs hourly as a safety net. If a brigade member’s structural jacket is condemned at inspection and no compliant replacement is issued to them, a replacement order is raised at that moment — not at the next review meeting.
Urgent gaps escalate to the client H&S manager through Vorrex Portal alongside email and SMS notification. Your safety team sees the gap on the same screen where they later prove it was closed.
Relevant standards
What the rule engine can be configured against
Vorrex ships configured for ISO 23616. The FR and chemical-protection rule sets below are built in Vorrex Manager during onboarding — no code changes, and nothing pre-loaded that we would then have to claim we had tested for your site.
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ISO 23616 — Cleaning, inspection and repair of firefighting PPE. Governs the works brigade’s structural kit, and §6 is the clause behind the contamination workflow on this page: specialist advice before decontamination, isolation until identified.
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EN ISO 11612 — Heat and flame protective clothing. Limited flame spread, convective and radiant heat, molten metal splash. Inspection checklists and wash count limits are set per garment type.
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EN 1149-5 — Electrostatic dissipative clothing — the standard that matters in an explosive atmosphere. Antistatic performance degrades with laundering, so the wash count rule is the enforcement point.
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EN 13034 — Type 6 limited-protection chemical splash clothing. Splash exposure can be recorded as a contamination event against the garment rather than left as a shift note.
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EN ISO 11611 — Protective clothing for welding and allied processes, Class 1 and Class 2. Common across maintenance trades during a turnaround; class is held as a garment attribute and used in rule evaluation.
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ISO 15797 — Industrial washing and finishing procedures for workwear testing. Wash parameters are recorded per batch, so deviation from the specified programme is evidenced rather than assumed.
Pre-first customer in petrochemical
We are pre-first-customer here. This is where their words would go.
Vorrex holds no signed refinery contract, and we are not going to put a placeholder logo on this page. If you run a plant fire brigade, a site FR fleet, or the laundry that services them, we would rather show you the contamination workflow and the audit trail in the live system than tell you what somebody else thinks of them. Yours could be the first name on this page.
FAQ
Common questions
How does Vorrex handle a structural jacket that comes back with chemical contamination?
The contamination category is captured at the sort bench, or reported earlier by the wearer in Vorrex Me, and the garment is quarantined rather than dropped into the next wash batch. ISO 23616 §6 is explicit that specialist advice is sought before decontamination is attempted, and that garments are isolated until the contaminant is identified. Vorrex enforces exactly that sequence: quarantine, individual assessment with photographs, then a routing decision. Only once the contaminant is identified and your protocol authorises treatment does the garment move to the specialist wash pathway.
What happens when the contaminant cannot be identified?
The garment stays segregated. It is blocked from re-entering the wash cycle and is passed to disposal or destruction under your site protocol and the regulation that applies locally. Vorrex records the segregation event, the assessment, the photographs, the operator, and the destruction record, and attaches the condemnation certificate to the wearer’s compliance history. The decision on disposal is your protocol’s to make; the evidence that it was followed is Vorrex’s to keep.
Can Vorrex enforce wash limits for FR and antistatic workwear?
Yes. Maximum wash count, calendar life, and inspection interval are configured per garment type in Vorrex Manager, and the compliance engine evaluates every garment against its own rules on every wash return. This matters most for EN 1149-5 antistatic garments, where performance degrades with laundering: the garment is flagged as it approaches the limit rather than after it has passed it. Wash programme parameters — temperature, chemistry, cycle count — are recorded per batch, so a non-compliant wash on FR textiles is visible before the load moves on.
Can Vorrex cope with a shutdown or turnaround surge?
Turnaround volumes are a routing problem before they are a capacity problem. Work queues at Vorrex Terminal present garments in priority order so operators do not have to triage, and temporary contractor kit can be issued and tracked individually so every item is recovered when the turnaround ends rather than written off. Dwell time is tracked at each stage, so a queue that is backing up at inspection is visible in the command centre on the day it happens, not in next month’s SLA report.
How do site auditors get evidence without going through the laundry?
Vorrex Portal is a separate authentication guard for the client H&S team, scoped to their own records. Your safety team pulls compliance packs, checks coverage gaps, and reads the audit trail for any wearer directly. Each garment label also carries a QR code resolving to the same digital history, so an auditor at the rack can self-serve. The audit trail is append-only by database constraint — once a wash, inspection, or condemnation is recorded it cannot be modified or removed through the application.
We are a contract laundry with several refinery clients. Can they be kept separate?
Yes. Every database query is scoped to the plant, and Vorrex Portal access is scoped to the client. One operator cannot see another operator’s garment inventory, wearers, or compliance data. The isolation is enforced at the database level rather than by application code, so it holds regardless of which screen a user reaches.
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