Question: How hard is the chemical plant to monitor?

Carl Barford answered on 14 Jun 2018:

Unless they are very simple and safe processes, chemical plants are impossible to monitor without devices (temperature, pressure, flows) and probably a computer system. We still use people to run them, but computers do not get tired or make mistakes. The computers also tell us if everything is running correctly, so we can check for broken equipment. When we build a new plant, the engineers spend a lot of time designing something that does its job, but can be controlled and safely stopped. Many of our plants have a second computer, whose only job is to stop the plant running if it sees anything out of control – like too high temperature.
The golden rule is that if something can go wrong, it will, eventually.