Common lessons learned from an analysis of multiple case histories

Excellent safety performance is our goal. But safety is not bankable. Long periods of time without significant incidents may in some cases create an unwarranted sense of complacency and relaxation of discipline. We must encourage a healthy respect for process industries chemicals, equipment, processes, procedures, and all the things we do for process safety management. Continuous incident-free operations may result in a slackening up of our well-established practices and procedures. Perhaps, incident-free safety performance tolerates a wink and a nod at proven methods allowing questionable shortcuts to flourish. This article offers some suggestions on raising the awareness by sharing focused examples of past mistakes and some catastrophic blunders. A number of resources are listed that identify easy-to-use, thought provoking case histories. Some are available at no cost. If employees share a sense of vulnerability within their process, there will probably be less deviation from time tested protective operations and maintenance activities.

Section: How Can You Reduce Your Vulnerability?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Keep a sense of vulnerability: For safety's sake

Sanders

2013

“…In process accidents, hydrocarbon leaks or release of materials may contribute more or less potential damage to accidents. For instance, on October 1944, a LNG tank in Cleveland, Ohio failed and released its entire contents, resulting in a vapor cloud explosion (VCE) from an unknown ignition source . In addition it caused the deaths of 130 people .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A network based approach to envisage potential accidents in offshore process facilities

Baksh

Garaniya

Khan

2016

Envisaging potential accidents in large scale offshore process facilities such as Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) is complex and could be best characterized through evolving scenarios. In the present work, a new methodology is developed to incorporate evolving scenarios in a single model and predicts the likelihood of accident. The methodology comprises; (a) evolving scenario identification, (b) accident consequence framework development, (c) accident scenario likelihood estimation, and (d) ranking of the scenarios. Resulting events in the present work are modeled using a Bayesian network approach, which represents accident scenarios as causeconsequences networks. The methodology developed in this article is compared with case studies of ammonia and Liquefied Natural Gas from chemical and offshore process facility, respectively. The proposed method is able to differentiate the consequence of specific events and predict probabilities for such events along with continual updating of consequence probabilities of fire and explosion scenarios taking into account. The developed methodology can be used to envisage evolving scenarios that occur in the offshore oil and gas process industry; however, with further modification it can be applied to different sections of marine industry to predict the likelihood of such accidents.

“…There are many commonalities between this work and the comprehensive listing of case history lessons given by Yang et al . [14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An analysis of CSB investigation reports concerning the hierarchy of controls

Amyotte

MacDonald

Khan

2011

Sixty‐three reports, studies, and bulletins resulting from process incident investigations conducted by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) have been analyzed for evidence of examples related to inherent safety, passive and active engineered safety, and procedural safety. These risk reduction measures, which collectively form the hierarchy of safety controls, were also analyzed for their contribution to both incident prevention and consequence mitigation. Over 200 examples from the hierarchy of controls were identified with the following breakdown: inherent safety (36% of total overall examples), passive engineered safety (8%), active engineered safety (14%), and procedural safety (42%). Numerous examples for both prevention and mitigation measures were found during the CSB report review. Inherently safer design (ISD) items were observed to be nearly equally split among the four primary principles of minimization (25% of total ISD examples), substitution (22%), moderation (25%), and simplification (27%). Widely applicable process safety management elements (in terms of a link to the identified hierarchical safety measures) were determined to be process and equipment integrity, training and performance, process knowledge and documentation, capital project review and design procedures, and management of change. © 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog, 2011.