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Learn From Experience

Metrics provide direct feedbacks on the workings of RBPS systems, and leading indicators provide early warning signals of ineffective process safety results. Organizations must use their mistakes and those of others as motivation for action and view as opportunities for improvement.

Management of Change (MOC) Auditing System

Mar 13, 2011
R. Wayne Garland
Our company has discovered that regular auditing of the MOC process is essential to enforcing its proper use. We have developed an audit that can be performed by plant personnel to identify the effectiveness of our MOC process in 2 critical categories: (1) Identifying changes and initiating MOC for...

Incident Investigation – Addressing the Worst That Could Have Happened

Mar 13, 2011
Samuel A. Rodgers
Incident Investigation techniques typically start with a detailed description of the actual consequence and work backward toward the root causes. A lot of time is spent to qualify and quantify the actual consequence so as to appropriately apply resources to prevent recurrence. A frequent outcome of...

Quantitative Models for Assessing MOC Performance

Mar 13, 2011
Rainer Hoff
The safety community, bolstered by the PSM regulations, has emphasized the importance of proper management of change to ensure safe, reliable and economic operation of chemical plants and refineries. Yet, at many sites, the MOC process is often harshly criticized as being "too inefficient", "too...

Kinetic Modeling of the Reactions Involved in the T2 Explosion

Mar 13, 2011
Ronald J. Willey
The runaway reaction at the chemical preparation facility called T2 laboratories in Jacksonville, Florida on December 19, 2007 is analyzed. The approached involved estimating kinetic parameters based on temperature time traces presented in the CSB final report for ARSST (Advance Reactive System...

Imperial Sugar Refinery Combustible Dust Explosion Investigation

Mar 23, 2010
John Vorderbrueggen
On February 7, 2008, at about 7:15 p.m., a series of sugar dust explosions at the Imperial Sugar manufacturing facility in Port Wentworth, Georgia, resulted in 14 worker fatalities. Thirty six workers were treated for serious burns and injuries—some caused permanent, life altering conditions. The...

Near-Miss Management to Develop Dynamic Leading Indicators to Predict Incidents

Mar 23, 2010
Ankur Pariyani
Recent studies have shown the importance of identifying near-misses to predict the probability of accidents (Meel and Seider, 2006) – and managing them to reduce the potential of accidents (Phimister et al., 2003; Cooke and Rohleder, 2006). In this paper, new methodologies involving near-miss...

Evaluating Human Response to an Alarm for LOPA or Safety Studies

Mar 23, 2010
Robert J. Stack
Many LOPA scenarios have an independent protection layer (IPL) credit for operator intervention to prevent or mitigate the scenario. It is often difficult for the LOPA team or other safety teams to assess if the appropriate operator response credit is being taken. To allow a more consistent...

Objective Analysis of PSM Audit Data

Mar 23, 2010
Jerry Forest
In developing systems for Process Safety Management, compliance audits are integral with verification that practices and procedures are developed and are effective for compliance. Data collected during compliance audits is often subjective and findings are descriptive in nature. It is therefore...

Investigation of an Explosion in a Gasoline Purification Plant

Mar 23, 2010
Kees Van Wingerden
On May 24, 2007 an explosion and subsequent fire destroyed a tank farm located at a gasoline purification plant in Sløvåg, Norway. In addition to the tank farm, an office building and some neighboring tank trucks were destroyed. There were no casualties in the accident, but at least two people...

Condensation Induced Water Hammer: Principles and Consequences

Mar 23, 2010
Carlos A. Barrera
An explosion occurred in the boiler room of a food processing plant as the steam generation system was coming online after a maintenance shutdown. The explosion shattered the case of the condensate return pump fatally injuring an employee, while another employee was burned by the escaping steam...

Ensuring Consistency of Corporate Risk Criteria

Mar 22, 2010
J. Wayne Chastain
The recently published CCPS text Guidelines for Developing Quantitative Safety Risk Criteria makes a strong case for corporations developing risk criteria. One topic addressed in the text is the development of criteria for use in single cause – consequence risk analysis methodologies such as Layer...

Journey towards PSM Excellence

Mar 22, 2010
Ravi Ramaswamy
This paper describes the experience, learning and major challenges in implementing Process Safety Management at Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) India. The Reliance Group, founded by Dhirubhai H. Ambani (1932-2002), is India's largest private sector enterprise, with businesses in the energy and...

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